Shane Mason

We built a numerical palace around our storage underwriting. Killer analysis is not always the best thing. The details that made our team comfortable with the deal took a lot of time to compute, and they weren’t necessarily the details other people cared about. Some people will do their own underwriting. Others will trust that you’ve done yours. In retrospect, thinking harder about scope and removing as much as possible could have given us a simple enough deliverable to ship faster and get market feedback sooner. That would probably have been a better path than the one we took. Feature creep is real and time to market matters! Can you share a time when you wish you would have cut scope to get to market sooner? Share your story in the comments!

so thinking through it i guess you would do a calc like this Estimated customer ltv Less: Target gross Margin Estimated max customer acquisition cost Times: % likelihood of a completed call to convert to a close Equal: max $ you'd pay for a completed call

have you done the math on how much you can pay for a completed call? curious to hear it

is this the book about ceasar's palace

doesn't surprise me that fraudsters are active in this space i'd love to make friends with researchers from the frontier labs, but feel like i'd need to be in SF to do it

i run an LLM wiki inside my obsidian vault whats the advantage of mem palace?

After 13 years in real estate, here's what I've learned: - Understand how long your capital could be tied up - Never underestimate the people and relationships that can make or break a deal - Evaluate the operator as carefully as you evaluate the property. A spreadsheet can tell you what a deal might earn. It can't tell you whether the person running it will make the right decisions when things get difficult. That's where experience and judgment matter. If you're an accredited investor looking to diversify beyond public markets and explore passive self-storage investments with potential tax benefits, subscribe to my newsletter or DM me. I'll share what I've learned from 13 years in commercial real estate.

Here's what investors need to understand. You can invest in a great property and still get a poor outcome if the operator makes the wrong decisions. And when you're investing passively, you're not the one making those decisions. You need to trust the person who is. Before investing, examine their track record, their judgment, and how they handle problems when things don't go according to plan. Don't just underwrite the deal. Underwrite the sponsor.

Mistake #3: Evaluating the property but ignoring the sponsor I see this mistake among high-income investors all the time. They scrutinize the property, analyze the returns, and examine the tax benefits. But they don't always scrutinize the person managing their money. That's dangerous. Real estate is an operating business. Someone has to make decisions about expenses, financing, property management, and the long-term value of the asset. Those decisions can make or break your investment.

We also trusted the wrong signals. We believed the mobile home park operator supported our project. Instead of speaking directly with the people who owned the mobile homes and would be affected by our plans, we relied too heavily on the operator's apparent support. When we presented the actual design, that support disappeared. We hadn't built the community relationships we needed. We lost the project. Looking back, we made two mistakes: We neglected the design's impact on the community, and we failed to engage the people who mattered. The lesson? A project can work perfectly on paper and still fail because you misunderstand the people involved.

Mistake #2: Thinking the numbers are enough We wanted to build a 65-foot-tall structure on a narrow railroad right-of-way in San Jose. The existing industrial zoning required 10-foot setbacks, making the site practically unusable for our intended project. We needed planned development zoning to make it work. So we hired an excellent land-use consultant and put together a plan. From a practical and economic standpoint, we knew what we wanted to build. But we made a critical mistake. We designed a building that worked on paper but did little to address the surrounding community's concerns. It was essentially a blank wall. We focused on making the project economically viable without thinking enough about how it would affect the people living around it.

Mistake #1: Underestimating how long a project takes One of my first major projects was entitling and repositioning a 30 MW data center in San Francisco. From start to finish, it took more than 20 years. Then, just 3 weeks before COVID hit, we sold it at a record-setting price. The timing was extraordinary. But the project also taught me how long real estate can take to execute. A deal that looks attractive today can require years of work before you realize its potential. Never underestimate the time, patience, and capital required to see a project through.

My family has developed $230M+ in real estate across 5 major U.S. markets. After 13 years in the business, I've learned that one bad decision can kill a multimillion-dollar deal. If you invest in real estate, avoid these 3 costly mistakes: 🧵

Short form video is the devil incarnate. Stop giving google your precious attention. Block shorts on desktop using an adblocker, and try the below procedure to block shorts on mobile: Open the YouTube app on your phone. Tap your profile icon (U button) in the bottom right corner. Tap the Settings gear icon in the top right corner. Go to Time Management (on iPhone under Family Center, on Android under Languages & time management). Scroll down and toggle on Shorts Feed Limit. Set the limit to 0 minutes. Pull down on the home screen to refresh, and Shorts will be hidde

desktop only

I used to struggle with “when can you get back to me?” Now I give my tasks a home on the calendar, including breaks and gaps. That protects production time and shows me where calls can fit.

Yep I'm running Parakeet locally. Was not challenging to set up at all.

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For me, this was a lesson in grit and resilience that I carry into my projects today. The proceeds from this sale provided seed capital for Mason Equity Partners and freed us up to launch the institutional development platform that we operate today. 27/28

Our investors probably would have made more money if we had defaulted on this property and deployed their capital into acquiring more storages nationwide. Self-storage’s run-up from 2001 to 2020 was nearly unparalleled. 26/28