building world models for sports
San Francisco, CA
Joined January 2025
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arp retweeted
I read this somewhere and agree with it: "Too many AI startups are selling picks and shovels. Not enough are actually mining the gold."
my new answer to thiel’s "what important truth do very few people agree with you on?” question is a corollary of "competition is for losers"
i think "value creation" (and other shibboleths like "customer obsession") is the entirely wrong framework for building massive companies
it's pointless to create "delightful" products that "add value" if you fail to make it impossible for your customers to survive or compete without paying you enormous sums of money
oh somewhat tangential but users being happy is also the entirely wrong north star to chase. you need users to feel anxious to not use you.
delight drives low-stakes, low-ticket purchases. big purchases result almost universally from fear
my singular goal is to make it impossible for sports teams to win a single game without paying me a shit ton of money
i’m grateful i never listened to advice from VCs who didn’t end up investing
it costs money to give me advice
Unrelated, but six separate acquaintances are all working on egocentric data capture for big labs. They all claim this is extremely lucrative and apparently they all have a blank check from OpenAI and Anthropic.
YET they’re all trying to urgently get loans and/or raise relatively tiny amounts (200k-1M) because the labs asked all of them for free, self-funded pilots and expressed no actual intent to buy (I had to actively confront them, obviously, to get this information out but yes this was true of each of them)
This entire ecosystem is full of noise
tbh i mostly don’t end up listening to the ones that invested either but at least they have some semblance of skin in the game
arp retweeted
This is unprofessionalism. Only low caliber people do it, expect it, and promote it.
You would be fired on the spot at Palantir or Tesla if you deliberately wasted a candidates time to see how they handle it as a recruiter.
arp retweeted
This is utterly off. Ramp was a hot seed stage company out the gate. They raised capital at $40-100M within a few months of incorporation. At $100M, a 1-2% grant is $250-500K / year in preferred-equivalent terms. Early stage startups simply do not grant that. It's off by more than half an order of magnitude.
This is why benchmarks for early stage comp -- especially equity comp, when stated in percentages -- are worse than useless.
They are actively harmful, and everyone (founders, people ops, candidates) would do better to completely ignore them.
Carta and Pave are useful for base comp, but they are doing the world a grave disservice by pretending to "benchmark" equity (at early stage through Series C/D, it's objectively incorrect).
Source: I've spent easily 10,000+ hours working on comp spanning founding through Fortune 500 companies, dating back to 2013.
I can't wait to publish a new version of my open source comp tool. (It'll be free, just a public benefit.)
Today on generational wealth. Ramp's first 10 employees may well be sitting on $1B + in stock. Employee #1's initial stake alone could be worth over $300m
In 2019, Ramp was at $0.21 / share. Today it raised at $160 / share.
Startups typically give their first 10 hires ~5% of the company. @sama says it should be 10% minimum, and Ramp is the type of company to be on the generous side.
Especially given the talent density at the company. 1/3rd of its first 60 hires were ex-founders. By 2021, @tryramp had set aside ~1/4th of the company for employees. Most startups set aside closer to 15%.
If the first 10 got ~10% between them and never sold (via secondary / tender), their original grants alone would be worth over $1B now.
Hire #1, ~$340M
Hire #10, ~$41M
That's post-dilution (~80%). Share price still up ~760x from 2019. Not yet fully liquid ofc.
Once again, only from original grants (total could be higher)
We don’t know the true grant values, so these are estimates. Chart and assumptions below.
arp retweeted
Bro it’s called a Roth IRA, it’s so sick. You just live in poverty for 50 years, then one day you wake up and your dick doesn’t work, but you get to open your phone and see a big number, and the best part? It’s all tax-free.
arp retweeted
Okay, so matrix multiplication on silicon isn’t thinking, but the flow of sodium ions through protein channels embedded in a lipid bilayer is?
Why do materialists turn to animist reasoning when the substrate is carbon-based instead of silicon?
yeah i've never understood the point of this question
there are decades-old vertical SaaS businesses serving lawyers and physicians that never really scaled
and there are three-year-old DTC brands with nine-figures in sales
“is this VC scale?” is a very subjective question.
all depends on the founder’s size of ambition and guts.
was nike a VC scale business selling sneakers to runner on tracks one by one pre internet days?
starbucks?
in somebody’s hands even an ordinary business idea can break free and IPO. in another’s hands even a VC scale business will bite dust and flop.
so it all depends.
arp retweeted
One of the most important things to understand about startups is that because they grow intensely fast, they tend to induce a lot of anxiety in their founders due to perceived lack of control, and this anxiety manifests itself in various ways.
A classic one is in projects that amount to ways to achieve greater legibility - hiring people to build dashboards, 'processes' to 'get their systems in order'. Almost always this is not actually addressing the real problem, which is inevitably a people problem.
A perennial one is problems with sales discipline. Most salespeople are by nature crafty, ambitious, lazy, and somewhat bad with tech. They want to be on calls yapping all day and will do the bare minimum of admin that's tolerated by the business.
As a result, most businesses have CRMs with terrible data quality. This results in the hiring of RevOps people, data engineers, more recently 'GTM engineers', etc. But it's fundamentally not a data problem. The problem is that the sales reps lack discipline and accountability.
The founders or execs will convince themselves that if they can just get the perfect system in place with the right dashboards and fields, if they just figure out how to dedupe the data just right and build the right context layer, they'll be fine.
But it's bullshit. They're avoiding the real solution, which is that they need to fire their underperforming reps and tell the rest of them that if they don't have their hygiene on point by the end of the month, they'll be fired too.
In the past this was a hard ask to make because CRMs were legitimately terrible and updating them took a long time. But this is no longer the case. If you give every rep a Grok Bot, keeping the CRM updated is trivially easy.
This is what actually effective AI transformation in GTM looks like, btw. Anyone who is leading with the tech is selling you a bullshit snake oil solution that will be tech debt in a few months. The real opportunity is in raising standards, driving massive amounts of urgency, and then using the new tech to find resourceful solutions to these new demands. Otherwise you'll just spin your wheels and build some pointless science projects
arp retweeted
I always find it surprising when VCs in new tech waves get overly hung up on business quality / metrics (TAM, quality of revenue, margin, etc.).
Disruptive tech always precedes figuring out the business model. Hell, we didn't monetize the Internet for years.
it surprises people but i have no interest in meeting other people in the 'sports tech ecosystem' and i have no interest in building relationships with people who 'know the space'. i don't want to 'network' with you, i don't want your 'advice', i'm not gonna have a strategic discussion with you
if you have a 'sportstech' fund or accelerator, all your portfolio companies are worthless
the intersection of sports, technology and venture is a magnet for the most mediocre idiots
i am building the only technology company in the entire sports industry that will matter in a decade from now
'sports tech' is not some diverse sector with numerous opportunities that can support a 'portfolio'. there's really one singular problem, solving which will unlock an obscene amount of value for coaches, athletes, fans, governing bodies, LITERALLY the entire industry and i've put together the only team with a three-digit avg IQ to attack said problem