Played high stakes poker 2006-2015 🃏 Now I sell Jiu Jitsu gear at https://xitter.cf/t.co/EwP8NjgIgB 🥋 Tweets mostly about e-commerce, tech, and business.
San Diego
Joined January 2011
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I don’t read many new books, but here are 3 I re-read every year:
1. Die with Zero by @bp22. Squandering your life is a lot more dangerous than squandering your money.
2. The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham. Stop being busy, start thinking.
3. Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. An emotional intelligence book disguised as a negotiation book.
this crazy year of tariffs ended up just incentivizing more manufacturing in China...
🇨🇳 China - we're basically back to pre-Liberation Day tariff levels
🇵🇰 Pakistan - we're getting slammed with this 19% reciprocal duty. not a fun check to keep writing 💸
The female equivalent of
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one of the businesses getting hit hardest by AI slop has to be Upwork
i've hired tons of people on Upwork over the years, but now every application is ChatGPT soup that is impossible to filter
best hack is a decoy question that AI answers consistently (sorry knee cut passers)
Tai Lopez is finally going down, in a textbook example of the Sketchy Doctor Theorem:
never trust anyone who refers to themselves as a doctor outside of a medical setting
earlier this month we launched our first USA-made Jiu Jitsu set, and the numbers are in...
Rash Guard cost (vs China): +117.3% 📈
Shorts cost (vs China): +306.1% 😬
we increased our retail price on both pieces 100% vs comparable imported gear we offer. so given the higher COGs, our margins definitely took a hit even with the high price point. we can live with that though, given the higher absolute $/order.
it was a cool project, but a most likely one time adventure. the two real bummers were:
1. quality. our All-American set's quality is solid, but it's just not quite as good as our imported gear in my opinion.
lots of people think that "Made in America" automatically implies better quality. that's not the case.
especially when it comes to athleisure apparel materials, China has the most experience and best machines. making this type of gear is not simple, and they are experts at it. there aren't many contract manufacturers in the USA that are capable of making something like this.
2. timeline. if we were turning around an American made kit like this super quickly, an argument could be made from a cashflow perspective that the margin hit is worth it.
we sent over the final artwork on April 22nd. the kit launched on August 13th. that's 113 days. we could have made the kit in China, shipped it via sea, and had it landed at our warehouse faster than that. i took a lot of brain damage herding this project over the finish line.
all in all, i'm glad we did it and the kit turned out nice. but i pray to our tariff overlords we don't have to revisit this experiment any time too soon.
here's a link if you'd like to check it out:
goldbjj.com/products/all-ame…
RIP US Bank Smartly credit card 🪦
this card was awesome, made 2.25% back on my taxes last year (4% cash back - 1.75% IRS pay by credit card fee)
Got scammed so hard by this stand at the farmers market
As a burrito connoisseur I cannot walk past a spot called Big Ass Breakfast Burritos without getting one
I thought it was a little weird their sign said “ignorance will not be an acceptable reason for a refund”
But whatever I’ll take an egg burrito with bacon
Can you spot the fine print?
After paying, out comes a completely inedible vegan burrito with tofu eggs and bacon
What’s their goal here? Just trying to piss off all meat eaters?
Cole South retweeted
yeah very complicated thing. My buddy @colesouth made a post once on X about how ex poker players are way too willing to blame variance in actual business situations. It has stuck with me for sure.
When you actually work in a business rather than just invest in them, you can be consistently amazed out how some people just seem to always pull shit off. There is a pretty significant (but not insurmountable) ability to bend the world to your will if your livelihood depends on it and you are competent.
I have seen that very rarely with suppliers where I know exactly what was involved and it just kinda shows up done and you just kinda shake your head in surprise.
we're now deep in the WSOP main event, where it's very common for remaining players who respect each other to swap a few % of equity.
why isn't there a business version of this? i'd def trade a small piece of my company for revenue-adjusted pieces of other solid ecom brands.
The competition was stiff. Some said I was nuts to bid. But I stayed firm and rose to the occasion in a long, hard auction.
pretty interesting drama going on in the Jiu Jitsu world right now...
influencer/financial guru (putting it extremely generously) Derek Moneyberg posted a photo of him "earning" his BJJ black belt in just 3.5 years:
last year my Jiu Jitsu brand surveyed ~2,000 practitioners. the average time to get to black belt was 13.3 years.
getting a black belt in 3.5 years is not completely unheard of. UFC Champ BJ Penn received his in about that time after dominating the competitive circuit, and proved himself by becoming the first non-Brazilian to win the Jiu Jitsu world championships at black belt. 3-time Judo Olympian Travis Stevens was awarded a BJJ black belt from legendary coach John Danaher after just 18 months of Jiu Jitsu specific training.
Derek Moneyberg is claiming to have trained over 2 hours a day, every single day, for the past 3.5 years. that's a lot of mat time for sure. for a guy who seemingly posts his entire life on social media, it's nearly impossible to find any video of him rolling.
you don't have to be a competitor, or to be able to wreck everyone in your gym to have "earned" a black belt. but if you're going to get one in an insanely short amount of time, you should be able to back it up (yes i realize it's a little silly for grown men to be arguing about the color of the belts they wear with their pajamas).
the coaches he's paid have stepped in to defend his promotion, while mostly everyone else thinks it's a joke. definitely comes off as a cringe level 10/10 to me.
ChatGPT is soooo good at finding discounts. Even for stingy Vuori it finds a solid 20% off code that works.
It absolutely nails our brand’s discount program with spooky precision.
Classic Amazon
This is the #1 in Sports Nutrition Endurance & Energy Supplements on Amazon. It also is the #2 best selling creatine gummy on Amazon (by volume) having sold at least 50,000 units across all flavors and sizes over the last month,
It also happens to be a creatine gummy with no creatine in it, as confirmed by testing done at a leading lab. No creatine.
But hey, maybe you dont trust the lab tests. Let's take a look at the SFP and see if these could possibly have creatine in them. This brand claims to have 5000mg of creatine monohydrate per serving and a serving size of two gummies. Thats 2500mg of creatine per gummy. There's only one issue: each gummy weighs less than 2500mg in total! Generally creatine should make up about 30% of the total gummy weight. In this, case it makes up over 100% (which is uhh impossible.) This is just blatant.
I have been flagging this to Amazon for months via email and live meetings with relatively senior folks but this brand still continues to sell fake and potentially harmful product to unsuspecting American customers. This is a Chinese company (address is: NO. 99 KING FUK STREET.SANPOKONG.KOWLOON RM D07.8/F .KAI TAK FTY BUILDING, Hong Kong CHINA 518000) selling fake, potentially dangerous product to stadiums full of Americans every month. Amazon has done nothing about it and is even (if just algorithmically) rewarding this brand with the "Amazon's Choice" badge.
If you have a friend at Amazon, send this to them.
Really surprising pivot by Meta, they are abandoning Shops Ads (where the customer checks out on FB/IG, never leaving the platform).
Meta was pushing everyone into this ad format so hard the past couple of years. TikTok showed it worked at scale.
It made a lot of sense:
• keep customers on FB/IG
• much better data to train the algorithm
• cleaner attribution for advertisers
• eat away at Shopify’s market
Very bullish for $SHOP if Meta is giving up on competing with them for checkout. Shopify’s biggest existential threat has always been Meta.
Crazy scandal going on in Jiu Jitsu right now, is there any precedence for this?
One of the top BJJ athletes, Jacob “JayRod” Rodriguez, was kicked out of his elite gym after they discovered he made AI generated porn featuring women who trained there.
He (allegedly) took photos from women he was training with’s social media and uploaded them into AI programs that turned them into NSFW content.
His girlfriend discovered these in a hidden folder on his phone and reached out to the women “in it” who confirmed that it was AI generated and without their consent.
The gym, B-Team, immediately banned JayRod when they found out. JayRod issued a weak sort-of-apology vaguely mentioning a porn addiction and then deflecting toward Christianity and therapy.
Obviously this is 10/10 creepy, but is it illegal?
