CS @UWwaterloo grad. 2nd degree tkd black belt and ex-instructor. 2x ex-FAANG. Now 2x SaaS founder in Toronto and also building physical schools in Michigan.
Jackson, MI
Joined February 2012
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Live-streaming my development teapawt.org/i/broadcasts/1NGaroloX…
Serge Toarca retweeted
new: Wisconsin Becomes 38th State to Enact IHRA Speech Code; Ohio Set to Follow as 39th
chrisbrunet.com/p/wisconsin-…
Major politicians aren’t talking about it. Headlines aren’t being written about it. But the IHRA speech codes march forward, state by state, without resistance.
Have been using Claude code aggressively for the last two months. It seems more and more like the bottleneck to productivity is how fast you can write down what you want.
Important corollary: compressible ideas are faster to implement!
Heard from an Iranian friend that their dictator has already killed more than 3000 civilians during the protests.
Internet and calls outside the country are completely blocked.
Iran was a great country before 1979. The Iranian people are extremely competent and hard-working.
Even conservative reports say about 1.5% of the population is actively protesting, and it takes about 3% historically for a revolution to succeed.
Now is the time to fight to get your country back! Fight! Fight! Fight!
hey guys i know i already take 53% of your income and spend it on fake somalian daycares, fake trains, fake healthcare, fake vaccines that undermined an entire century of public trust in real vaccines, fake media, fake nonprofits that i use to funnel money to fake voters that will keep me in power so i can take more of your money, fake courts and judges that let violent criminals run free if they're the correct skin color, fake hotels and schools that i actually use to house fake immigrants while i send your kids home, and real castrations for your 12-year-old with a fake gender that i've convinced them of and affirmed, but now i just need a teeny tiny 1% of your net worth that you've already paid taxes on so we can make things better for everybody.
oops, my mistake, it's actually 5% but only 1% per year if you split it up, but you would have to pay interest of course.
i hope you understand that this is the first step to rebuilding public trust in government.
California 'bout to slay its golden goose
My district is $18 trillion, nearly 1/3 of US stock market in a 50 mile radius. We have 5 companies with a market cap over a trillion dollar companies. If I can stand up for a billionaire tax, this is not a hard position for 434 other members or 100 Senators.
Those saying that we wouldn't have a future NVIDIA in the Bay if this tax goes into effect are glossing over Silicon Valley history. Jensen was at LSI Logic and his co-founders at Sun. He started NVIDIA in my district because of the semiconductor talent, Stanford, innovation networks, and venture funding. We have 37 times the VC money as Austin given the innovation ecosystem & Florida isn't even on the map. Jensen wasn't thinking I won't start this company because I may have to one day pay a 1 percent tax on my billions. He built here because the talent is here.
AI was created with our tax dollars. ImageNet was created by Fei-Fei Li at Stanford using NSF money. This was a visual database. Hinton presented at an ImageNet conference his famous paper. The seminal innovation in tech is done by thousands often with public funds. NSF, DARPA, Stanford, Berkley, San Jose State, Santa Clara and the UCs are the foundation for what has made Silicon Valley a powerhouse. It's why we won 5 Nobel Prizes this year in the UC system.
Yes, we need entrepreneurs to commercialize disruptive innovation. Stanford blazed a trail in licensing technology & partnering with the private sector. The university enabled companies like Google which began as a research project called BackRub, looking at back links to rank pages. And entrepreneurs like Brin & Page reap huge rewards when they succeed. But the idea that they would not start companies to make billions, or take advantage of an innovation cluster, if there is a 1-2 percent tax on their staggering wealth defies common sense and economic theory @paulkrugman @DAcemogluMIT @baselinescene.
We cannot have a nation with extreme concentration of wealth in a few places but where 70 percent of Americans believe the American dream is dead and healthcare, childcare, housing, education is unaffordable. What will stifle American innovation, what will make us fall behind China, is if we see further political dysfunction and social unrest, if we fail to cultivate the talent in every American and in every city and town.
The industrial revolution saw soaring inequality in Britain for nearly 60 years. On the continent, it lead to revolutions in France with worker uprisings (1848) and contributed to one in Russia (1917). America's central challenge is to make sure the AI revolution works for all of us, not just tech billionaires.
So yes a billionaire tax is good for American innovation which depends on a strong and thriving American democracy.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The proposed California billionaire tax is a one-time 5% levy on net worth exceeding $1 billion for residents as of January 1, 2026 (optionally payable over 5 years with interest), not a 1% annual tax for 5 years. oag.ca.gov/system/files/i… lao.ca.gov/BallotAnalysis…
Serge Toarca retweeted
🚨 WOW. Brown University student Alex Shieh previously EVISCERATED the school's administrators for having a $46 million deficit, despite surging costs for students.
They pay $90K+ PER YEAR.
Alex Shieh: "What about the kids who weren't born on third base?! [...] Brown is on track to run a $46 million DEFICIT this year. WHERE is all the money going?"
"I'll tell you where it's going. It's going into an empire of administrative bloat and bureaucracy! Brown employs 3,805 full time non-instructional staff for just 7,229 undergrads. That's one administrator for every two students."
"This isn't education. This is bloat paid for on the backs of students and families who are mortgaging their futures for a shot at a better life!"
HE'S SPOT-ON.
Also seems to correspond to massive degradation in service quality starting in about 2015 or so. Increasing rate of flaky API calls, including some that don't work at all anymore. Their docs used to be be instant, but now take a long time to load on a much faster connection. Prices have gone up unilaterally and arbitrarily despite no new usage and all the goodies that made them great have gone away (e.g. refunding a customer used to refund the fees).
Went from being an active promoter to actively recommending people don't go with them to anyone who asks. Go with Helcim instead, it's a lot cheaper if you can make the switch.
I have never shared this publicly out of fear, but I was actually passed over for a job at Stripe in 2019 because I looked at the male interviewer instead of the female interviewer when I asked a follow-up question in my onsite interview.
I wish I could say I was joking, but I'm not: this was the actual feedback I received. I only got this information because I was friends with several folks high up at Stripe, but if it weren't for that I'd have had 0 information why communication with my recruiter completely stopped and I didn't get the job.
The reason it wasn't an *immediate* "no" is that there was quite a lot of disagreement internally since I performed very well technically. The problem was a "cultural" one.
In one interview, they gave me the codebase of an actual open source project and asked me to both identify a specific bug and fix it in 45 minutes. I completely finished it. Apparently that was quite rare; basically never happened. (Aside: I don't know if they still do this interview anymore but it was really fun).
Anyways, it's water under the bridge, and I'm over it, but until that happened I had no idea what had happened with regards to DEI in big tech. Through that point I'd been self-employed so completely shielded myself. It was a real wakeup call to me.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of hosting @TomLeonard28, the former Speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives, and current candidate for Governor of Michigan, at our childcare center.
We gave him a tour and he was able to sit down with some of our kids to watch them read. From our conversation, it was clear that he has a deep passion for early childhood literacy. He mentioned that if he could only achieve one objective, it would be to have every child reading.
Skilled readers create enormous value in society. If you could wave a magic wand and upskill everybody in the US to a proficient reading level, you would create an immediate double-digit bump in GDP, and a trillion-dollar bump in tax revenue collected by the US.
Reading is a unique skill because it compounds quickly. Once you know how to read, you can start learning other skills by reading. So teaching kids to read early doesn't just make them better readers, it makes them better at every skill. This is why we've set our very ambitious target to get every 3-year-old reading.
100% of the credit for our success goes to our exceptional staff, and it's great to see others notice the results of their hard work. Looking forward to the next year!
Serge Toarca retweeted
I’m turning 41, but I don’t feel like celebrating.
Our generation is running out of time to save the free Internet built for us by our fathers.
What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is being turned into the ultimate tool of control.
Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU).
Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy.
A dark, dystopian world is approaching fast — while we’re asleep. Our generation risks going down in history as the last one that had freedoms — and allowed them to be taken away.
We’ve been fed a lie.
We’ve been made to believe that the greatest fight of our generation is to destroy everything our forefathers left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech.
By betraying the legacy of our ancestors, we’ve set ourselves on a path toward self-destruction — moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological.
So no, I’m not going to celebrate today. I’m running out of time. WE are running out of time.
Serge Toarca retweeted
A couple things a couple of principles:
- LinkedIn is like X in the sense that you have to invest into the platform to get results so don't be surprised if you don't get results immediately. But 2-4 weeks of a applying a consistent system you'll see results for sure.
- People will talk to you the more credibility you have and/or value you give first
- First interaction receiving a connection request request is "Who is this person?" especially if you're not writing posts regularly so people don't see your name/photo on the platform. So you need to answer that question quickly and position yourself as credible within seconds.
- People will generally look at your profile FIRST before accepting your connection request to answer the "Who is this person?" doubt.
- LinkedIn is more business than social so keep that in mind. For instance, with busy people get straight to what they care about the most quickly.
- Mutual connections results in a higher chance of someone accepting a connection request
- Cold InMails or personalized invites get ignored unless you have an extremely targeted offer and to a high degree of probability you know what the other person wants.
How that translates into actual actions:
- Making sure your profile highlights who you are and what you're trying to achieve. #1 thing a person receiving a connection request first is your photo and "title" which is literally a free text field that you can use to your advantage. Example "Founder @ ParseHub $10M ARR | Now raising for Moment CRM".
- Same topic. Make sure profile is up-to-date. Checked your website, I'm not sure if you're raising for Moment, but if you are I see no reference to it in your profile. That would be important. I'd probably switch your photo to the one you're using on X. Looks more on brand and professional. Add a banner image. It can be a simple graphic that's on brand or even better a professional photo that sets you apart as an expert (i.e. nice photo of you talking at a conference, etc). Take advantage of any LinkedIn feature that builds trust. Add an about with your background and achievements and custom call to action with your premium plan.
- There's very few posts on LinkedIn while on X you have over 2k. You don't have to get to that same level, but do spend some time on posts that will increase your credibility for instance, "What I learned growing ParseHub to $X ARR and now what my plans are for Moment".
- After that investment in upgrading your profile just send connection requests to VCs or people who work closely with VCs. No personalized messages or InMails (extremely useful tip from @akin_opaleye).
- If you happen to personally know people that are already connected to VCs, connect with them that way when you send your connection request you come up as a mutual connection.
- After you connect. DM them a short thank you message.
- When someone accepts your connection request, view their profile on LinkedIn mobile, if you see a " People you may know" section pop up under the blue message button, scroll all the way to the right, and click on "Connect with more people like X". Makes it so much easier to find people that are similar and connect with them quickly.
I'm far from a LinkedIn expert, but those have helped me a lot.
Also, watch Kasey Brown's videos on YouTube on how she's made LinkedIn work very well for her and for others. youtube.com/@kasetheace
I've spent several hours over the last few days reaching out to investors cold. Wanted to give an update.
Background: we are building exceptional schools and we've come up with an unorthodox (but sound) model to generate venture-scale returns by doing so.
Stats:
- cold DMs sent via X: ~120
- responses via X: 14
- calls booked: 6 (4 + 2 pending)
- rejections: 5
- 3 either not yet played out or text-only
- very excited: 2 (including soft offers to be angels)
- mildly excited: 1
- maybes: 1
- cold DMs sent via LinkedIn: ~20
- responses via LinkedIn: 0
Not a ton of signal yet, but I seem to be very good on calls. The ones that are most excited are ones that I've had calls with before sending the deck.
As predicted, multiple rejections are due to the unorthodox model. But also, the ones that were excited seemed to love it specifically because it was weird.
First time raising, so I was expecting a *lot* of no's. But it seems like I have a pretty good hit rate, especially given that these are all completely cold. Not sure if that's because of my history or because of what we're solving (would appreciate feedback if you've spoken to me and you're reading this).
Our deck content is solid, but it is ugly as hell. Default Google Slides template. But I didn't want to waste more time on it and it hasn't yet been cited as a reason for rejection.
Twitter DM interface is complete ass. Buries messages and I almost missed a few.