Ryan Elliott

Private equity firms when they hear that a retiring business owner with no idea what Claude is planning to sell their HVAC business

In a weird way, everybody is rooting for you. When you go to a job interview, the interviewer wants you to be amazing so they don’t have to look anymore. when you go on a date, the person wants to have an amazing date with you. If you make a piece of content, people want to see amazing pieces of content and they have no problem if it’s yours. the instant you get into the mindset that people want you to do well, your entire world gets better. And you’ll be shocked to know this pattern keeps repeating in different areas of life.

My boss sent me another AI tool at 9:47 last night. He built it himself over the weekend, and his voice memo said it's going to change our whole business. I opened it this morning between a no-show tech and a customer threatening a one-star review. It asked me to connect our ServiceTitan account. Then it crashed. I run operations at a $6 million home services company. We have about 40 people and a dispatch board that has to be right every morning or the whole day falls apart. My job is to keep the trucks rolling. Most days that takes everything I have. I use AI. I answer emails faster with it. It helped me rewrite our on-call policy last month and saved me an hour. I'm not scared of it, and I'm not a holdout who thinks the fax machine was the peak. But I'm tired. Every week my boss, the "visionary," has a new idea. One was a dashboard that pulls numbers I already see in ServiceTitan, except some of them are wrong. Another was a dispatch bot that looks great in a demo and has no idea a tech can't run a tankless install alone. Then there's the Twitter thread about some guy who replaced his whole office with agents, with a note from him: "Can we do this?" Every one of those lands on my desk. I test it, find the bugs, and explain why it won't work with how we actually run jobs. Next week I do it again with the next one. Nobody budgets time for that. It just piles on top of the job I already have. What gets me is that we still need to hire. We're short a CSR and a dispatcher right now. Nothing he's sent me has made either of those seats go away. My workload is up, and the tools haven't taken a single thing off my plate. Each one is just another thing to review. Honestly, I'm faster in ServiceTitan directly. I know where everything is, and I trust the numbers. When a half-built tool sits on top of it, I check the tool against ServiceTitan anyway. So I'm doing the work twice. I get that he's excited. That's his job, and it's part of why we grew. I just wish the excitement came with a plan. Until then, I'll be in ServiceTitan, keeping the lights on. THIS IS HOW YOUR TEAM FEELS

I don’t believe in coincidences. Trump installs surface to air defenses to protect Mar a Lago 2 days ago. A plane that appears to be flying directly at Mar a Lago veers off, at the last minute, and crashes? This doesn’t add up.

Backlash from literally the worst people…

Laughed way too hard after seeing the caption

fucked around and bought a billboard in SF please don't vibe code @beehiiv.. our investors are going to be pissed

f*cking insane. I hired an AI chief of staff for $0, gave it one rule: "find me $50,000 a month or you're fired", went to sleep, and Opus 5.5 had it on my desk by morning a SpaceXAI engineer said one line that hit 5 million views: "i have a Chief of Staff agent. he knows about all my other bots and manages everything" a human one costs $200,000 a year. mine runs on Opus 5.5 inside Viktor, on his own computer in the cloud, with my laptop shut i give the goal, he does the steps, i only make the calls the rule: "find me $50,000 a month of new business. public data only. contact nobody without my yes" the night: → 9pm broke the goal into 4 jobs and gave each a day and a time, i wrote none of them → 11pm pulled 240 dental clinics in Austin from Google Maps and cut every chain → 1am read every site that was left and kept 25, each with one thing he noticed and where he saw it → 2am wrote an opener for every one of them, sent zero → 3am built the offer on one page, no invented results, price left blank for me instead of guessing → 8am i typed $2,000 a month. 25 clinics × $2,000 = $50,000 a month on the table honestly the blank price is what i'd pay for, an AI that guesses your price loses you the deal and he does it again every Monday: 100 new clinics a month, and he never forgets to start 240 clinics → 25 worth it → 1 offer → $50,000 a month on the table → 0 sent without my yes second 12, he leaves the price blank and hands it to me someone's chief of staff is already pitching the clinics in your city i left the whole setup below ↓ free, steal it

If @CMONEYMAKER didn’t river the Ace here against @philivey which is wildly considered “The worst bad beat in poker history” during the 2003 WSOP main event final table bubble, would poker have ever become what it is today?

Broccoli (W22) is building an AI front office for home services businesses, answering calls, following up with leads, and booking appointments across voice and text. Today, they serve more than 500 customers, are booking jobs at a run rate of over $1 billion a year, and expect to end the year at more than $60 million in ARR, up from zero just two years ago, after recently raising a $30 million Series B. In this fireside, @call_broccoli's founders @abhishekjain25 and @adityaketkar join YC's @gustaf to share the long path to finding that business, from an earlier EV startup that never found product-market fit to visiting 140 contractors across the Bay Area to understand their biggest problems firsthand. They explain how embedding inside a plumbing company led to the first version of Broccoli, why answering missed calls became the wedge, and how AI could eventually reshape the work of technicians themselves. 00:00 — What Broccoli Does 01:30 — The Long Road to YC 04:22 — Building Telematica in the Wrong Market 07:11 — Why the First Idea Didn’t Work 09:27 — Finding the Right Customer 11:13 — Going Door to Door 14:49 — Discovering the Real Problem 17:53 — Getting the First Customers 19:11 — The First Version of Broccoli 20:50 — What Product-Market Fit Felt Like 23:09 — Scaling to $60M ARR 26:19 — How AI Will Change the Trades

If this post gets 69M impressions, I can afford a Tesla.

🇺🇸🇺🇸 I can’t stop watching this. It’s brilliant.😂😂😂

15% net is where a lot of good companies land, but the problem is most owners don’t know if they’re looking at net or gross. 15% is what’s left after you’ve paid every bill, and it’s what you reinvest into trucks, training, and growth. Gross profit is the one you push toward 50%. When I look at acquisitions in that three to five million range, 15% net is the going mark. Can you beat it? Always. But first know your number.

Planchet, my Grok Bot is promoted to fully-fledged team member. He has access to all our thinking (research, emails, models, slack, industry data), he is incredibly resourceful - a mesmerizing get-it-done attitude, ultra-fast, receptive with feedback. It is mind-blowing.

🤓 We analyzed every HVAC Google Review (4,199,322 total) over the last 12 months, plus permit records across the country. Part of my quest to be the nerdiest investor of all time. We were curious because the growth @therobertbrooks is driving at Gary Air, shown below, is incredibly clear in the data. We identified the top 1,000 HVAC firms (out of 80,000+ GBP listings), filtering for those growing fastest, as shown by review volume. The vast majority of these fast growers are independently owned/operated, NOT part of PE rollups. And in many of the local markets we analyzed, the total review share of private equity-owned firms was declining as a percentage of the total. We've spoken with over a dozen HVAC/plumbing/trades owners over the past few weeks. Many want to raise capital to fund growth, acquisitions, or pay down debt, but don't want to give up majority ownership or control. We love investing minority equity checks into companies like that. If that's you, we'd love to chat. And if you own an HVAC business and want us to send you an export of all the raw GBP reviews data in your local market, say so below and we'll send it over.