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Mornington Peninsula. Founder
Joined November 2006
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ben barren retweeted
Today @RVStewards have concluded their inquiry into Saturday’s Caulfield Cup fall.
ben barren retweeted
Correct, referring to speed ratings, which is the time it takes a horse to cover a given section (or overall), compared against a normalised standard for that track & distance, adjusted for conditions on the day. You can't use raw times, as every track layout is different, e.g., uphill, downhill, the number and tightness of bends, straights, etc. On the TopRate speed ratings he went +3.9L vs standard to the 800m on Saturday. His previous fastest was +3.6 lengths, where he led.
ben barren retweeted
🏇 Would going forward have helped Ka Ying Rising?
Tempted was brilliant in winning The Everest, posting a new peak WFA Performance Rating of 106.5 ⏱️⚖️📊.
That improved on her last start 105.2 and, coincidentally, matched the 106.5 Ka Ying Rising ran to win the race last year.
Much of the discussion has naturally centred on the beaten $1.35 favourite and the ride by @zpurton . I think the criticism is unwarranted. The early speed and post-race data give me little reason to think pushing Ka Ying Rising harder to secure a more forward position would have improved his result.
🔹 What would going forward have cost?
The early speed was hot. From the overhead footage, it was clear Ka Ying Rising’s natural speed on the day wouldn’t get him across without additional urging. Purton had to decide in a split second whether asking for that effort was in the horse’s best interests.
Afterwards, it’s easy to identify a preferred position outside the leader and think that if he pressed forward, he would have won the race. The more important question is what it would have cost to get there.
Even from where he settled, Ka Ying Rising travelled +3.9 lengths above the TopRate standard to the 800m, exceeding his high from 24 previous starts of +3.6. So, relative to standard, he travelled faster to the 800m mark on Saturday than he ever has before.
While his reputation as an exceptionally fast horse is well earned, his elite overall times have historically come largely from a controlled early pace, then blistering speed over the final 800m.
He rated 112 on the occasion he ran that previous +3.6 figure to the 800m mark, so this doesn’t mean Saturday’s early speed was beyond his capabilities. A repeat of that 112 would have seen him win comfortably. He managed 106.
What the comparison does show is that settling behind the leaders didn’t mean he was travelling too slowly and could have simply gone faster without consequence. Asking him to exceed his natural speed to join the battle up front could arguably have left him finishing further behind.
🔹 Purton backed his horse’s ability
Before Saturday, Purton had ridden Ka Ying Rising 22 times for 20 wins. He knows the horse exceptionally well and was best placed to judge how he was travelling at that moment.
He was riding one of the highest-rated sprinters we’ve seen, with a clear edge over his rivals on established times, sectionals and overall performance ratings. There’s a familiar saying in racing: “Ride it like the best horse.” I think that is essentially what he did.
The last thing a jockey wants is to compromise a horse’s chances by doing too much in the first 300–400m, especially when its ability gives it a clear advantage. Sometimes you have to accept an imperfect position, “take your medicine”, as jockeys say, and trust the horse’s superiority to carry it through.
On this occasion, it didn’t. That alone doesn’t make the decision wrong.
🔹 There wasn’t a powerful finish suggesting unused energy
Ka Ying Rising’s final 200m sectional was +1 length above standard. He worked steadily to the line, while Tempted deteriorated slightly to -0.6, and others behind him finished similarly.
He wasn’t powering through the line like a horse with plenty of unused energy. His finishing data offers little support for the argument that he could have spent considerably more early and still produced enough late to win.
He covered some extra ground, encountered a soft track for the first time (or at least one that wasn't firm), and was racing away from home. Those are variables to consider when explaining why he regressed below his best. I wouldn’t automatically treat the soft ground as an excuse, but the combination of circumstances may have contributed.
Even allowing for those factors, his 106 was disappointing against the 110 - 114 level he had consistently shown since last year’s Everest, with a last start peak of 119.
Three races later, Cross Tasman carried 60kg, sat four-wide without cover and won. That is a different race and horse, but it is a useful reminder that a difficult trip doesn't automatically cost a horse the opportunity to win. Given Ka Ying Rising’s exposed talent relative to his rivals, saying the decision to take a sit and not press forward cost him the race goes too far.
My assessment is that Purton made a reasonable decision in real time, and the subsequent data supports it. Ka Ying Rising wasn’t good enough on the day, under those circumstances.
Tempted deserves full credit for reaching a new peak and beating him. Even an exceptional horse starting at $1.35 still has to produce the performance to win.
History shows time and time again that racing offers no certainties.
ben barren retweeted
📊 MELB CUP STAT OF THE DAY🏆
GEELONG CUP LEADUP = more Top2 finishes in the Mel Cup than 2x other key leadup races combined!
Since 2000, the Geelong Cup has had an extremely powerful impact on the Melbourne cup placings including -
3 wins
6x 2nds
9x Top 2 finishes
Compare that with ⬇️
Lexus/Archer Stakes:
2 wins
1x 2nd
3x Top2
Moonee Valley Cup:
2 wins
2x 2nds
4x Top2
See video ⬇️ ⬇️
where I breakdown:
- strength of the Geelong Cup for finishing Top4 in the Melbourne Cup
- how the raw race time can be used as a future indicator
- Comparison against the Moonee Valley Cup & Lexus/Archer (ex Hotham Hcp)
ben barren retweeted
OMFG! This response from @AbdulElSayed to a completely bigoted question is probably the best thing I’ve heard all year.
Every bigot in America needs to listen to this three times.
ben barren retweeted
To compare like-with-like you need to compare KYR yesterday with Black Caviar when she was shipped away and fell-in at Ascot, whatever the excuses may have been.
A more reasonable comparison is home-ground BC vs home-ground KYR … now that would be a match-up, were it possible.
ben barren retweeted
a 50-person company’s slack and email data is selling for $300-400K right now, and the labs are calling brokers on fridays saying they don’t care what it costs.
here’s everything from our conversation with data broker ryan lock (sponsored by Ahrefs):
ryan sold his solar company ($35M revenue, 1,000 reps) last year and stumbled into data brokering when someone told his co-founder he could license his company data. the first offer gave him two days to accept or it exploded. his co-founder negotiated it up 4x. that gap is the whole business: the labs are desperate, business owners have no idea what they’re holding, and nobody’s advising the sell side. he launched in july, went viral once, and was doing 15 meetings a day with business owners. team of 13 now. every single lab reached out to him inbound through X.
the model is simple: buy data assets from companies, package them into training sets for frontier and mid-tier labs. what they want is operational data: email, slack, drive, accounting, shopify, klaviyo. raw text, not photos or video. the part nobody understands: it’s not volume, it’s context. a customer email that gets pinged into slack that gets resolved in a ticket is a complete story a model can learn from. switch from slack to discord two years ago and lose the chain? the data’s worth a fraction. ryan’s own solar data was nearly worthless because everyone just picked up the phone. his co-founder’s remote slack-native team got the full ask.
the numbers: average deal is $300-400K for a 50-100 person company, deals go up to $2-4M for the big ones. quick valuation proxies are number of software tools, years of full-context data, and headcount, because a hundred people generate idea-discussion-approval-feedback loops that five people in one office never write down. the de-identification alone costs $10-50K per terabyte, done by a third party who never lets ryan touch the raw files. and don’t try to scrub it yourself: tony becomes “employee six” everywhere consistently, or the whole set is destroyed.
ryan’s analogy for margins: raw data is oil at $100 a barrel, the labs turn it into jet fuel at $2,000, and the broker takes the risk that the barrel has no engine inside. the spirit airlines bankruptcy sold its data to google for $10M, which he thinks is low for the largest public deal. the data companies are all talked about as very profitable, but the real edge is procurement on demand: he forecasts what the labs will want next and ranks his pipeline by acquisition priority. current requests: circuit board CAD files, architecture firms, heavy construction, and video game 3D development.
the gotchas before you sell: never sign a perpetual exclusivity. perpetual use is standard (nobody can track files down the chain), but exclusivity should be termed, usually two years, or you’re locked out of a future revenue stream forever. and if you’re selling your business in the next year or two, a $500K data deal can become a due diligence landmine on a $20M exit. tom’s referrals keep saying exactly that. micro one pays $50-75K referral fees because they’re playing a different game. ryan pays 6% and tells brokers to charge the seller for running the process instead.
where it goes next: ryan thinks the buyer pool expands past the frontiers to enterprises training their own models. a 20-person HVAC company only knows what it knows, but add 150 years of industry data and you’ve got a vertical model, the harvey-for-law playbook in every trade. the video side is wilder: labs pay $10-20 an hour for people to wear headcams doing manual work, and there are state-sponsored warehouses in china and every low-cost country where workers rotate through sewing and dishwashing stations for robot training. jacky’s fraud prediction: 500 fake chinese companies with active linkedin pages.
ryan’s answer: if the simulation is that good, the data’s probably valuable anyway.
bonus: jacky’s own slack community, 500 people and 20K messages a month, has already gotten offers. “no amount of money, well, that’s a lie, I’d take my pants off for seven figures.” the over/under for ryan’s next 12 months was set at $300M gross, and micro one just passed a billion annualized. tom asked to become a master affiliate and jacky immediately called it master and slave. tony’s response: “the white guy’s still on top. we went back a hundred years.” the industry is a gold rush and the shovels are already being sold.
NGMI with @itstonyyu and @tomwang24, guest @RyanLockAI.
watch/listen ↓
ben barren retweeted
مصورة الواشنطن بوست التي تعرض لهجوم من الوحوش الصهاينة في الضفة الغربية المحتلة.
"رسالة واحدة إلى أهاليهم: لا أعرف كيف يمكن لأب أو أم أن يربّيا مثل هؤلاء الوحوش. حقًا، وبكل صراحة.
لقد شهدت بنفسي سلوكهم وهم يعتدون على العائلات، وقد نشرنا مؤخرًا تقريرًا عن ذلك. وأشعر بخجل شديد، وبصفتي أمًا، لا أستطيع أن أفهم كيف يمكن لأهل أن يربّوا أفرادًا بهذه الوحشية. إنهم ليسوا بشرًا حتى.
ونعم، إنهم إرهابيون يهود، وهم يسيئون إلى سمعة الجميع في هذا البلد بصورة مروّعة. وللأسف، أصبح الجميع يرون حقيقتهم على ما هي عليه.
وهل تعرفون ما الأمر المحزن؟ أنا متأكدة من أن أحدًا منهم لن يُلاحَق قضائيًا، للأسف."
ben barren retweeted
I know America. I know that, in America, we believe in a country big enough for all of us.
So, JD Vance, don't you dare come from Ohio to lecture me. You don't know a damn thing about America.
ben barren retweeted
David Hayes deserves full credit, has turned up to every media call, every tv show, interview and so on.
A fantastic ambassador for the game and even more so after the defeat of Ka Ying Rising.
ben barren retweeted
This is what Jillian Segal is defending.
This is what the Albanese government's continued political and diplomatic support facilitates.
The IDF covered for a group of thugs who were bashing a woman journalist to death.
This is Israeli terrorism - this is why the world loathes them.
“Let me die,” American photojournalist Heidi Levine repeats to journalists Jasper Nathaniel as they try to outrun masked Israeli settlers who attacked her on Friday while she covered the olive harvest in the West Bank village of Abu Falah, near Ramallah.
Around 80 settlers attacked Palestinian olive harvesters in the village, AP reported. The Palestinian Red Crescent said it treated six people injured in two attacks in Abu Falah.
Levine, a freelancer for the Washington Post, told the Committee to Protect Journalists that the settlers knocked her down and kicked her for at least 10 minutes, even after she identified herself as an American journalist. They stole her camera, phone and bag. She was eventually taken to a hospital in Ramallah.
"The IDF provided cover, with tear gas and machine guns, while the settlers beat" Levine "nearly to death," Nathaniel wrote, adding that soldiers then shot a Palestinian bystander and aimed their guns at and shoved paramedics trying to treat him. AP photos and circulating videos show Israeli soldiers standing over a wounded Palestinian man after they shot him.
Andrey X, an activist also at the scene, said a Palestinian man "saved our lives from the settler-terrorists who attacked the olive harvesters and journalists” armed only with a slingshot.
ben barren retweeted
Cheap Chinese EVs are doing what the RBA couldn't: dragging down inflation.
The "BYD effect" is cutting fuel bills, insurance, and maintenance costs. EVs now make up a quarter of new car sales in Australia. The next target? Electrifying freight? hope so.
ben barren retweeted
The lack of information, the misinformation and the absence of opinion following the dreadful fall at Caulfield today highlighted how out of their depth both 7 and RDC broadcasters are when incidents of this nature occur. All in an attempt to sanitise what we had just witnessed
ben barren retweeted
Melbourne Cup implications from the Caulfield Cup 👇🏼
⭕️ Saint George has now passed the ballot and sits in 23rd, will get a run if they go that way
⭕️ Starford did not pass the ballot, won't get a start
⭕️ Kingswood, Cosmic Crusader not entered
ben barren retweeted
Massive congratulations @GavinBedggood , such a hard working dedicated team. Proud to write their website stories and looking forward to this one!!
ben barren retweeted
I have Blue Door coming across and Savvie Hallie driving up So Blue Door has to cross or take the sit outside lead, Ninja kicking up to hold the 1 back rails,Callabus either pushing for lead or take the 2-2, Spicy Martinee and Jolie star hold the 3 back 1 & 2.
ben barren retweeted
2026 $6M G1 Caulfield Cup runner by runner Preview has dropped.
Luke Murrell @Ausbloodstock provides his unmatched expert insight into the overseas imports and his two runners Wine Dark Sea & Royal Supremacy, including the fallout on barrier 19 and the reasons behind Jamie Spencer being chosen as a rider.
Adam Henwood @ThatQuaddieGuy provides the positive & negative historical profiling stats that matter for each runner.
▶️ Watch the preview: bit.ly/4yZklcU
🎧 Listen on SoundCloud: bit.ly/3VK6skm
🏆 OUR CAULFIELD CUP 2026 FINAL FIELD PREVIEW IS HERE!
Dean Evans @DeanTrialSpy , Luke Murrell @Ausbloodstock and Adam Henwood @ThatQuaddieGuy go through every runner, assess the positive & negative historical profiles, analyse the international runners and share their top selections.
Who looks suited to the 2400 metres at Caulfield? Which runners still have a bit to prove?
▶️ Watch the preview: bit.ly/4yZklcU
🎧 Listen on SoundCloud: bit.ly/3VK6skm
🏆 CAULFIELD CUP TIPPING COMPETITION
WIN A WINNING EDGE INVESTMENTS MEMBERSHIP!
💥 TIP THE CAULFIELD CUP WINNER 💥
Tip the winner to WIN your choice of a Monthly Winning Edge Investments membership worth up to $397.
Become an Active Recurring Member of any Winning Edge Investments membership before the 2026 Caulfield Cup starts and your prize will be upgraded to your choice of a Quarterly Winning Edge Investments membership worth up to $987.
HOW TO ENTER:
➡️ Submit your tips in the comments of this YouTube video, or under our competition posts on Facebook, X or Instagram
➡️ Only 1 tip per race per person/account to be eligible for a prize
➡️ Subscribe to the Winning Edge Investments YouTube channel to qualify
➡️ If entering on social media, follow Winning Edge Investments on the platform where you submit your entry.
⏰ Tips for the Caulfield Cup must be received by 11:59 pm AEDT, Friday 16 October 2026.
#CaulfieldCup2026 #WinningEdgeInvestments
ben barren retweeted
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.
My observations:
1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.
2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.
3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.
4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.
5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.
6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.
They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.
7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.
8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.
Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.
9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.
10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!
11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.
12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.
13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.
14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.
15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.
16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.
17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?
18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.
19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.
20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.
21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.
Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.
Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.
Happy to be home and locked in.
Until next time!
ben barren retweeted
68 runners. No winners. Just four placegetters.
That’s the 🏆 Caulfield Cup record over the past 11 years for horses coming into the race with a last-start rating below 100, adjusted to their Cup weight.
This year, three of the top five chances in the market fit that profile.
🎥 In the video below, I use TopRate to show why their overall rating profiles leave them with such a difficult task, and why I couldn't possibly make a case to back them at current prices.
I also explain why Cosmic Crusader’s ratings make him the rightful favourite and highlight another runner offering value at good odds. 👇