Exploring the golf improvement process. Open Forum cofounder. Tax Firm Owner (CPA). dad of 3 vb players. startups. side hustles. equity comp tax expert
San Francisco, CA
Joined December 2009
- Tweets35.3K
- Following5.8K
- Followers5.3K
- Likes9.4K
Nick Chertock retweeted
To my fellow #TaxTwitter compatriots:
The October 15th offensive has officially ended.
We’ve survived on caffeine, rage, and an unreasonable amount of profanity.
Today, we emerge from our bunkers and reacquaint ourselves with sunlight.
Nick Chertock retweeted
EY is paying employees up to $25,000 to catch their own AI's mistakes.
They’re calling it a bonus for "human checks". But let's call it what it is: a bounty program for AI slop. This comes right after all four Big Four firms faced major incidents involving fabricated AI citations in their consulting divisions.
We talk about it on Episode 504 of The Accounting Podcast: youtube.com/live/s2wn65xfdsE…
Nick Chertock retweeted
The visual model is evolving nicely. Can’t wait to use it to show #golf impact concepts in 3D.
Follow @adamyounggolf
And if you really like nerdy golf topics, get my “7 Advanced Ways to Improve Your Golf” webinar here - adamyounggolf.com/prm-7-adva…
Nick Chertock retweeted
Psychologist’s Occum’s Razor: the simple explanation is usually the correct diagnosis.
Nick Chertock retweeted
incredible spontaneous saxophone performance from Nathanial Young at the Palace of Fine Arts yesterday, hundreds of people showed up to listen quietly. tons of kids and families out… shut down by the cops after 30 minutes. no fun allowed! so infuriating
Nick Chertock retweeted
Lucy Chertock and Rachel Grier of UNH Women's Volleyball have been named to the Preseason All-Conference Team!
🔗 to press release ➡️ unh.short.gy/2HpVel
#BeTheRoar
Nick Chertock retweeted
Incredible change for one of my students here
Before - Left image
After - Right image
Now, I'll be up front with you... This is at about 25% speed. BUT, It shows me he understands the feel, the look, the movement that we are looking to move towards
When I'm working with players, If we are working on a change, you MUST show me you can perform the movement down speed. If you can't do it slow, you most definitely won't be able to do it fast
Now I know he can do the movement, we can now focus on ramping up the speed
Learning new techniques is important, but learning "how to learn" is important too, & most golfers have no idea how to learn a new motor pattern
If you want to learn, DM me & let's get started with a program 👊
Nick Chertock retweeted
Michael Jordan talks to Steph Curry about his golf obsession.
Pro athletes are figuring this out. Many used to be lost after retirement, but now they take up golf and the competitive fires are quenched.
MJ conquered basketball. But he can’t beat golf.
Nick Chertock retweeted
My wife and I own Forest Park Pharmacy, and we don't accept insurance. None of it. That decision is exactly why we could fix what happened to a patient today.
A family came in wanting to transfer their kid's antibiotic to us. The child had already STARTED the course. Then, mid-treatment, the insurance company decided the last 14 tablets suddenly needed a "prior authorization" before the other pharmacy could hand them over. A sick kid, halfway through an antibiotic, and the answer was "please hold."
The drug is linezolid. It's a generic. It's been generic for over a decade. It treats serious gram-positive infections — the kind you do NOT want to stop antibiotics in the middle of, because an interrupted course is how you breed resistant bugs and end up right back where you started.
So why the hold-up on a cheap, common generic? Follow the fake math.
Insurance and the PBMs behind them price drugs off a number called AWP — "Average Wholesale Price." People in my industry have another name for it: "Ain't What's Paid." It's a benchmark number, not a real-world cost. On paper, the AWP for just those last 14 tablets is about $2,500.
My cash price for the same 14 tablets? $18.
Read that again. The system that's supposedly "protecting" this family from cost is the same system that inflated an $18 medication into a $2,500 line item, then slapped a prior auth on it to "review the expense" THEY invented. They manufactured the problem, then billed everyone for the privilege of solving it — and made a sick kid wait while they did it.
This is the whole game. When a drug is priced honestly, there's nothing to "manage." When it's priced off a fantasy benchmark, you get spread pricing, PA paperwork, pharmacy phone trees, and delayed treatment — all dressed up as cost control.
Here's the part nobody tells you: roughly 90% of prescriptions are low-cost generics. For the vast majority of what people pick up every day, running it through insurance does two things — raises the real cost and risks delaying your care. That's it. That's the value-add.
That's why we fired the insurance companies. No middleman deciding your kid can't finish their antibiotics on schedule. No fake prices. Just the real number, on the shelf, today.
The medication was always cheap. The insurance was the expensive part.
Nick Chertock retweeted
AI is having its moment in the accounting and tax world. I love It and am here for it, but arguably the bigger conversation is the one happening around it: Section 7216, client confidentiality, and the rest of the regulatory considerations.
The unfortunate truth is that no clear-cut guidance exists today. AI is new, and a lot of the existing regulatory framework simply hasn't been updated to address it fully.
Which is exactly why I'm excited to announce that I'm joining Rebecca (@RDriscollCPA) and Michael (@michaelcutajar ) at the AI Lab for Accountants (ailabforaccountants.com).
I share their mission, which is to build a community of AI-native accountants and tax pros who leverage AI safely, responsibly, and appropriately. Not only to give us back some of our time as professionals, but to elevate the service we provide to our clients.
The AI Lab is meant to be a place where accountants, wherever they are in their AI journey, can come to learn, grow, and develop. While also empowering them to use these tools, vet them, and build the confidence to use them well, even though the regulatory guidance hasn't caught up yet
But it's important to be honest: we don't have all the answers, and we'll never claim to. What we're doing is working hard to fill the gap that exists today. We're constantly reaching out to the people inside the regulatory bodies, the IRS, the AICPA, and our own state societies, urging them to address AI more clearly so the rest of us can use it confidently and appropriately in our work.
We just released our newest tool, the Safe Use Planner. We took everything we've learned so far and built it into something that helps you navigate using AI safely and get your firm set up to do it right: safe-use-planner.ailabforacc…
To be clear about what we are building: a place to learn and develop, not a source of truth or law. Filling that gap isn't ours to do, but we feel it's our duty to do everything we can to help close it.
We're revamping the AI Lab for Accountants site to reflect this mission, and there's much more coming.
If you're trying to become an AI-native accountant, come join us for the journey. It's going to be a lot of fun.
Nick Chertock retweeted
This is the easiest way to show you the simplified MATCHUP between body rotation & shaft pitch.
The steeper you are, the more you have to tilt in order to get the club back in position. If you try rotating instead, you’ll get way too steep on it.
The shallower you are, the more you need to rotate in order to get the club back into position. If you try tilting, you’ll get stuck way underneath and will suffer from all sorts of low point and contact issues.
This is a big reason why being shallower is specifically better for golfers who want to rotate more through the shot. Enjoy! 🤙
Nick Chertock retweeted
I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.
I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.
My takeaways:
1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.
2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.
3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)
4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.
5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million
6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.
7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.
8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.
9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.
10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.
11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.
12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.
13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.
14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....
15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.
16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.
17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.
It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.
But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.
We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.
What an incredible time to be building.
Nick Chertock retweeted
If you haven't tried a meeting AI assistant yet, here's your sign (and a free month).
Paid partnership with Ping Assistant.
I'm calling Ping a Productivity Advisory Assistant. Yes, a brand new term.
After testing it out in my own firm, the most interesting part of Ping wasn’t even the notetaking.
It was seeing how AI can help organize information, surface ideas, reduce admin friction, help firms operate more effectively, and make more money.
Here's my in depth video going over all the features in Ping!
Check out the link in the comments to get a FREE MONTH of Ping.
Nick Chertock retweeted
Do you want to know how to increase COMPRESSION in your #golf shots.
This thread🧵 explains how 👇👇👇
Bookmark 📑 this, and follow me
@adamyounggolf
Nick Chertock retweeted
Today, we’re announcing Viktor’s $75M Series A, led by @Accel .
@viktor_com was supposed to be a small experiment.
It became the AI coworker 10x'ing real businesses.
$15M in annualized revenue run rate. In 10 weeks.
– Small companies saving millions of dollars
– Sourcing hundreds of thousands in new revenue in their first 30 days
– Whole teams getting half their week back
– Companies running 40% leaner without cutting output
Viktor is not another AI tool.
It’s the first true AI employee.
The vision that has been with us since 2023 when we started the company has finally been shipped.
Back then, it was just the two of us, with a very small but dedicated team, iterating for years. Failing multiple times.
Showing products that users didn't even want to test!
But we never gave up.
Our decisions were often wrong. Certainly more often than not! We kept trying.
Now we’ve shipped something people love.
Worth every sleepless night. Every sacrifice.
The best employees don’t need to be told what to do.
Neither does Viktor.
Grateful to @Accel, our team, our earliest users, and everyone who believed this category could be bigger than chat.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Viktor operates a creator program paying users up to $2000 per promotional post on X that includes real product screenshots, with no requirement to disclose the payment. getviktor.com/creators
