life insurance and digital marketing. @Coversavvy founder, @Bestow_inc, @aura_protects, @Cal alum. The Reuben is the best sandwich.
Austin
Joined March 2009
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That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
AI-generated ads perform roughly as well as human-created ads, unless consumers suspect they were generated by AI.
Researchers from the Technical University of Munich, Columbia Business School, Harvard Business School, and elsewhere analyzed more than 16 billion ad impressions and 116 million clicks from Tabola. In a novel quasi-experiment, they compared the performance of AI-generated and human-generated "sibling ads": ads from the same campaigns, for the same products, and with the same launch dates.
They find that CTR performance for AI-generated ads is statistically "indistinguishable" from human-created ads when controlling for campaign-level factors. But they also reached an equally important conclusion: ads that look AI-generated perform worse.
The researchers identified a set of visual traits that consumers identify as "AI-like," and found that perceived artificiality reduced click-through rates even when the ads were not explicitly flagged as AI-generated. Ironically, the authors find that a not-insignificant number of human-generated ads were perceived as AI-generated for possessing those visual traits.
This is an important result. The cost of creative production through generative AI is decreasing rapidly, especially for static images. But not all AI-generated creative performs equivalently. Teams need to consider an optimization for their AI-enabled workflow beyond mere volume, which is the perceived visual fidelity and provenance of the ads being generated.
Link to paper below. Thanks to @garjoh_canuck for flagging this for me.
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
William is a great reminder that the people who win become obsessed with something very small and stick with it far longer than anyone else.
Enjoy three minutes of him explaining how to become the very best at one thing:
"I'm probably the best in the world at a couple small, boring stuff. I do think the world for builders is the world of specialists. And you have to go extremely, extremely deep into your area and that's where you find value.
One of the best determiners for success of founders is can they find the most boring thing humanly possible, interesting, over a multi-decade period.
How AI is going to disrupt software...These are generalist topics that I can probably find a thousand people that have interesting, compelling ideas and can go pretty deep on that. But you can't create value there.
You can create value if you're the number one person in the entire world at this little niche thing. And I think this niche thing can generate billions of dollars over time.
The problem is those places are really boring and requires you to read hundreds of thousands of pages that you cannot Gemini Deep Research your way through."
.@williamhockey is one of the least visible founders in tech relative to what he has created.
He co-founded Plaid and is now building Column, a software company that owns a bank, and powers Ramp, Wise, Bilt, Mercury, and others. He funded it himself by borrowing against nearly everything he had in Plaid shares, and has never raised any outside capital.
His story matters because so much of the value in our industry gets created through exactly this kind of extreme personal risk. He is maniacal about being the best in the world at his thing, and has spent his entire career betting on himself and doing whatever it takes to win.
He also spends a lot of time outside the US (in places like Kinshasa) which has given him a rare perch on the power of the US dollar.
We discuss:
- Why emerging markets are often the most financially innovative
- What owning 100% of his company allows him to do that VC-backed founders cannot
- Getting margin called and nearly going bankrupt
- Why the best founders are specialists
- What it takes to be the best in the world at your thing
- How Silicon Valley's consensus culture produces consensus founders
- How the US dollar functions as an instrument of national security
Enjoy!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
9:19 Emerging Markets
14:03 Silicon Valley's Elite Consensus Problem
16:03 Rejecting the VC Hamster Wheel
21:45 Equity and Liquidity
26:03 Funding a Bank
29:45 The Necessity of Extreme Founder Risk
37:18 Finding Leverage
45:20 Longevity and Profitability in Banking
48:46 Matching Your Capital Structure to Your Business
51:44 The Unseen Power of the US Dollar
1:02:30 How AI Will Transform Legacy Banks
1:09:23 The Kindest Thing
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
The biggest take off in AI isn’t a lobster, it is that millions of weekly phone calls to confirm trucking loads and appointments that used to be done by overseas call centers and are now done by AI callers.
It flipped in like 12 months.
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
The age of opaque lead sources and blind traffic in financial publishing is over.
Ad networks used to send leads and refused to provide any information about where the leads came from.
This allowed them to get away with shady business practices.
Media buyers are not putting up with that crap anymore.
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
Big news for taxpayers: the Texas Bond, Tax, and Project Database is LIVE!
Now Texans can see exactly how much debt their local governments carry, what bonds voters approved, and how those dollars are being used.
BIG step for transparency and accountability! comptroller.texas.gov/transp…
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
Haus year in review. An exec summary of all the research that we published in 2025. We’ll be talking a lot more about what this means and how to use this to your advantage in 2026.
1. View based channels (YouTube, TikTok, & CTV) are systematically undervalued by click attribution because their impact is delayed and skews omnichannel.
- YouTube is a powerhouse: It drives 3.4x more incremental lift than Google Ads reports.
- Like YouTube, Tiktok builds your funnel and is best viewed as demand creation. It delivers 68% more lift in the post-campaign window as audiences take time to convert and drives 1.9x more value when you account for its impact on Amazon and retail sales.
- CTV has the most delayed return. During big moments like Cyber Week, Connected TV sees efficiency improve by 344% when you account for delayed conversions.
2. Meta is king but beware the automation trap
- Meta remains one of the most reliable sources of incremental performance. 77 of the top 100 highest lift Haus experiments ran on Meta.
- Automated tools are excellent at identifying intent, but they may prioritize capturing cheap, easy conversions over generating new ones.
- Meta Advantage+ vs. Manual: Advantage+ is great for speed, but it over-reports revenue by 12 percentage points compared to Manual campaigns. Manual campaigns frequently deliver higher incremental ROAS because they are less likely to cannibalize existing organic demand.
3. Branded Search & PMAX
Buying your own keywords is often not necessary; it is a defensive tactic that depends on competitive pressure.
- Competition dictates value: Branded search is highly incremental when you have 3+ competitors bidding on your terms. If competition is low, you may be paying for traffic you would get for free organically.
- Sales Channel Shift: Branded search tends to cannibalize your own Amazon sales, shifting that revenue to your DTC site.
- PMAX Brand Exclusions: If your goal is acquiring new customers, you should almost certainly exclude brand terms from Performance Max (PMAX); doing so lowered Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) in 100% of tested cases. However, High-AOV brands (>$238) may need to keep brand terms included to give the algorithm enough signal to work.
4. Black Friday / Cyber Monday and Seasonality
- You may not see immediate payback on ads, especially in the lead up to holidays. That doesn’t mean media is not working.
- For Q4/Cyber Week, consumers add to cart early (early November) and buy later. Brands that ramped spend early saw 75% efficiency improvements when accounting for this lag. Apparel brands saw outsized impact.
- Don't cut a test too early: Cutting spend based on midpoint results runs the risk of "false negatives." Run longer tests and adding a Post-Treatment Window (PTW) that runs through your sale period to see the full payback.
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
If you have any doubts about who Prop Q benefits, the love Austin pac (pro prop q) campaign financial statement is out and it is chock full NGO'S trying to save their grifts.
Donation highlights: ECHO $25k
Foundation communities $25k
@KirkPWatson PAC $20k
Sunrise homeless center $5k
The Other ones Foundation $10k
@chitovela3 $1k #atxcouncil #txlege
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
Airbnb uses a fascinating, composite approach to measure the lifetime value (LTV) of listings.
First, they start with an estimate of the number of bookings they expect that listing to receive in the next 365 days. This is a rolling estimate that is updated over time.
Then, they adjust that prediction by the number of bookings that listing might cannibalize, meaning: the bookings that listing might take from other listings in a zero-sum fashion versus incrementally new bookings that wouldn't occur absent its presence on the platform. This is the core of the estimate and distinguishes it from naive LTV estimation approaches. Airbnb determines this with a value function that takes into account various features of the local supply/demand dynamic. This is "Incremental LTV."
Finally, they modify the LTV prediction by incorporating the value of a broad range of marketing efforts that may enhance listing appeal. One example could be interventions with Airbnb owners that improve their booking rates, but this also might include product improvements to things like Search or Recommendations.
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
All the things wrong with Austin’s new “brand”
1) “We are launching our first-ever brand, aimed at improving our engagement with + service to Austinites.”
Marketing 101: A brand is not a logo. It’s the narrative, values, and feeling that a company, city, etc. evokes, expressed through a logo, stories, and assets. Slapping a new logo on everything does not improve engagement.
2) The logo is just not visually appealing.
3) “Austin City Council voted in 2018 to make developing a cohesive brand for the City a strategic priority.” Seven years of work for this?!
4) As City Council demands a massive tax increase, they're spending $1.1M on this. Priorities are out of whack, or, better yet, we see what the real priorities are.
5) If a rebrand is so important, crowdsource it and let the public pick. Way more cost efficient, effective, and it would create real community buy-in.
Austin’s brand is what you feel on the streets, what we build, and the story that carries past our walls. Focus there, not on a $1M grift.
We are launching our first-ever brand, aimed at improving our engagement with + service to Austinites.👏
👉 Learn more: bit.ly/47sKZA9
📌 AustinTexas.gov/AustinBrand
(1/4)
ALT City of Austin Logo
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
The City of Austin needs to reverse course on this gawd forsaken.
Council needs tell City Management to go back to the drawing board.
#txlege
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
It seems like there is not enough of a policy response to the fact that, with 57M miles of data, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles experience 85% less serious injuries & 79% less injuries overall than cars with human drivers.
2.4 million are injured & 40k killed in US accidents a year
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
.@Uber just sued LA’s biggest billboard lawyer @JacobEmrani under RICO
The allegations read like a Netflix crime doc:
A fender bender
No injuries reported to police
One week later
Spine surgery
Total bill: 556,000 dollars
Client was dancing and singing on social media while supposedly recovering
Surgery still billed at $246,000
Internal email from surgery center
"Patient is authorized… Defendant was an Uber driver… BI policy limit is $1 million… schedule the patient asap"
Another client reported 0 out of 10 pain
Still recommended $530,000 in future surgeries
One man flew home to St. Louis the same day as a minor crash
Months later, surgeon paid for his flights and hotel to return for unnecessary surgery
Medical coordinator wrote
"Patient might be a bit confused due to so many different appointments arranged"
A client testified
He never paid the surgeon
Never saw an invoice
Never knew he was behind on payments
Uber calls it fraud
Fake injuries
Fake bills
Fake care
Real payouts
According to Uber
45% of every ride in LA goes to insurance
And a huge chunk of that is allegedly funding this racket
If this sticks
These lawyers are facing prison
And the billboard companies cashing in on their ads might want to lawyer up too
Federal complaint filed July 21
Defendants are presumed innocent
But the evidence is jaw-dropping
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
As crazy as it is, Austin continues to lead the nation in home prices decreases.
It’s been quite the correction, wonder when we will hit the bottom.
November 2024: 7 of the nation's 50 largest metro area housing markets (14%) had falling year-over-year home prices
February 2025: 12 of 50 (24%)
April 2024: 20 of 50 (40%)
May 2025: 22 of 50 (44%)
June 2025: 25 of 50 (50%)
Chart via @ResidentialClub
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
Want to know why those other countries have lower brand drugs prices than us ?
They don't have PBMs. We are the ONLY country that uses PBMs.
Insane
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
It's a very bad signal for progressivism's future that they're teaching degrowth slop to their young generation.
A whole generation of progressives will grow up thinking that *destroying the economy* should be the goal of public policy.
This is how @Columbia's "Contemporary Civilization" course ends. A nice illustration of the lopsidedness of almost all humanities curricula— promising "a wide range of perspectives" and then excluding all unapproved perspectives
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
The test:
• 25,650 users
• Same landing page
• Only difference? “Made in China” at $129 vs. “Made in USA” at $239
That One Guy MG💡📈 retweeted
The most underrated blog in existence related to ecommerce is MineThatData by Kevin Hillstrom.
