New!! “The Agents #008: Outbound Isn’t Dead, Agents Are Merging, Not Multiplying.” youtu.be/dF_RcN4BkQU

My take on California’s “One-Time” Billionaire Tax. It’s much worse than it looks. 📉 Will it pass? Yes, likely. It only needs 50%+1 voter approval. SEIU + CTA have done this before—Prop 55 won 63% in 2016. ⚖️ Will it get tied up in litigation? Almost certainly. Retroactive wealth tax on a tax type CA has never had = due process challenges. Billionaires have the legal budgets for years of fights. 👋 But it’s clearly … only the start. The goal is an annual tax, not one-time. And the target is $25m-50m net worth folks, including illiquid foldings (early stage founders raising a Series B). The “one-time” framing is strategic, not terminal. The same coalition (CTA, CFT, SEIU) already has AB 259 written—an >annual< 1% wealth tax at a >$50M threshold<, with plans to go to $25M. It’s been introduced 3 years running. The one-time tax removes the constitutional barrier. Once that’s gone, the annual version becomes a much easier ballot measure. 🔃 CA Policy Center said: “If SEIU hopes to keep Medi-Cal spending growing, it may need to place repeated wealth taxes on the ballot—potentially lowering the threshold as billionaires flee.” The real risk for founders: At $1B, you’re taxing ~200 people. At $50M, you’re taxing 23,000 households—including most successful founders on paper before any liquidity event. The rational move isn’t to leave when you hit the threshold. It’s to leave—or never incorporate in CA—before you get anywhere close. ✈️ Net net: it will make sense to leave before the Series B. Vinod Khosla nailed it: “Even people who don’t expect this initiative to pass are still planning to leave because there will be another one.” The one-time tax is the constitutional Trojan horse. The annual tax — at a much lower threshold — is already waiting inside.

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Boom!! The #1 AI agent for eCommerce

I have a seed investment I made years back now at $130m ARR now growing 40% and cash flow positive. And all the VCs have checked out. They haven’t been mean about it. Everyone is nice. It’s just, one has their associate manage the investment now, hasn’t shown up in a long time. Another shows up once in a while, says Great Job. This may sound like a criticism, but it isn’t. It’s a Sign Of The Times. Folks are just moving more quickly than ever to try to find the next Cursor or Harvey. Everyone is in the hunt, and if it turns out an investment may not be that, they move on faster than ever. For founders, it’s good and less good. The good part is you get left alone if growth is OK but not epic now, as long as you don’t need more money. The less good part is the VCs disappear, and that can feel … well … not so good. Buck up. They are only investors. Expect most to check out if you aren’t on a path to hypergrowth. And they may check back in once you achieve it again.

So far I've watched 3 VC seed deals this year where the founders just decided to keep the money for themselves and not build the product. All were on SAFEs, and they took the position they owed investors nothing and that in fact they were not even investors. Just SAFE holders. One eventually returned cash after keeping a large chunk for themselves. Another hired an attorney who said plainly nothing was owed to the investors and the founders could pay themselves whatever they wanted. I did not personally invest in these deals but I might have, they had a lot going for them (or so it seemed). This is going to happen in the Age of AI. It's the flip side of so many things also exploding so quickly and growing at insane rates. It's just a risk to be more aware of perhaps than in the past.

Worst news of the day :( ChatGPT caught a misdiagnosis from a doctor that told me I likely had cancer (doctor was 100% wrong, re-tested) Claude reviews every legal doc and legal issue we have. We then have our human lawyers confirm. I get it but such a huge bummer

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SaaStr AI Day Live: The Human + Agent Sales Org with Salesforce x.com/i/broadcasts/1OyJAj…

Ok I don’t seem to see @tbpn on my feed as often as a few weeks ago Is it possible X penalizes them for being bought by a competitor? Just curious The views still seem large. They’ve just … dropped off my feed. Hmmm

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