“The wise man does at the start what the fool does at the end.”

-Howard Marks, (Second Greatest Investor of All Time)

(full post available here)

Warren Buffett Helped Me Go VIRAL Last Week :)!

Last week I published an article on X with tons of my favorite quotes from Buffett and other iconic investors.

It took me months of collecting (across books, online, interviews)

But actually, months.

So to see….

23,000 views and 98 people who ‘bookmarked’ my article….

….to re-read later, feels good.

We’ve got something even greater today……

But first…

Hey, I’m Don!

I LOVE INVESTING. If you do too, then stop, and subscribe below.

If you hate investing, probably should also subscribe and I’ll teach you to love it ;)

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Between 2015 until 2025 I networked with 100’s of incredibly cool people, both in person while living in San Francisco, and London, as well as virtually (re-watch our convo’s here).

Now in 2026, I’m building an institutional grade investment fund on top of a fully proprietary AI platform. We’ll be going live to @ThoughtfulCapLP with the fund thesis! (Website launching June 1st).

Thank you for engaging!

The most wise thing anyone responded to me on X with this week, was from @BigIdeasCapital on X

His point was around having survived the pivot from CD’s to Cloud.

He wisely states that the pivot from CD to Cloud is different than Cloud to AI because the prior was more a difference in distribution, whereas the latter is a fundamental difference in product.

That is very smart, and I totally agree. ADBE needs to revamp an entire new product suite with AI.

But, taking it a step further. We see that was founded in 1980’s… and started with printing software. Moving from clunky enterprise printing software to a consumer friendly CD.. now that is as big of a shift as AI.

So I appreciated him commenting and making me go deeper on my thesis.

ALSO → Shoutout Sean, Alex Stetson, Wolfe, Ken MacPherson, and The Polite Investor for showing me tons of love on X this week!

This year, I set the goal to publish a thoughtful blog every Monday.. 52 of them! Don’ Daily is a recap of the entrepreneurship adventures I collect, as well as the new lessons I’m constantly learning from investing.

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Read our article on X with a built-in audio AI bot that summarizes it for you!

I’m Traveling Today (again!)

On the road again! Another AirBNB adventure, this time to the East Coast of Florida.

I’m meeting with one of my investors!

(this email will be sent out 48 minutes after that meeting starts!)

So I’m actually in it right now!

It’s been an absolute honor working together over the years, I’m thankful he’s supporting me in this new fund I’m building, and I hope I’m enjoying the coffee.

AI Stock Software

I don’t know if I’ve ever worked this hard on something over a stretch of 7 days.

From Friday night at 10 PM (March 24th), thru May 2nd, I have not stopped.

I haven’t shaved, have barely showered, haven’t been to gym.

I’m eating extremely healthy, like Steve Jobs healthy. Just plain ground turkey and veggies.

Plus my usual eggs and sausage, plus toast, every AM.

So I’m not feeling unhealthy, quite the opposite, I feel like I’m so zoned in, and my fuel tank is full.

I’ve felt like my fuel tank has been full nearly 24/7 since last Friday.

I’ve fallen asleep twice in the past seven nights while coding.

I woke up with Claude sending me a finished build to test, and my dog laying next to me.

Here’s a sneak preview:

If you know Buffett, and you know the Margin of Safety concept (explained below), then you can see what I’m doing.

We’re using AI to re-create Buffett’s investment style :)

Think like Buffett, become Buffett.

~Don

Leave a comment

Great quote.

Let it sink in for a second. The man who helped build one of the greatest investment empires in history is not kicking himself over missed billions or missed headlines. He is kicking himself over missed wisdom. That is the whole game in one sentence.

Get rich slow, and in a way that prevents the risk of losing principle.

The TLDR is brutally simple for making good investments:

Margin of Safety.

Look hard, and say no.

But harder to do so, as most people don’t have the patience to get rich slow.

For investing, the number one thing I want burned into my brain when the market is screaming at me is this: you know nothing. Nobody does. If you ever feel 100 percent sure you are going the right direction, you have already failed the test. That is the discipline.

G.K. Chesterton nailed the feeling better than anyone: “The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”

That is the market in a single paragraph. It looks orderly until it bites you.

Nobody knows anything, including me. You know nothing. Nobody does. Everything is an opportunity. Everything is a risk. Everything is both.

True professional investing is not about predicting the future. It is about not losing money while the future unfolds, often in ways that make fools of us all. You go slow. You keep taking in new information. You adjust. You treat every hour like you are driving cross-country with no GPS, no map, and no idea what is around the next bend. You pull over. You ask directions. You listen. Then you drive again until the next thoughtful voice tells you something better.

Howard Marks said it with his usual calm clarity: “We never know where we’re going. But we better know where we are. Find your comfortable speedometer number out of 100, and try to be there as much as possible.”

I am just going to do the simple thing.

Warren Buffett put it even plainer: “Everyone has ideas here and there, usually the simplest is the best.”

David Swensen summed up the entire profession in one line: “Investment success follows most reliably from pursuing value-based strategies.”

The One Rule to Rule Them All

First rule, follow me on X 😀

But no, THERE IS ONLY ONE thing that matters most in investing. It is non-negotiable. Without it you are not an investor. You are a gambler. That thing is margin of safety.

This game will embarrass you right when you start thinking it is easy. Do not celebrate. Ever. The moment you feel too smart, too smooth, too certain, that is the exact moment the market is warming up its biggest punch. It is the calm before the storm. It is the pre-wave before the shock. It lulls you into complacency and then it destroys you.

We’ll dive into all 14 Principles, with extensive quote reference below.

But first…

Hey, I’m Don! I’ve been building career memories for a decade. Over the last three years I’ve been reinvesting my own capital and time back it into my business. All the while learning and growing my net worth via public markets and crypto.

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Thanks for reading Don’s Daily! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Over that same period, I also hosted 50+ virtual events with some of the world’s best VC investors and founders for our CEO group. Prior to all that, aside from my first job at Meta, I was lucky enough to raise $10 million in my twenties; doing my best to learn business, investor relations, and the startup mindset all at the same time. Maybe some of you can relate.

Welcome our new Subscribers!

(Cough… Aw… no new subscribers this week.. oh well! I do it for the love of the game.)

This year, I set the goal to publish a thoughtful blog every Monday.. 52 of them! Don’ Daily is a recap of the entrepreneurship adventures I collect, as well as the new lessons I’m constantly learning from doing. My hope is that this entertains, inspires, and influences new creative ideas for you. Every Monday. If you enjoy the blog, please share!

You can share this post or read it on X with a built-in audio AI bot that summarizes it for you!

14 Principles To Keep You In The Game

Here is where the ride gets fun, because these are not dry rules. These are battle-tested, often profane, sometimes hilarious truths from the people who actually survived the market’s worst moods.

Principle 1: Epistemic Humility – You Know Nothing, Stay Nimble

Any arrogant approach of thinking you know what is best for someone else is probably not a great idea.

Shit happens. You are not perfect. Roger Federer only won 54 percent of his points but 80 percent of his matches. The best just show up enough times to put themselves in position for the game-winners. Michael Jordan missed over 9,000 shots but made more than 25 game-winners. You have to get back up, keep grinding. Every 0.1 percent is an edge. You only need a tiny edge over 50/50 odds across a long enough period to become iconic.

Howard Marks was blunt: “Recognize that mistakes are inevitable. The important thing is that the investor recognizes a mistake quickly, accurately diagnoses its cause and does not repeat it.”

Don was even blunter: “Doing more of what works. Doing less of what didn’t work. Don’t sweat it, you fucked up, just start doing more of what works day by day. Write out a schedule of a week, each day doing more of what works. Just force yourself to do it. This is up to you. Nobody can save you.”

Howard Marks broke it down into three classic mistakes investors make. First, thinking you understand what the future holds. Second, assuming the world will stay exactly the way it is right now. Third, letting your emotions drive the bus instead of your checklist.

Peter Bernstein said it like a philosopher: “Essentially, risk says we don’t know what’s going to happen. We walk every moment into the unknown. There’s a range of outcomes, and we don’t know where the actual outcome is going to fall within that range. Often we don’t know what the range is. Aka. We know nothing. Stay nimble.”

Howard Marks again: “Forecasting is not valuable. We don’t know what’s gonna happen, and randomness will play a role.”

Keynes warned about the “dark forces of time and ignorance” that cloud the future and make even the most thoughtful estimates unreliable.

In markets you need two things, Marks said: “a view of what you think is going to happen, and a view on the probability that you are right.”

Charlie Munger’s famous line still stings: “If something is too hard, we move on to something else. What could be simpler than that?”

Stay hyper-aware, but only of things that live in the easy bucket. If it is too hard, hyper-awareness will eat your entire life. Find the things that are not too hard and stay on top of those.

Principle 2: Get Rich SLOW – Do Not Lose Money, Leave Some on the Table

Make money equals raise money.

Jeff Bezos knew the math: long-term wealth always beats fast money.

Warren Buffett was crystal clear: “The philosophy requires patience. Which a lot of people don’t have. People would rather be promised they’ll win a lottery ticket next week than they’re going to get rich slowly. Be long term greedy, not short term greedy.”

Charlie Munger warned: “The desire to get rich fast is pretty dangerous.”

Buffett again: “You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”

Munger loved this one: “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be intelligent.”

If all you ever did was buy high-quality stocks on the 200-week moving average, you would beat the S&P 500 by a large margin over time, Munger said. The problem is almost nobody has that discipline.

This deliberate slowness keeps you from spinning out around the corner you never saw coming.

Charlie Munger called the whole process: “Extreme patience combined with extreme decisiveness. You may call that our investment process. Yes, it’s that simple.”

Warren Buffett: “You have to make very, very few right investing decisions in your life.”

Munger again: “If you’re just not crazy, you have a big advantage over 95 percent of people. If you’re just consistently not crazy, you get a big advantage in life. It’s so simple. Why don’t more people do it?”

Buffett’s punch-card thought experiment is legendary: “Don’t risk what you have and need to get what you don’t have and don’t need. If everyone has a punch card with 20 punches. Each one was a major financial decision in your life. Everyone would be rich because they’d make damn sure those are good bets.”

Munger loved watching Buffett do nothing when there was nothing to do.

At Berkshire they tried to do less, not more. They never thought they could know everything. They just worked hard enough to find a few things where they were right, and that was enough.

Gradualism is a virtue in itself. Substantial uncertainty surrounds the asset allocation process, Graham reminded us.

Charlie Munger in 2018: “In America they call it long attention span. They can keep their mind on a game for a long time until they’ve solved it. The world is full of foolish gamblers and they will not do as well as the patient investor.”

Deciding to make radical changes based on shaky data is just putting too much weight on a shaky foundation.

Buffett again: “If you’ve got 150 IQ and you’re in my business, go sell 20 or 30 points to somebody else because you really don’t need it. You need emotional stability.”

“I’d rather be 100 times cautious than 1 percent too incautious.”

“Don’t swing at every pitch. Wait for yours.”

You should feel like you are moving so slowly that your own mind thinks you are moving too slow.

One of the hardest things in life is for a man to sit in a room and do nothing.

Larry’s version was shorter: Survive and advance.

Principle 3: Value Investing Discipline – Buy Below Fair Value, Then Be Patient

Warren Buffett: “Stocks sell at silly prices from time to time, that’s how I got rich.”

“People behave in extreme ways in markets. Over time, that’s very good for people who keep their heads.”

His greatest lesson: NEVER CHASE. If an exceptional company trades at insane prices, do not buy it. Wait for an exceptional company at a reasonable price. Then go all in. If you cannot find it, wait.

Howard Marks explained the real secret: “How do you make money as an investor? The people who don’t know think the way you do it is by buying good assets. Good building, stock in a good company. Something like that. That is not the secret for success. The secret for success in investing is buying things for less than they’re worth.”

I want to get paid MORE for my risk. Not less.

Buffett on the ideal business: “The ideal business is one that earns very high returns on capital and that keeps using lots of capital at those high returns. That becomes a compounding machine.”

“The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business.”

“You can turn a good business into a bad investment if you pay too much for it.”

Common sense is the guiding light. Howard Marks again: “When you buy the S&P 500 at a 23x P/E, your 10-yr annualized return has always fallen between +2 percent and –2 percent, IN EVERY CASE, EVERY CASE!”

Principle 4: Anti-Momentum, Contrarian Behavior – Fish Where the Fish Are

Charlie Munger: “Fish where the fish are. You want to fish where the bargains are. It’s that simple. If the fishing is really lousy where you are, you should probably look for another place to fish. We all do better hunting when we hunt where the hunting is easy.”

Markets move to extremes. High prices for the popular. Low prices for the out-of-favor. That is where the money lives.

Pabrai: “Wall Street gets confused between risk and uncertainty. In fact, when Wall Street gets confused between the two is where the greatest opportunities arise.”

Jeremy Grantham: “Reversion to mean constitutes the most powerful force in financial markets.”

Buffett: “Innovator, then imitator, then idiot.”

Howard Marks: “The wise man does at the start what the fool does at the end.”

Scott Bessent: “The crowd is right 80-85 percent of the time. And that’s the momentum. But it’s when things turn, or you can imagine a different outcome, is when you can really make a lot of money. Most of my big successes have been taking the other side of a weak opinion.”

Larry Ellison: “You have to find errors in unconventional wisdom.”

Ben Horowitz: “Any fact anyone knows has a half life.”

Note to self: You are naturally contrarian, which means you are usually right at the opposite end of the cycle, but you are typically early. So move slowly in action, fast in thought. Maintain a long attention span. Write things down. Believe your gut and hold it.

Charlie Munger on formulas: “If you want a formula, you should go back to graduate school. They will give you lots of formulas that won’t work.”

Warren Buffett: “The stock market is the most obliging, money-making place in the world. Because you don’t have to trade. You can wait for a good deal. It’s a marvelous game. The rules are stacked in your favor.”

The Little Blue Book that Beats the Market described Mr. Market perfectly: On some days he is in a great mood and offers you way too much for your shares. Sell to him. On other days he is depressed and offers to sell you shares for far less than they are worth. Buy from him.

Contrarian behavior is at the heart of success, but human nature craves the safety of the crowd.

Phil Fisher: “Have the moral courage to act against the crowd when your judgment tells you that you are right.”

Declines sow the seeds of future purchases.

Buffett again: “When the price of a stock can be influenced by a herd on Wall Street with prices set at the margins by the most emotional persons, or the greediest, or the most depressed, it is hard to argue that the market always prices rationally. In fact, market prices are frequently nonsensical.”

The attractively priced, out-of-favor strategy beats the highly valued alternative every time.

Most investors feel safe in the mainstream. Only a rare few operate outside it consistently.

Charlie Munger: “A few, rare opportunities will come. You got to learn how to recognize them. Opportunity doesn’t come often, so seize it when it comes.”

In the face of overwhelming consensus, successful contrarians turn a deaf ear.

Establishing the position is only half the battle. The other half is not losing your nerve.

Travis Kalanack: “What separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”

Principle 5: Simplicity – Keep It Simple, Never Sell Quality, Most Things Go in the Too-Hard Pile

Charlie Munger: “The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting.”

Time does what timing cannot.

Warren Buffett: “The main thing to do is buy into a wonderful business and just sit there with it.”

Warren Buffett and Munger: “We leaned very much towards things where we felt certain to get a decent result, rather than where we were hopeful to get a brilliant result.”

Howard Marks on amateur tennis: “It’s like amateur tennis. It’s about not hitting losers, the winners don’t need to be hit. They just happen if you don’t hit losers. In tennis, if you’re pro you win by hitting winners. If you’re amateur you win by not hitting losers.”

There will always be more to learn than you can truly understand. Do your best turning over every stone you can.

Jensen on Musk: “The first is deletion.” Huang added: “He has the ability to question everything to the point where everything’s down to its minimal amount. Most engineers solve problems by adding. Musk solves them by subtracting. Every part. Every process. Every assumption that survived because no one had the nerve to kill it. He picks it up. Asks if it’s load-bearing. If the answer is anything less than absolutely, it is gone.”

Principle 6: Conviction and Sizing – Stick to Policy, Do Not Sell Quality

A thoughtful portfolio management process ensures funds only accept risks that match the targets and promise enough reward.

KNOW what you own. This becomes critical in downturns. And there will be downturns.

Peter Lynch: “If you can’t explain to an 11-year-old in a minute or less why you own a particular stock, you shouldn’t own it and should just buy a fund instead.”

You did all that work, so trust your gut.

Warren Buffett: “Big opportunities in life have to be seized. You won’t get many of them in your lifetime.”

Stanley Druckenmiller: “It’s not whether you’re right or wrong, it’s how much you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.”

MSFT CEO: “Be bold. But be right.”

David Swensen: “Most portfolios work well with around a half a dozen asset classes, but careful investors define asset classes in terms of risk function.”

“My advantage is not IQ. It’s ‘trigger pulling,’” said Stanley Druckenmiller.

Buffett: “The most extreme mistakes we’ve made are mistakes of omission. It’s the things I knew enough to do; they were within my circle of competence, and I was sucking my thumb.”

Brandon: “Be thoughtful that the things you know aren’t mainstream, and EACH person has a unique cocktail mix of information that stirs their drink. Your information is unique when combined with other unique info, hard earned, and generates an individual perspective. To what degree is the real question? And for how long until it becomes mainstream reality is the second.”

Charlie Munger: “I never allow myself to hold an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.”

CNBC Guest: “He who knows only his side, his side of the case, knows little of that.”

Charlie Munger: “The goal of investment is to find situations where it is safe not to diversify.”

Recognize that the investment universe contains very few truly outstanding companies, and opportunities to buy them occur very infrequently. Concentrate your attention and funds in the most desirable opportunities.

Charlie Munger: “We tend to go in heavily when a great investment opportunity presents itself. For many, many months, we were buying as much Coca-Cola as we could buy — roughly one-third of the volume trading every day for months. We were very aggressive.”

Buy with gusto when conditions are unfavorable or others misperceive true worth.

Charlie Munger: “Opportunities in life are going to be rare because that’s the nature of the human condition. The best and wisest are only going to get a few big opportunities — and you really have to step up to the pie counter and take a big helping when you get the chance.”

I buy when I know I should but I don’t want to. Much better than buying when I know I shouldn’t but I want to. That is value versus momentum.

“I’m only interested in investing if I have some sort of advantage. Which means I can’t do the conventional things. And if I have an advantage of 3 different things, that’s enough for any family,” Munger said.

Principle 7: Process Over Emotion – Checklists, Memos, Measured Iteration

Fast shortcuts create biases. Sloppy management follows.

Warren Buffett said that in 60 years at Berkshire, only 12 decisions moved the needle. That is one good idea every five years.

Checklists are not optional. They are how you survive.

“Act only after you have collected sufficient information and have thoroughly evaluated a situation,” Phil Fisher said.

Stanley Druckenmiller: “I’ve always loved to play games, and face it, investing is one big game. You need to be decisive, open-minded, flexible and competitive.”

“Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great,” John D. Rockefeller said.

Peter Lynch: “You look dumb in this business. You are terrific in this business if you are right 6.5 times out of 10. That’s a great score. Even if you are right 5 times out of 10, if you own Costco or Walmart or Nvidia that offsets your mistakes.”

Time is the friend of a wonderful business and the enemy of a lousy one.

Pabrai: “Quality over quantity in decision-making. Great investment opportunities are rare. Have your capital working in a reliable compounder like Berkshire, which combines reasonable returns and safety. Meanwhile, scan for more asymmetric opportunities for smaller investors.”

“The best time to buy stocks is when you don’t feel like buying,” Parag Parikh said.

Warren Buffett: “I would still be buying stocks even if World War III broke out.”

Buffett’s checklist is simple: businesses he understands, consistent profits, strong competitive advantages, trustworthy management, fair valuation. Avoid speculation. Focus on long-term value and patience.

Carter’s car story is the perfect framework. A good investment is one where you said no to a lot of offers and looked really hard. A bad investment is one where you did not look hard and said yes in the moment.

Principle 8: Independence and Freedom – Money for Free Time, Not Things

The ultimate success in investing is being able to sleep peacefully, do what you want, and feel relaxed. You need to know why you own something, both at the individual level and the portfolio level.

Warren Buffett: “You really want to go along with the idea that if you’re going to take a trip for 20 years, you wouldn’t feel bad leaving no orders with your broker, and you know when you come back it’s going to be a strong company. If it’s only going to be a great company for 3 years, it ain’t a great company. I think it’s better just to own them. They’re too hard to find. We could attempt to buy and sell, but they’re too hard to find. So to sit there and hope you buy them in the throes of some panic, I’m not sure that will be a great technique. You never get the full benefit of those extremes anyways. I think the main thing to do is find wonderful businesses.”

Waking up with no alarm is a real luxury.

“Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich, not because I wanted Ferraris. I wanted independence. I desperately wanted it,” Charlie Munger said.

Don was honest: “I made money not because I wanted to make money, but because I did not want to work. That’s why I wanted money, freedom from working. Freedom from my weekly community tasks. 100 percent full control over my time. So wanting money didn’t stem from wanting money, it stemmed from a pain in my life that I needed to solve. Wanting 100 percent of MY time to be MY time.”

At the bottom of a bear market you have to drag people to the altar to buy stocks. They will be cheap. That is where they make the most money. Ted Oakley said it best: at those moments you say this company will make X over the next five years, and if you had all the money in the world you would buy the whole company right now.

You have to pick winners and losers. Once you pick the winner you are okay.

Principle 9: FOMO versus FOME – Fear of Moving Early, Patience Over Impulsiveness

Have to be okay with missing things and sticking to policy. Dad said: “If you never own a CRM, then you never own a CRM, what can I tell ya. Like in real estate, don’t fall in love with your work. Don’t say to yourself ‘I did all this work on CRM, blah blah, but it isn’t hitting my price, I’ve got to make things happen.’ You can’t get sucked in. If you don’t buy it, or buy a little, and it goes up then oh well. There are 5K stocks, you’re looking at them every day, you’re finding them.”

Are we leaning risk on or risk off right now?

Warren Buffett: “I did miss the boat on tech stocks, but I don’t mind missing boats that I don’t know enough to captain. I don’t have to understand everything. I just have to be right about the things that I do.”

FOMO disappears when you remove time as a factor and make it infinite. There is plenty of time. Warren Buffett missed tech and still made 100 billion on Apple.

Have to be okay missing stuff and sticking to policy.

Principle 10: Momentum is a Feature – Be Prepared for Sudden Endings

Richard Bookstaber: “The general rule of thumb is that every financial market experiences one or more daily price moves of four standard deviations or more each year. And in any year, there is usually at least one market that has a daily move that is greater than ten standard deviations.”

Howard Marks: “96 percent of financial history has occurred over 2 standard deviations. But everything interesting has happened outside of 2 standard deviations.”

Since 1950 the average drawdown in the S&P 500 has been 14 percent in a calendar year. Drawdowns of at least 10 percent happened in 37 of the past 75 years. 20 percent plus corrections happened in 11 of those years. 30 percent plus in 4. You get one or two big opportunities per decade. You never know when they are coming. That is when the big money is made. The greatest opportunity is always at the depths of uncertainty.

Becky said the markets just had a significant decline. Buffett replied: “Not significant. I’m not in this to make 5 percent.”

Peter Lynch: “What you learn from history is that the market goes down. The market has had 50 declines of 10 percent or more, about once every two years, the market falls 10 percent. We call that a correction. Of those 50 declines, 15 have been 20 percent or more, a bear market. So every 6 years the markets are going to have a 20 percent decline. If you’re not ready for that, you shouldn’t own stocks. It’s good when that happens. And, no one knows when they’re going to happen. Take advantage of the volatility if you understand what you own. You have plenty of time. People are in an unbelievable rush to buy a stock.”

“We can’t always buy the stocks that go up. I wish we could. But obviously we can’t know. And the stocks that go up also go down. And they can go down ferociously, violently. And that’s a feature of stocks. Not a bug,” Chris Mayer said.

If an investor avoids the flavor of the month over and over but eventually gives in, it is usually at the exact peak of hype. That is when returns are minimal.

“Stocks are SAFE for the long run and very unsafe for tomorrow,” Warren Buffett said.

“The stock market will do whatever it has to do to embarrass the greatest number of people to the great extent possible,” Walter Deemer said. That is Deemer’s Law of Perversity.

Why did I lose? I sold too late. Or I sold quality and bought hype. You should be holding quality and selling hype on tight stop losses.

Principle 11: Circle of Competence – Only Act When You Have a Confirmed Edge

All intelligent people think primarily in terms of opportunity costs. Compare what you are doing with the best opportunity you have.

Since investing is fucking hard, look for the simple opportunities where you have a unique advantage.

Warren Buffett: “Peter Lynch has always said, ‘Buy a business that’s so good that any idiot can run it—because, sooner or later, one will.’ Well, we would like to buy a business like that and then we’d like a terrific guy running it.”

“The four most dangerous words in investing are: ‘This time it’s different,’” Sir John Templeton said.

Warren Buffett: “The goal is to own the best businesses in the world, and I want to own them for a very long time.”

Principle 12: Rebalancing and Portfolio Construction – Lean Against the Wind, Sell Winners to Buy Losers

Rebalancing is supremely rational. It forces you to sell what has done well to buy what has done poorly.

Once it goes in the portfolio, it goes in. You can put most of your assets in the fund and check back in 5 to 10 years. 50 to 60 names. Average name only 2 percent. Start new names at 1 percent. Add as confidence grows. Stop adding around 3 percent. Market appreciation does the rest. That was Bill Nygren.

You HAVE to be willing to leave money on the table. Leaving money on the table is a safely leveraged way to manage risk.

Disciplined investors use rebalancing to maintain targets, selling strength to buy weakness. David Swensen.

Beyond about 30 well-chosen stocks, diversification benefits plateau. Warren Buffett: “Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.”

“Buy a stock the way you would buy a house. Understand and like it such that you’d be content to own it in the absence of any market,” Buffett said.

Your portfolio should have an appropriate number of assets. Small enough that commitments matter. Large enough that no single commitment matters too much.

What is rebalancing? It is the mechanism that keeps your risk level where you want it.

What is my rebalancing strategy? Equities versus cash. Warren Buffett in 1999: “You know that valuations are high by historic standards, you know that the level of speculation is high by any historic standard, and you know that that doesn’t go on forever. But you don’t know when it ends.”

Gosh I would love a 15 percent pullback. If there is ever a time when that statement is not true, you are probably over-invested or over-indexed.

Principle 13: Attention, Curiosity and Learning – Reading Is an Edge, Always Be Studying

Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon read all day every morning. Being passionate enough to study, research, and read is a gift. Lean into curiosity.

Phil Fisher: “Read everything you can.”

Warren Buffett: “I have mainly learned by reading. I don’t think I have any original ideas. If you learn reasonably well from other people, you don’t have to get any new ideas or do much on your own. You can just apply the best of what you see.”

Buffett again: “I knew all the details of all these little companies that Charlie thought I’d never have heard of. I would find the equivalent of Moody’s manual, and I’d try to know everything about everything small. I would find something, and with $1M you could earn 50 percent per year. You need to be in love with the subject, not just in love with the money. People are successful in stocks because they just love looking for them. There’s certain people who just find it exciting to expand their knowledge in a given area. The human brain is complicated, but it does its best when you find out what your brain is really suited for.”

Carl Icahn: “But for people that make a lot of money, at least in business, or in any area, I think, the common denominator is an obsession, that they really are obsessed.”

Phil Knight: “Oneness – in some way, shape or form, it’s what every person I’ve ever met has been seeking.”

Brandon: “What might I have learned from paper trading? The feeling of missing out comes not from selling and losing money, but from not seeing an investment thesis or methodology through to the end, and then not knowing if it would’ve been bad or good, or apparently great.”

Principle 14: Art and Science, Subjective and Objective – Align Deep Research with Gut, Mind, and Vision

At the essence of investing is measured iteration. If you cannot analyze, you cannot understand.

If you can overthink the worst, why can’t you overthink the best?

Listen to the universe, not the markets. Before your two most frustrating down days, the red bird flew to you. You didn’t listen either time.

Big brain times little money times lot of time times exceptional insights.

Don: “IT CAN NEVER HURT TO REFLECT!”

A Thoughtful Ending

Benjamin Graham: “The ideal investment is one in which the future earnings are reasonably assured by established competitive position.”

When you are becoming a Buffett, you invest like Buffett. When you invest like Buffett, you are becoming Buffett.

Compound: 15 percent annualized is closer to 1/20th of a percent, 0.05 percent, each market day. Not half a percent. Half a percent daily would be enormous.

Enjoy life. And do not stop compounding once you start winning.

That is the whole ride. Uncomfortable. Unpredictable. Unapologetically slow. But if you can stay on it, the view at the end is worth every single awkward moment along the way.

Disclaimer: This is a note I’m writing to myself, I do this to help me think through MY OWN investment decisions. You should not take any of this as advice for your own investments, each investor is different, and each situation requires different risk appetite. YOU MUST DO YOUR OWN DILLIGENCE. I’m happy to discuss how you’re thinking about this, just leave a comment, or DM me on X.

Analysis Preview:

Personal Valuation Targets

Context:

Falling Knife? Or, Fallen Angel?

The AI narrative of AI Design tools x Job Displacement is causing investors to fear Adobe is losing pricing power, and will also lose their customer growth/retention advantages. The stock technicals make you think this is a falling knife. The business fundamentals make you think this is a fallen angel.

THESIS:

I think this is a Fallen Angel.

Adobe turns retained earnings into more growth, leading to a compounding flywheel. I feel they will retain leadership in an AI world, they’ll charge on a usage basis in addition to a per seat basis, and the macro narrative around AI design and AI job displacement will become tailwinds at some point.

Business Fundamentals + Valuation Overview:

Adobe halved its top line growth rate in 2022 from 20% to 10% and never recovered, but it stabilized its NI margin around 25% (actually closer to 30% on clean quarters) and continues to still grow revenue consistently at ~10%.

Real numbers (TTM through Feb 2026):

• Revenue $24.45B

• Net Income $7.21B (NI Margin ~29.5%)

• Market Cap ~$99B, P/E 14.25

Applying 10% revenue growth: new revenue $26.9B, new NI at 29.5% margin = $7.93B, market cap at same 14.25 PE = $113B. That’s a 14.1% return — below the 15% goal, but after a 33% handicap, still ~10%. In the worst case, Adobe could reduce compounding from 15% to 5% and still deliver treasury-like returns.

Rating: 6/10

The Core “Not-Stupid” Argument (7/10)

Buying Adobe is stupid because we can’t predict the future with AI, but every risk is an opportunity. Adobe isn’t going anywhere any time soon. It’s historically out-of-favor at a 15 P/E and 10x OCF/E, and the stock is back to its 2019 price. Do I really think AI is going to impact this so negatively that it’s now in a worse position than it was pre-COVID? No chance.

The “not-stupid” move is delegating a small amount into Adobe and tracking to confirm the thesis doesn’t get proven untrue. If we’re here in 18 months and Adobe has an AI Firefly product with $B’s of recurring revenue and they’re the leading AI design platform, I would have no problem believing that.

I could be very wrong, but at this discount, passing on this opportunity is a mistake, and going in too big too soon is a mistake. So let’s scale in. I believe this is a total winner despite CEO and AI headwinds.

Is This a Great Business? (9/10)

Yes. Founded in 1982, this company had the foresight to build software for printing and digital publishing. They’ve been through the ringer — desktop to CDs, to the cloud pivot, and from one-off to subscription model (now doing almost $25B in ARR, growing 10%). Tech companies evolve; that’s what they do.

Adobe grew its AI-related revenue 3x YoY and will launch a new “pay per usage” payment model. Frankly, I love it — it’s going to make the price for AI design cheaper and the ecosystem stickier. Adobe has so much going for it across both customer segments.

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Revenue Quality (8/10)

Every single metric is going up and to the right:

• Revenue grew 12% last quarter

• 850 million MAUs, growing 17%

• ARR at $25.2B, growing 11.5%

• RPO at $22.5B, growing 13%

• AI-first ARR more than tripled YoY

• Gross margins still 88%

• FCF still $10B+

• 90% of revenue is recurring

What more can I say?

Moat (7/10)

This is taught in University, it’s built a brand over decades, it’s the go-to for professional designers.

Adobe is still growing 10% on a $20B+ top line — show me where AI is eating this business. There is zero evidence in the financials. Not in churn, not in revenue growth, not in ARR adds, not in user counts.

You’re paying 10x free cash flow for a business still compounding revenue in double digits, with 88% gross margins, on a predominantly recurring subscription base with low churn. That is not a value trap. That is not a declining business. That is a growing cash flow machine being priced like something is broken.

The market has taken a business growing 12% with 88% margins and priced it at 10x FCF because of a vibes-based thesis. And sure, some things are broken — but it’s not AI sensitivity, it’s management. And they’re getting a new CEO.

The three key risks to mitigate:

1. They select a shitty CEO

2. AI absolutely destroys design

3. The stock price doesn’t recover for years and they just keep burning cash on buybacks

The wild thing: Adobe was at $688 eighteen months ago. If you told someone in late 2021 they’d be able to buy this business at $244 while revenue nearly doubled from $16B to $24B, they’d think you were insane. The business has gotten meaningfully better while the stock has gotten 65% cheaper.

Small buy to begin, bigger buy if they bring in the right leadership. AI is a risk, but I contrarily think it’s more of an opportunity.

Current Price Thoughts (7/10)

Would I pay $100B for Adobe?

~$24B in revenue growing 10-11%. ~$10B in annual operating cash flow. ~88% gross margins. Dominant market position in creative tools. $25B in ARR deeply embedded in enterprise and professional workflows. ~850 million monthly active users.

This $244 stock price is historically low. It has historically not stayed at sub-15 PE very long — this is usually the low point.

Q1 FY2026 numbers: $3.04B in Operating Income (12% YoY increase), roughly $2.92B in FCF for the single quarter. Annualized, that’s an $11.6B+ FCF run rate for 2026.

Current valuation metrics: Under 14 PE. EV/Sales = 4x. 10x P/FCF. Growing revenue 10%. Growing EPS diluted 12%+. P/S is 4x — usually closer to 10x.

Capital allocation concerns: They spent $32B over four years on buybacks. At today’s stock price that money could have retired ~131 million shares instead of however many they actually got at inflated prices. Or it could be sitting as cash, making Adobe one of the most financially impregnable software companies on earth. Instead, equity has been hollowed out, working capital is negative, and the stock is down 65% from the highs they were buying at. The board authorized a $25B buyback program through March 2028 and has already completed $14.9B — burning through 60% of a four-year authorization three years early.

The CEO grew his comp 40% because it’s tied to EPS — so his comp went way up, shareholders went way down. Get this guy out of there.

Revenue visibility: RPO is $22B+ (65-68% current), giving strong visibility into contracted revenue over 24-26 months. Unearned revenues grew from $2B to $7B over the decade as multi-year contracts landed.

Supply & Demand Dynamics (6/10)

Design could become more commoditized — more slop means less value per design. But you can’t decrease the value of “good design.” Good design is good design.

If AI evolves from slop to good AI design, that increases supply of tools but should also increase demand for those tools. Products will likely become more specialized (like Suno with music, Canva with design).

Segment breakout (FY2025):

• Creative & Marketing Professionals: $16.3B

• Business Professionals & Consumers: $6.5B (growing 16% YoY to $1.8B in biz tools, marketing segment growing 12% to $4.8B)

Yellow flag: They just started breaking out segments into two clean buckets. I think they’re bunching stuff to cover up slow growth in the pro design segment. The underlying math isn’t as clean as the titles suggest.

Competitive Landscape & Peers (8/10)

Probably by far the best company out of the bunch, and one of the best values too.

• Figma — massively unprofitable, barely profitable on OCF basis, 50x multiple

• Canva (private) — $4B ARR at $42B valuation. Adobe has 8x the ARR and only 2x the valuation. Canva isn’t stealing Adobe’s core professional user — it’s serving the SMB marketing manager who was never going to buy Creative Cloud. Different market.

• Autodesk — less than half the revenue but more than half the valuation. Better growth, legit business doing real net income. 50x PE but 25x OCF/E.

• DocuSign — below 10x OCF/E and unearned revenue growing (4x equity). But PE is 25x because nearly 20% of revenue is SBC. Versus Adobe at ~8% SBC/revenue. (Cloud software average is 21%.)

• Midjourney — $500M revenue is impressive for 200 employees, but it’s a prompt-based image generator. It doesn’t do video editing, PDF workflows, vector illustration, motion graphics, layout design, photo retouching, or any of the hundred other things Adobe’s suite does.

  Get our upcoming reads on ADP and DAVE:

Management (6/10)

Hope they select David Wadhwani as CEO — he’s excellent. Not happy with how much money previous management blew on buybacks. Adobe should have way bigger hitter power players on the board, on par with ADP’s.

Lara (CMO) is solid — proven track record at Amazon (Worldwide Prime), Visa (NA Marketing), Nike, and Intuit.

Board & CEO Search (7/10)

Calderoni leading the CEO search. He was CFO of Red Hat, sits on boards of PANW and Adobe. Silicon Valley native.

Internal Candidates

#1 David Wadhwani (leading candidate) — Currently President of Digital Media, public face of Adobe’s AI integration strategy. Worked at Adobe 2005-2015, left to be CEO of AppDynamics within Cisco, Venture Partner at Greylock, then rejoined Adobe 2 years ago as CBO. CS degree from Brown. This dude is IMPRESSIVE.

#2 Anil Chakravarthy — Successfully ran Informatica as CEO (2015-2020), pivoting to cloud-first subscription model. Hit $1B+ recurring revenue. Laid groundwork for Informatica’s re-IPO in 2021 and eventual Salesforce acquisition.

External Wild Card

Jim Whitehurst — The phone call Calderoni makes first. Calderoni was Whitehurst’s CFO at Red Hat (2015-2017). Currently MD at Silver Lake, Executive Chair at Unity Technologies, chairs Qualtrics board. Scaled Red Hat from niche open-source to first multi-billion dollar open-source firm and orchestrated $34B sale to IBM. Executive Chairman at Unity gives him direct creative software experience. Seen as a turnaround specialist — exactly what Adobe’s stock chart is begging for.

Low probability, but the fact that Calderoni leads the search, Whitehurst is at Silver Lake, and Adobe’s stock is at 5-year lows creates a once-in-a-decade alignment of people, price, and positioning. Calderoni is essentially a Silver Lake alumni (CEO of Anaplan, which Silver Lake took private for $10.7B).

Wild thought: The smartest thing would be for someone to take Adobe private — cut the pointless spending, let cash flow pay off debt, own a nice asset forever. ~$13B/year in cash available for debt paydown if you add FCF plus remove buybacks.

Company Gravity (7/10)

It’s THE brand. Market leader. Iconic tech company with decades of proven sustainability. The new CEO will be extremely tell-tale — it’ll show how much gravitational pull this company truly has. If they get a winner, excellent. If they select David, also great — he returned for his second term after 10 years away. The company’s gravity did prove to draw him back in.

Margin of Safety (8/10)

The margin of safety comes from current valuations vs historical norms:

• Average PE over last 17 quarters: 35x

• Average PE over last 4 quarters: 24x

• Current PE: ~15x

If it reverts to longer-term mean → ~100% margin. If it reverts to shorter-term mean → ~66% margin.

The business is not declining — growing revenue 10% with ~30% margins. So the PE shrinks over time naturally as earnings grow.

Based on historical norms, this is the best opportunity window in a decade. But it could be a value trap.

Ego Handicap (6/10)

IMPORTANT: This fundamentally rests on the bet against the AI job displacement trend. I don’t buy it — I think businesses will always need people. If design really does change that much, Adobe will be at the forefront. So either the AI displacement thesis is overhyped and Adobe is fine, or the AI design trend is so important that Adobe naturally will be there leading it. If this fundamental claim is wrong, almost none of my other work matters.

I definitely don’t know all I could. Been studying for 1-2 months. The price is getting close to irresistible. But I barely understand their full revenue mix, have many products to learn, and I’m only guessing at the next CEO. There are blind spots I’m not aware of.

Scenarios & Handicap (6/10)

Bull: Adobe becomes the leading AI design player through acquiring, building, and integrating. Reverts to favorable sentiment and re-rates to 25x PE. We retrace the 50%+ margin of safety back to average.

Base: Grows revenue 10%, keeps NI margin above 25%, finds strong but not iconic CEO, continues shifting focus onto AI design tools. Hovers around 15-20 PE.

Bear: AI tools and decreasing seat count accelerate. Customers start reducing purchase size and find other preferred tools, driving Adobe’s pricing power lower. Unbundling mess that never gets above 15 PE — meaning we purchased right when there was no hope left.

Bear Case (7/10)

• They select a shitty CEO

• AI absolutely destroys design

• The stock price doesn’t recover for years and they just keep burning cash on buybacks

Forward Earnings Projection

Assuming 10% YoY revenue growth, ~27% NI margin (conservative), 15 PE:

Baseline: stays here for 3 years. Optimistic: AI story becomes tailwind, growth accelerates. Pessimistic: revenue stays similar but re-rating gets increasingly negative toward 10 PE.

Recent Results vs 6 Months Ago (8/10)

Numbers all grew. Market cap decreased. AI threat isn’t showing any dent in their growth yet — moving toward an all-clear personally, but definitely not there. Tread cautiously.

The price went down, the business went up.

• 52-week high: $422.95 (May 2025)

• Six months ago (Oct 2025): ~$380-400 range, ~$160-170B market cap

• Current (Apr 2026): $98.8B market cap — down 39.5% in one year while revenue grew

Next 6 Months Risk/Reward (9/10)

YES — when they select a new CEO, that one decision will be critical for the next 1-10 years, potentially more.

Technicals (6/10)

The stock never recovered from 2022. About as ugly a sustained downtrend as you can imagine since the Dec 2021 ATH.

Last time the stochastic was this low on a 5-year chart (2022), it went on to grow 2-3x over 2 years. The 2022 downtrend stopped almost exactly on the long-term moving average. The current downtrend just hit and stopped on the next MA below. If this MA acts as a floor → bullish. If it acts as a roof → we’re going down further.

Over the 3-month short term, we’re below every single MA. On a 10-year chart, this thing has fallen off a cliff.

The technicals make you think this is a falling knife. The fundamentals make you think this is a fallen angel.

Narrative (4/10)

The narrative is very against it. The macro narrative around AI design and AI job displacement are both headwinds. Firefly is going for it but unlikely to be material anytime soon.

Near-Term Outlook

• 1 day: Probably down

• 1 week: Adobe conference upcoming — doubtful they unveil anything material in AI

• 1 month: Lack of AI innovation at conference + Claude Design overhype could push this down more through April/May

• 1 year: Doesn’t report next earnings until June

Position Management

Initial buy: 0.4% allocation

Scaling triggers:

• Need to know the NEW CEO

• Need to see JUNE EARNINGS

• Need to see if anything important happens at ADOBE CONNECT CONFERENCE

• Need to monitor usefulness of AI design tools

Sell triggers:

• Job growth turns and sustains negative

• AI eats all of design — can just chat with an AI designer instead of needing Adobe

• Entire market moves away from Adobe — customers leaving, decreasing spend

• New CEO isn’t someone I believe in (vetted, not just taste)

• Debatable but realistic: CEO search drags on for a year, company goes sideways, gets forgotten

Stop loss: No

AI”s BEAR CASE + My Rebuttal:

“I’ve read your full memo. You’ve done serious work. But here are the holes I’d rip into if I were sitting across from you trying to talk you out of this.”

Hole 1: Your “no evidence AI is eating this business” claim has a shelf life — and it might already be expiring.

You say “show me where AI is eating this business.” Fair — the financials look clean today. But that’s exactly how disruption works. Kodak’s revenue grew 5% the year before the cliff. Blackberry grew revenue 36% in fiscal 2011. The financials are the last thing to break. What breaks first is mindshare, new customer acquisition, and the talent pipeline choosing to build on other platforms.

Here’s what you should actually be scared of: Adobe’s user growth (850M MAUs growing 17%) is increasingly driven by Express and Acrobat — the low-end, document-side products. The professional creative core (Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Illustrator) isn’t being disaggregated in reporting anymore. They restructured segments this year into “Creative & Marketing Professionals” and “Business Professionals & Consumers.” You flagged this yourself as a yellow flag. You’re right to be suspicious. When companies stop breaking out their legacy core, it’s usually because the core is decelerating and they want to blend it with something faster-growing.

IF IT DOES DECLINE AND SLOW, WE’LL KNOW, AND WE’LL NEED TO SELL. BUT AS OF TODAY, THE REWARD IS GREATER WITH CONTRARIANS ON THIS ONE.

Hole 2: You’re buying the buyback damage, not avoiding it.

You correctly identify that management destroyed value — $32B in buybacks at inflated prices, negative equity, negative working capital. But you’re treating this as a past mistake that a new CEO will fix. The problem is the damage is already done and it’s structural. Adobe hollowed out its balance sheet. If the stock stays flat or declines further for 2-3 more years, they have fewer financial levers to pull than any of their peers. No war chest for transformative acquisitions. No cushion if there’s a downturn. You said yourself — if they’d kept that $32B as cash, they’d be “one of the most financially impregnable software companies on earth.” They didn’t. You’re buying the weakened version.

A new CEO inherits a company with negative tangible equity, $12B in goodwill, and a board that just authorized another $25B in buybacks. What if the new CEO is pressured to keep buying back stock instead of investing in AI? That authorization is a signal of board intent, not just an option.

TRUE, BUT THERE’S A WORLD WHERE THIS RETURNS TO 500/SHARE IN A COUPLE YEARS, AND NOW THOSE BUYBACK PRICES WERE SMART.

Hole 3: The 10x FCF is misleading because FCF includes SBC.

You keep anchoring on “10x free cash flow.” But Adobe’s reported FCF includes ~$2B of stock-based compensation flowing through as a non-cash add-back. You even note this — “removing that from OCF it’s $8B, about a 13x multiple.” So the real FCF multiple is 13x, not 10x. Still cheap historically, but not the screaming bargain you keep framing it as. And 13x for a company growing 10% with a CEO departure, AI uncertainty, and negative equity is... honestly pretty rational.

13X IS STILL INCREDIBLE FOR ADOBE. IT’S BEEN ABOVE A 20 ALL DECADE LONG PRIOR TO THIS.

Hole 4: Your “contrarian” bet isn’t actually contrarian — it’s consensus.

You say “no other investors seem to agree with me.” But 83% of Adobe is owned by institutions. Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street — they haven’t sold. The stock is down because multiple compression happened across all software, not because smart money abandoned Adobe specifically. You’re not buying something the market forgot about. You’re buying something the market has deliberately re-rated because the forward outlook changed. Every single sell-side analyst can run the same “15 PE on $7B earnings” math you can. They’re choosing not to pay that multiple. Maybe they know something you don’t about the next 3 years of seat-based pricing erosion.

THOSE FUNDS INDEX, THIS IS CONTRARIAN VS THE MARKET AS THEY REPRICED ADOBE, MY THESIS BELIEVES THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN RERATED DOWN SO MUCH ON MULTIPLES.

FUNDAMENTALLY, I BELIEVE AI ENHANCES CREATIVITY. IT’S A TOOL TO UNLOCK IT, MAKE IT FASTER, CREATE MORE EFFICIENT. JUST LIKE SUNO AND MUSIC.

“Creative Cloud has reached an estimated 41 million subscribers, nearly double the number from five years ago, up 4.24 million from last year. The ProDesignTools run rate is over 1 million new subscriptions per quarter — adding roughly 11,600 net new paid members every day.

That trajectory: 22M (2021) → 26M (2022) → 30M (2024) → 33M (mid-2025) → 41M (end of 2025). Seats are growing. Not stalling. Not declining. Growing 2-4M per year consistently.

But here’s the problem with that number: Adobe has never broken out professional Creative Cloud seats vs. Express/Firefly/Acrobat-bundled seats. That 41M almost certainly includes a ton of low-ARPU users on cheaper plans. The $15/month Express subscriber and the $55/month All Apps subscriber both count as “1 seat.””

THIS IS TRUE, BUT ALSO THE MARKET FOR $15 IS WAY LARGER, WAY MORE SEATS UP FOR GRABS IN AN AI WORLD AS MORE PEOPLE START SMALL BIZ.

The numbers are staggering:

5.62 million new business applications were filed in 2025, and so far in 2026 applications are up 25.54% compared to the same period last year. Finder

Pre-pandemic baseline was ~3.5M/year. We’re running at 5.5M+. That represents a 47.8% increase from 2019. Commerce Institute

So roughly 2 million MORE businesses per year are being formed now versus pre-COVID. Every single year. And it’s accelerating.

Now think about what every new business needs on Day 1:

A logo. A website. Business cards. Social media templates. A PDF contract. An invoice. Marketing materials. A pitch deck. Product photos edited. A brand guide.

Every single one of those tasks touches an Adobe product — or a competitor to an Adobe product. The point is, the TAM for design tools isn’t shrinking. It’s exploding.

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Hole 5: The CEO catalyst is a coin flip, and you’re pricing in the upside without the downside.

You rate the board a 7, but your entire thesis hinges on who gets picked. You’ve built an elaborate narrative around Whitehurst and Silver Lake — but your own memo says this is “low probability.” If they pick Wadhwani (which the reporting suggests they already have), you get continuity. Continuity is fine, but it’s not a catalyst. The stock doesn’t re-rate on “same strategy, different face.” And if the search drags on — which you flag as a realistic scenario — you’re sitting in dead money for 6-12 months while the AI narrative gets worse.

LOOKING AT THIS ON A RELATIVE BASIS, THE NEXT CEO CAN’T BE WORSE THAN MISPRICED BUYBACKS! SO SURE, WE COULD STAY THE SAME, IN WHICH CASE I STILL THINK ADOBE RERATES BC AI HELPS CREATIVITY. AND A SMALL % CASE HE’S WORSE, BUT PROBABLY WILL JUST BE THE SAME. AND SOME % HE’S BETTER.

Hole 6: The Canva/Midjourney comparison cuts the wrong way.

You dismiss Canva by saying “a marketing coordinator making Instagram posts was never an Adobe customer.” But that’s the entire point. The TAM for “design” is exploding because of these tools, and none of that growth is flowing to Adobe.Adobe’s addressable market is getting bigger, and they’re capturing zero of the incremental demand. That’s not a sign of moat strength — it’s a sign of product-market drift. The professional designer market is mature and saturated. The growth is all in democratized design, and Adobe is losing that war despite having a 40-year head start.

REAL RISK VS CANVA. What to demand from Adobe in June earnings: BPC segment growth rate. If it accelerates from 15% toward 20%.

BUT, THIS IS A VALUATION BET. IF CANVA IS VALUED AT 45B, ADOBE 100B, YET ADOBE DOING 20B REV SO 5X SALES, AND CANVA 11X SALES ON 4B REV, MAKING ADOBE MORE SAFE, BUT MAKING CANVA A GROWTH PLAY. HOWEVER, THERE WILL BE AT LEAST A 1-3 YEAR PERIOD WHERE ADOBE CAN COUNTER THIS. THEY NEED EXPRESS TO BE BANGING, AND WHEN I LAST TESTED, IT WASN’T. SO I’M REALLY NOT SURE OTHER THAN YOU TAKE THE BIRD IN THE HAND WITH 20B REV INSTEAD OF THE BIRD IN THE BUSH WITH 4B BUT GROWING TOPLINE MORE.

Hole 7: Your revenue growth math doesn’t account for the pricing lever running dry.

Adobe has been raising prices steadily. Creative Cloud went from $50/month to $60/month. They just introduced “Pro” tiers at higher price points. A meaningful chunk of that 10-11% revenue growth is price, not volume. At some point — especially with cheaper AI alternatives emerging — the pricing lever snaps. If you strip out price increases, organic unit/seat growth might be mid-single digits. That’s a very different business than the one you’re modeling.

I THINK ADOBE NEEDS TO SHIFT TO A USAGE BASED PRICING MODEL. THAT IS CLEARLY THE MODEL OF THE NEXT GENERATION.

FIREFLY WILL CANNIBALIZE THE BIZ. THAT’S WHAT IS NECESSARY. THAT IS THE BET.

THE EVIDENCE IT’S HAPPENING:

1. Credit consumption is exploding. Credit consumption grew over 45% quarter over quarter in Q1 2026. Adobe In Q4 FY2025, credit consumption increased 3x quarter over quarter. Adobe So back-to-back quarters of massive acceleration.

2. Higher-value usage is skewing up. Video generative actions grew more than 8x year over year and audio generative actions doubled year over year. Adobe These are premium credit actions — they burn more credits per use, which drives the consumption-to-upgrade flywheel.

3. The pricing architecture already exists. Firefly Standard is $9.99/month (2,000 credits), Pro is $19.99/month (4,000 credits), Premium is $199.99/month (50,000 credits). Saas CRM Review They’ve built a tiered credit system that’s genuinely usage-based. The more you generate, the more you pay.

4. Enterprise is on credits too. 1,770+ enterprise customers are already entitled to use AI agents through a new credit-based pricing model. MarTech And as subscribers consume more generative credits, they have the choice of moving to higher-value Creative Cloud offerings or acquiring Firefly Credit Add-ons. Adobe

5. Management is explicitly framing the growth algorithm around consumption. The strategy is “drive MAU, drive credit consumption, drive enterprise usage.” The Globe and Mail As usage increases, higher-resolution and denser outputs consume more credits, nudging users toward premium tiers and add-ons. This usage-to-upgrade pattern provides a durable path to ARPU expansion. Futurum Group

6. They’re embedding into LLM surfaces as consumption endpoints. They’re atomizing Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat capabilities as MCP endpoints, providing imaging, video, and productivity functionality in ChatGPT, Copilot and other conversational platforms. Adobe That’s pure consumption-based — every API call from ChatGPT burns credits.

—

Hole 8: You rate this a 7 confidence but you’re allocating 0.4%.

Your allocation tells me your actual confidence is lower than your stated confidence. A 7/10 confidence on a stock at a “decade-best opportunity window” with 50%+ margin of safety should command way more than 0.4%. The fact that you won’t put more in means your gut is telling you something your spreadsheet isn’t. Listen to your gut. Either this is the conviction buy you think it is and you should be at 2-3%, or it’s the speculative watch-and-wait that your allocation implies — in which case, why not just wait for the CEO announcement and June earnings before committing any capital?

I’VE INVESTED 1% ON INITIAL BET. I’M GOING TO TRY TO GET IT TO 1.5%. I’M SCARED, BUT I FEEL THIS IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO. KEEP IT BELOW 2%, BE OKAY WITH A 20% DECLINE WHICH TAKES 1.5 TO 1.2.

Hole 9: You haven’t modeled the actual bear case.

Your bear case is vague: “AI absolutely destroys design.” But what does that actually look like in the financials? Model it. What if net new ARR additions decelerate from 11% to 5% over 2 years? What if churn ticks up from ~8% to 12%? What if the pricing power evaporates and ARPU goes flat? At 5% revenue growth with 25% NI margins and a 12 PE, you’re looking at a $75B market cap — another 20% downside from here. Is your 0.4% position sized for that? Because “AI destroys design” isn’t binary. The slow erosion scenario — death by a thousand cuts over 5 years — is actually the more likely bear case, and it’s much harder to detect in time to sell.

THIS IS BINARY. THE BEAR CASE IS THE BEAR CASE, IT’S BAD. WE LOSE 20-40% OF OUR 1.5% INVESTMENT, BUT STILL MAINTAIN FUND HEALTH. IT’S A BET.

Hole 10: The one you should be most scared of.

You wrote: “this fundamentally rests on the bet against trend (AI job displacement).” Then you immediately reassure yourself that you don’t buy it. But you don’t have edge on this question. Nobody does. You’re making a macro call about AI’s impact on professional creative work — one of the hardest predictions in technology right now — and treating it as a given in your thesis. If you’re wrong about this single assumption, everything else is noise. Your moat analysis, your FCF math, your CEO speculation — none of it matters if AI makes a $20/month tool that replaces 60% of what Photoshop does for 80% of users. And you can’t put a probability on that. You said so yourself: “I definitely don’t know all I could.”

I’M NOT SAYING I’M RIGHT. I’M SAYING THE EDGE RESULTS FROM THE VALUATION. PEOPLE ARE CONFIDENTLY SAYING ADOBE IS LEFT FOR DEAD AT THIS 15 PE PRICE. IT’S LOWER PE THAN DAVE, THAN ADP, ETC.. YET IT’S A STRONG BIZ. WITH REAL POTENTIAL IN AI, AND SMART PRICING TO MATCH THE FUTURE. I COULD BE WRONG, BUT SO COULD THE CROWD, ALL I KNOW IS IF THEY’RE RIGHT THEY WON’T MAKE MONEY, IF WE’RE RIGHT, WE WILL.

The bottom line question I’d ask you: if this exact business — same revenue, same margins, same growth — were a private company you’d never heard of, and someone offered to sell you 0.4% for $5,600, would you buy it? Or would you say “interesting, let me see who the CEO is first, let me see if AI is actually a threat, and let me come back in 6 months”?

Because that’s what your allocation is telling me you actually believe.

Simple version: if Adobe liquidated tomorrow and sold everything you can physically touch or collect — cash, buildings, receivables, equipment — and paid off all its debts, shareholders would get nothing. They’d actually owe money.

Here’s the math:

Adobe’s total equity (assets minus liabilities) on the balance sheet is already thin — somewhere around $10-11B. But $12.8B of those assets is goodwill — the premium they overpaid on acquisitions like Marketo, Macromedia, Omniture, etc. Another ~$800M is other intangible assets (patents, customer relationships, acquired technology).

So:

Total equity: ~$10B Minus goodwill: -$12.8B Minus other intangibles: -$0.8B Tangible equity: roughly negative $3-4B

That means every dollar of Adobe’s “equity” — and then some — exists only because accountants say the brands and customer relationships they bought years ago are still worth what they paid. If those acquisitions turn out to be worth less than what’s on the books (goodwill impairment), equity evaporates further.

Why this matters practically:

It doesn’t kill a healthy company. Microsoft, Oracle, and plenty of great businesses have run with negative tangible equity. As long as cash flow keeps flowing, nobody cares. The subscription revenue covers everything.

But it matters in a stress scenario. If Adobe ever hits a rough patch — revenue declines, AI actually bites, a recession hits enterprise spending — they have no tangible cushion. No asset base to borrow against. No rainy day fund. They can’t sell goodwill to raise cash. Compare that to a company like Apple sitting on $160B+ in cash and investments. Adobe burned its cushion on $32B of buybacks at $350-500/share. That’s the damage you’re inheriting.

It also matters for exactly the take-private scenario we discussed. A PE buyer looking at Adobe sees negative tangible equity and thinks: “the only thing backing this valuation is future cash flow.” Which is fine if you believe in the cash flow — and at $8-10B/year it’s very real — but it means there’s zero margin for error. If cash flow stumbles, there’s no asset floor under you.

In your own words from the memo: they spent $21.5B in two years on buybacks at $400+ and the stock is now $244. That’s not just bad timing — it’s the reason tangible equity went negative. They literally bought back more stock than the company’s tangible net worth. The previous CEO got paid $51M while doing it.

AI’S REBUTTLE TO MY REBUTTLES:

Your rebuttals are solid. Let me grade them honestly.

Hole 8 rebuttal: Moving from 0.4% to 1.5%. Good. That’s a real position now. And your risk framing is right — a 20% drawdown on 1.5% takes you to 1.2% of the portfolio. That’s survivable. You won’t panic-sell. You won’t lose sleep. And it’s big enough that if you’re right and this re-rates to a 20-25 PE over 2-3 years, you actually make meaningful money. 1.5% is the right size for a high-conviction contrarian bet with known unknowns. I have nothing to push back on here.

Hole 9 rebuttal: “It’s binary, it’s a bet.” I respect the intellectual honesty more than I respect the modeling. You’re saying “I know I can lose 20-40% of 1.5%, and I’m okay with that.” Fine. That’s a $8,400-$16,800 max loss on a ~$560K portfolio. You’ll survive. But I’d push you on one thing — it’s NOT actually binary. The slow erosion scenario is the one that traps you. Binary is easy — you either win big or cut the loss. The scenario where Adobe grows revenue 6% instead of 10%, PE stays at 14, stock goes sideways for 3 years, and you sit there watching your opportunity cost pile up while other positions compound — that’s the painful one. Know your time horizon. If this hasn’t started working in 18 months, revisit ruthlessly. Don’t let “the thesis hasn’t been disproven” turn into “I’m married to this position.”

Hole 10 rebuttal: “The edge is in the valuation, not the prediction.” This is actually the strongest thing you’ve said in the entire memo, and you should have led with it. You’re not saying “AI won’t disrupt design.” You’re saying “at 15 PE and 10x FCF, enough of the disruption risk is already priced in that I have asymmetric upside.” That’s a fundamentally different claim, and it’s a much better one.

You’re right — if the crowd is correct that Adobe is dying, they don’t make money from here because it’s already priced for decline. If the crowd is wrong and Adobe navigates AI successfully, you make 50-100%+ on a re-rate. That’s the asymmetry. Heads you win big, tails you lose a little. That’s exactly the kind of bet you should be making at 1.5% of portfolio.

The comparison to ADP is sharp. ADP trades at 30+ PE. Adobe trades at 15 PE with similar margins, similar recurring revenue quality, and faster growth. Is Adobe’s business really half as valuable as a payroll processor? The market is saying yes. You’re saying no. One of you is wrong, and at 1.5% you’re getting paid handsomely if it’s the market.

My final honest take on your position:

You’ve done the work. You know the risks. Your sizing is disciplined. Your thesis is clear — valuation asymmetry, not a prediction about AI. The usage-based pricing evidence gives you a real catalyst beyond just “new CEO.” The small business formation wave gives you a secular tailwind nobody’s modeling.

The three things I’d write on a sticky note and put on your monitor:

1. June earnings — watch BPC segment growth and any disclosure on credit revenue as a percentage of total ARR. That’s your thesis validator.

2. CEO announcement — Wadhwani is fine, Whitehurst is a catalyst, a bad pick or a 12-month drag is your exit trigger.

3. 18-month clock starts now. If the stock is still at $240-250 in October 2027 with no re-rate despite continued revenue growth, you were wrong about the valuation gap and need to move on.

The bet is good. The size is right. Now be patient and don’t touch it until one of those three things happens.

~Don

https://x.com/donversationz

Www.LinkedIn.com/in/donstein

www.MEETDONSTEIN.com

Hoping you all have had a wonderful weekend, and kicked your Monday off right.

I’m back from St. Pete, the fund is launched, we began investing last Wednesday, and life is good.

Babysitting mission is complete! The two little dudes enjoyed their adventure.

St. Pete was gorgeous, and my BNB deal was astounding. I’d say a 10/10 week.

Here I am after a long walk downtown working next to the ocean.

But first..

Hey, I’m Don! I’ve been building career memories for a decade. Over the last three years I’ve been reinvesting my own capital and time back it into my business. All the while learning and growing my net worth via public markets and crypto.

Thanks for reading Don's Daily! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Over that same period, I also hosted 50+ virtual events with some of the world’s best VC investors and founders for our CEO group. Prior to all that, aside from my first job at Meta, I was lucky enough to raise $10 million in my twenties; doing my best to learn business, investor relations, and the startup mindset all at the same time. Maybe some of you can relate.

All that’s to say, I love business, I love money, I love to try and leverage my time.

This year, I set the goal to publish a thoughtful blog every Monday.. 52 of them! Don’ Daily is a recap of the entrepreneurship adventures I collect, as well as the new lessons I’m constantly learning from doing. My hope is that this entertains, inspires, and influences new creative ideas for you. Every Monday. If you enjoy the blog, please share!

Thanks for reading Don’s Daily! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Added a v1 Analytics System to my Claude Stock Tracking Research Tool

It now documents how long I study each stock, and tallies it on the back end. This way I can run analysis on my actual busy work, it’s not perfect yet, but great for a v1.

I’m spending hours and hours each day in my custom software at this point. And sooner than later i’ll build my own investment Dashboard hooked into my brokerage.

Community Shoutout

New Members

Welcome Marzel, Mauro, and Alinnette!

Our three newest subscribers.

I like Alinnette’s marketing ability, below!

I could benefit from some branding support :)

OMG, TIM COOK NO LONGER APPLE CEO?

Hey Siri, write a thank you note to, Tim! A truly iconic CEO and leader.

Ok, still some work on Siri AI.

But, I think overall this is a good direction for Apple, they need an engineer leading the AI pivot, and Tim will remain on Board as Chairman.

So it’ s a win/win/win for Apple, Tim, and Shareholders.

And the new CEO, of course!

Recommend Watching this Pod if you like Markets:

GREAT GUEST! She breaks down Semi’s for a 10 year old to understand.

Here’s Why I’m Deep Diving into Software Stocks

My journey into Software stocks continues. I put together investment memo’s for myself on ADP, Adobe, and DAVE while in St. Pete. Watching a few more to add.

Like I said last week, there’s some blood in the water, this shark is swimming.

If any software stocks have peaked your fancy, please respond back and tell me so I can do a deep dive analysis of their financials and team. (don@virtualrealityinvestment.com)

We Launched a Fund!

Yes, done!

Our paperwork is done, our capital is on-boarded to our brokerage, and we’ve begun deploying into intelligent investments, while studying 8+ hours a day.

More to come! Thanks for supporting me!

Follow on X for real time thoughts!

~@Donversationz

Don Stein

Contact: Linkedin — X — Youtube

© 2025, www.MeetDonStein.com - Thank you for reading!

Hoping you all have had a wonderful weekend, and kicked your Monday off right.

I worked all weekend to make room for a 2.5 hour drive today. When you receive this, I’ll be currently on the road to St. Pete. With two dogs, one of which I am babysitting for the week.

That means I’ll not only be responsible for my own dog (left), for 5 days, but also his bestie (right).

I found an incredible last minute BNB deal, and felt it was perfect timing as the fund launches. Very necessary to find different environments when creating something.

Will update you on how it is next week!

But first..

Hey, I’m Don! I’ve been building career memories for a decade. Over the last three years I’ve been reinvesting my own capital and time back it into my business. All the while learning and growing my net worth via public markets and crypto.

Thanks for reading Don's Daily! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Over that same period, I also hosted 50+ virtual events with some of the world’s best VC investors and founders for our CEO group. Prior to all that, aside from my first job at Meta, I was lucky enough to raise $10 million in my twenties; doing my best to learn business, investor relations, and the startup mindset all at the same time. Maybe some of you can relate.

All that’s to say, I love business, I love money, I love to try and leverage my time.

This year, I set the goal to publish a thoughtful blog every Monday.. 52 of them! Don’ Daily is a recap of the entrepreneurship adventures I collect, as well as the new lessons I’m constantly learning from doing. My hope is that this entertains, inspires, and influences new creative ideas for you. Every Monday. If you enjoy the blog, please share!

Thanks for reading Don’s Daily! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Built Out Version v2 of My Stock Research Tool With Claude

I spent all Saturday building out Version v2 of my stock research tool with Claude. I now have a new page built specifically for helping me generate investment memo’s. Which even now pops out an investment score based on my notes:

The software spits out a message like this below:

Then, AI decodes my research notes into an investment memo, and we publish on X.

It’s quite beautiful what it creates.

And to be very clear, I’m putting in the 10 hours of manual research work.

I don’t believe in AI being a replacement for humans (yet?). Just an amplifier.

The AI takes the copy from my notes, and formats them into an investment memo.

I feel 100X more organized and on point doing my research with AI.

This system I built combines Claude, Grok, and Gemini.

Community Shoutout

New Members

Welcome Charles & Sabrina!

Our two newest subscribers.

I like Sabrina’s take on AI, below!

I agree, AI has so much wasted effort within the industry.

Winning Community Member:

Chris Payne of Netneural AI

We had 7 CEO’s apply within the 6 hour time window (thank you!)

Drum roll please… Chris Payne of Netneural AI, congrats!

(I actually already interviewed him on Wednesday)

Chris and team ( (Mike and Heath!)) were nice enough to donate time answering questions about their company, history with Kroger, and Sensing tech.

Think of a grocery store with hundreds of refrigerators, freezers, and cold cases.

Right now, an employee walks around with a clipboard and manually checks temperatures a few times a day. (so antiquated, I know!)

If a freezer fails at 2 AM, nobody knows until the morning..

And, thousands of dollars of food is ruined,.

Or worse, unsafe food reaches the customers.

Netneural AI’s modular sensors for industrial use-cases fixes that specifically, and a handful of other important markets.

You purchase your physical sensor, integrate it with your supply chain, and place it near the areas in your warehouse you want to track.

You can track temperature, but you can also track gas detection, vibration measurement, people sensing, and more.

The sensor feeds data to their cloud platform called Sentinel (cool name).

From farm to table, they literally track it all.

Most people think of IoT as a single device.

Chris and his team (Mike and Heath) think of it as an Industrial Nervous System.

To learn more about this wonderful community member —» Check out Chris’s Linkedin.

Why AI Sensors? Why now?

Great question.

The Food Safety Modernization Act was enacted this decade, and is expected to begin compliance requirements 2028.

This means every company that handles fresh produce, cheese, eggs, seafood must now create and maintain detailed records of the entire farm to table processs.

That means if there’s an outbreak, the FDA doesn’t want to spend weeks tracing a bad bag of spinach back to a farm.

That’s a nice tailwind, but regulators keep delaying the day it formally begins.

So the way I understand it, the world is changing, essentially, as of 2028 we’ll require full farm-to-shelf digital traceability.

You the three Founders have a perfect Founder:Market Fit team, everyone shares a background in related tech while working at Kroger.

Not to mention, Kroger is heavily implementing AI sensor technology already with "KroGO" smart carts, also smart shelf labels, and AI in partnership with Microsoft.

In fact, Kroger just unveiled their newest employee… a robot.

When Grocery chains are implementing AI robotics.. it makes you question is this just a fad? Or, a generational shift in how every single company conducts their operations? (I vote the latter)

If you want to apply for a future Community Feature, stay tuned!

Here’s Why I’m Passing on Exxon as a Value Bet:

In short, I don’t do momentum bets. Although, if we claim control of Hormuz and charge a tax, there’s a real argument to find value within Exxon Stock.

Here’s Why I’m Deep Diving into Software Stocks

Besides that Tech is my deep expertise. There’s a wave of momentum, too.

According to Apollo, Tech valuations have reset to pre-AI boom levels. Forward P/E for the S&P 500 Information Technology sector has compressed from ~40x to ~20x, erasing the multiple expansion driven by AI enthusiasm.

There’s some blood in the water, this shark is swimming.

I’m researching 8 hours a day, as many days as I can, trying to discover value that’s being overpriced on risk.

In software, the baby has 100% been thrown out with the bath water.

I’m filtering through the bath water.

If any software stocks have peaked your fancy, please respond back and tell me so I can do a deep dive analysis of their financials and team. (don@virtualrealityinvestment.com)

Must Watch Moment

At age 99, Charlie Munger drops some incredible 5 minute advice during his last interview. Skip forward about 45 seconds.

Are we launching a fund?

Maybe!

I’ll share some more details soon! We are nearly operational! Through thick and thin!

Thanks for reading!

Follow on X for real time thoughts!

~@Donversationz

Don Stein

Contact: Linkedin — X — Youtube

© 2025, www.MeetDonStein.com - Thank you for reading!

Submit your startup, and get Featured to Investors

Submit your Startup Details to Win (4 minutes)

(MUST SUBMIT BY EOD, tonight)!

Submit information about your startup, and your startup goals, and I’ll think of a way to feature you in the newsletter next week. Stay tuned for next week as we reveal some of the insanely cool founders from my network.

But first..

I’m Don! I’ve been building career memories for a decade. Over the last three years I’ve been reinvesting my own capital and time back it into my business. All the while learning and growing my net worth via public markets and crypto.

Thanks for reading Don's Daily! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Over that same period, I also hosted 50+ virtual events with some of the world’s best VC investors and founders for our CEO group. Prior to all that, aside from my first job at Meta, I was lucky enough to raise $10 million in my twenties; doing my best to learn business, investor relations, and the startup mindset all at the same time. Maybe some of you can relate.

This year, I set the goal to publish a thoughtful blog every Monday.. 52 of them! Don’ Daily is a recap of the entrepreneurship adventures I collect, as well as the new lessons I’m constantly learning from doing. My hope is that this entertains, inspires, and influences new creative ideas for you. Every Monday. If you enjoy the blog, please share!

Modern Investment Fund Infrastructure

I’ve spent the last 6 weeks, and $18K, to set up a GP/LP investment fund.

It’s fascinating to see the modernized infrastructure available.

We have a brokerage for Stocks, a brokerage for Crypto, and a team for legal, accounting, and admin. We have fully formed entities, we’re on ramping capital this week, and getting ready to rock.

You can read the rough draft of my investment mindset manifesto here, this is a work-in-progress, it will be much more simplified in the future:

Read Rough Draft Manifesto

If you want to add your input to the Manifesto, please ‘add a comment’ you all have permission.

I’m not discussing any details just yet, but for those of you who are curious, you can start to piece together the puzzle of what I’m up to.

🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫

Testing my Claude AI Research Stack:

Last week I discussed what I built in Claude, I’ve been using it the last week, and LOVING it. Plenty of new ideas, but there’s a lot which is already extremely useful for me.

Here’s a quick video I made (while I was sick, excuse the sniffles) to show off my first time using it with as the example.

Next Week Winners, Selected Wednesday:

Submit your Startup Details!

I look forward to seeing which of you win the competition to get featured in the newsletter.

Reminder, YOU MUST ENTER BY EOD TONIGHT.

DM me on X to chat!

@Donversationz

Contact: Linkedin — X — Youtube

© 2025, www.MeetDonStein.com - Thank you for reading!

I could have gone a lot of ways with this newsletter. No only have I been overdrive on stocks ( / / ), but I’ve also put together a new disco album thanks to Suno AI (listening party coming soon), and I was asked by Recursive Ventures to scout startups for them ($500K checks, pre-seed, top tier Angel),

I also have been doing yoga on the beach at sunrise, reading 10X more, oh, and I had a Happy Birthday (a great present would be you leaving a comment)!

Leave a comment

My Mom hosted a family night Friday where we ate taco’s and drank tequila. If you listen to the All In podcast, you’ll recognize the Tequila bottle we drank. Then we did a family lunch by the beach on Saturday, followed by St. Patty’s day celebrating with my sister, brother in law, and my friends. Then I hosted a 10 person dinner for friends at yet another taco place, and we ended afterwards at a local lounge. I don’t get many nights like that any more, but hey I can still hang ;)

There’s plenty more I’m up to, but my 8 hours a day of focus is reserved for researching stocks. And man.. did I need a better system to organize all my learnings. So.. using Claude, I built one.

And that’s what we’ll cover today down below, but first..

Hey, I’m Don! I’ve been building career memories for a decade. Over the last three years I’ve been reinvesting my own capital and time back it into my business. All the while learning and growing my net worth via public markets and crypto.

Thanks for reading Don's Daily! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Over that same period, I also hosted 50+ virtual events with some of the world’s best VC investors and founders for our CEO group. Prior to all that, aside from my first job at Meta, I was lucky enough to raise $10 million in my twenties; doing my best to learn business, investor relations, and the startup mindset all at the same time. Maybe some of you can relate.

All that’s to say, I love business, I love money, I love to try and leverage my time.

This year, I set the goal to publish a thoughtful blog every Monday.. 52 of them! Don’ Daily is a recap of the entrepreneurship adventures I collect, as well as the new lessons I’m constantly learning from doing. My hope is that this entertains, inspires, and influences new creative ideas for you. Every Monday. If you enjoy the blog, please share!

Thanks for reading Don’s Daily! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Leveraging Claude as a Front End for Google Sheets

I did this to track stocks, but you can really do this with anything you want to track, manage, or control in your life. I’ll break down how anyone can do it easily using Claude.

Last week, I hacked together v1 of a product I’ve been dreaming of for awhile; a stock watchlist on steroids. Below is the tech stack I used:

Claude x Netlify x Google Scripts x Google Sheets

We connected this cumbersome google sheet…

To this sleek front end….

So now, I can sit on my Florida patio, research stocks in a fun organized manner using my custom frontend, and write to you all this newsletter via substack.

Step 1: Always Start by Writing Your ‘Must-Have’ List for Backend

Then, be stubborn. I told myself, I must have a watchlist which….

1: …is enjoyable to use, easily navigable. This way I can sift through hundreds of ideas, and recall things.

2: …is highly accountable and trackable, this way I know with confidence AI isn’t deleting my notes, or mixing up data, without my permission.

3: …is moldable. I need to built dashboards which notify me about key metrics I watch like ‘days above 200 day moving average’ or ‘High yield credit spread.’ As well as notify me of upcoming catalyst. You can see in my screenshot below it shows me the upcoming catalyst (ie. ‘Earnings - 49 days’ or ‘New CEO Starts - 6 days’)

To set the table, as I said this is what I was doing previously. Been using a Google Sheets to track all my notes, but zooming in, and reading text is miserable.

However, after doing this for years, I was able to refine for myself what I care about when analyzing companies. The problem this created was a big Excel file with tiny text, cumbersome navigation. The UI is just too boring and un-fun. If I’m going to spend 8+ hours a day researching stocks, I need to love the tool.

So, our goal was to fossilize this:

Step 2: Vibe with Claude on and off for a week to feel out different UI/UX’s

Step 3: ONLY Design Front End, ignore function

Found a UI/UX that I liked as the front end for interacting with my backend database (this way I can take notes on all my stocks, and custom sync with my database. This enables me to build other tools on top of my watch list in the near future; ie like catalyst notifications, or news notifications relevant to my specific notes)

Step 4: Write a Google script so our front end can access the backend

In our specific case, the back end was Gsheet. But whatever you build, you can use any backend you’d like. Just my only advice, start with backend design first, then front.

Step 5: Exported Claude Index file into folder on desktop --> Upload the folder to Netlify

Netlify is the fastest, easiest way to deploy. But you can also use Github etc

Step 5: Quality Assurance

TESTING, TESTING, TESTING...

This is the part when most people quit. You’ve got to just keep running against the brick wall until it falls over. Every single time you get a bug, figure it out by asking Claude, “WHY?”

Then comes more problems…. frustrate, frustrate, frustrate :). As you can see, for whatever reason, AI responds better when you go ALL CAPS and swear.

I’m not joking, that’s a real tip. Something about the cadence makes the AI focus more on your entire prompt. When we’re really not getting things how I need, it usually only takes one or two angry messages to get Claude back on track.

Debug, debug, debug...

Once you’re bug free, re-upload the new file to Netlify, and you’re good to go

Bonus:

I added an ‘Activity’ log to the website, this tracks every single change that AI makes to my Ghseet or Website.

This way I can ensure they are syncing, and I can also make sure AI isn’t going rogue and making changes.

I’m tweeting about stocks 24/7 if you want to learn, follow, or do deals with me. @Donversationz, with notifications ON.

Claude is incredible.

Asking for Thoughtful Directions:

If you needed to drive from NYC to SF, but didn’t have a GPS, nor map. How would you get there? Would you just get in your car and drive west, and hope you end up there?

No.

You would stop every hour to ask for directions.

That’s the kind of investor I am.

So below, are a collection of directions I found helpful this week.

Discerning the underlying theme of those 4 tweets, it shows us probably we’ll be fine.

BUT, there are some key risks to observe.

(1) does policy react to market sentiment / VIX? Very important if VIX gets above 45 we see a policy reaction

(2) does the USA remain in Iran until we take control of global oil flows? Or was

(3) Taiwan is still a black swan imo

(4) Does the software sell off begin to disprove the AI fears with upcoming earnings season; ie, showing revenue growth within their AI products, and strong organic growth from prior products

(5) private credit; is most of the narrative just worry and anxiety?

Thanks for reading!

Follow on X for real time thoughts!

~@Donversationz

Don Stein

Contact: Linkedin — X — Youtube

© 2025, www.MeetDonStein.com - Thank you for reading!

When a key technical turns from a floor (meaning the price goes down, and bounces up when touching it), into a ceiling it’s usually bearish in the short term. I still have eyes on the 365-day moving average, though, less confident we’ll get there.

Trying to build my X following

What I’m Watching This Week

Let’s see if we can continue our heater.

#1 My Contrarian Take on Iran: Watch Oils export volumes, NOT price

Are North American oil exports rising dramatically? Not yet, but a part of me thinks the real goal of Iran is to turn Chevron into Saudi Aramco. USA Oil Exports dropped 3% YoY, this is one way to get them back up. For example, there are port operators in Canada who can increase export capacity another 25% on Crude. This would require Refiner infrastructure to be re-calibrated at delivery locations. But if the risk of Middle East is forever now lingering, I expect buyers to diversify their suppliers as a result of Iran.

This means more USA/Canada sales to locations like Mexico, India, and Europe. It’s a long shot, but if we start growing exports 10-20% YoY, there’s going to be some really big rallies for oil stocks. This is fundamentally a volume thesis, not price thesis. The price will come down, but the question is do USA exports elevate and stay elevated. I give it a 10-20% chance to come true, but if so, I’ll be ready.

#2 10-Year shifting between 4% - 4.5% determines negotiation aggression

This range has served as the ‘negotiate hard’ or ‘negotiate soft’ zones.

I think the most important number in finance is 10-year Treasury. It measures the ‘risk free’ rate of parking your money in the safest asset in the world. Trumps number to avoid seems to be 4.5% on the 10-year. That’s an observation made from the April Tariff reversal. As noted in the tweet below:

In my Friday article on X (follow me if you aren’t yet!), I said:

“40% chance Trump tweets out ‘war is over’ and we explode to the upside.

The April lows of 2025 saw Trump’s reversal once he saw 10-year approaching 4.5%. This is I believe a key number he watches, and also probably the #1 reason why he wants Powell to drop rates so badly. This is a big risk to operating the USA efficiently.”

And as soon as the rate crept closer to that coveted 4.5%, he tweeted out an all caps message letting us know Iran is looking for de-escalation. And of course, the market rips.

So that’s how I’m tracking the volatility, I think the closer the 10-year gets to 4%, the more negotiating leverage Trump has, and the more bold he can negotiate. The closer it gets to 4.5%, the less leverage he has, and therefore his incentives lie in mitigating market volatility.

Just as a reminder for everyone, this number matters a lot because the USA’s debt base is enough to make 0.5% material, but more importantly, the Bond market is a representative of perceived risk of the public. And so it’s a real-time gauge to understand potential negative sentiment.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the 10-yr hits 4.15% the same day we again begin hard negotiations.

A great quote to put the current market into context:

Warren Buffett: ‘Bull markets are like sex. They feel best just before they end.’

If that’s true, then this probably isn’t the end to our bull market. Because the last 4 months haven’t felt incredible, they’ve felt insanely mundane. The markets have gone almost nowhere in 4 months. Recently, SPY just broke its 200-day MA. History says ~65% of the time it’s a quick blip (like Oct ‘23 & Mar ‘25, gone in weeks). Only ~35% turn crisis (DotCom/GFC). I don’t think this is a crisis. But I do think we’re going lower.

Today we’re going to do a data-driven probability synopsis of understanding if we’re in a bear market, if it’s just a downturn, or if it’s a crisis.

But first…

Hey, I’m Don! I’ve been building career memories for a decade. Over the last three years I’ve been reinvesting my own capital and time back it into my business. All the while learning and growing my net worth via public markets and crypto.

Over that same period, I also hosted 50+ virtual events with some of the world’s best VC investors and founders for our CEO group. Prior to all that, aside from my first job at Meta, I was lucky enough to raise $10 million in my twenties; doing my best to learn business, investor relations, and the startup mindset all at the same time. Maybe some of you can relate.

All that’s to say, I love business, I love money, I love to try and leverage my time.

This year, I set the goal to publish a thoughtful blog every Monday.. 52 of them! Don’ Daily is a recap of the entrepreneurship adventures I collect, as well as the new lessons I’m constantly learning from doing. My hope is that this entertains, inspires, and influences new creative ideas for you. Every Monday. If you enjoy the blog, please share!

If one of your friends loves startups, stocks, business, investing, let me know!

These are 7 of the last 9 times the SPY broke it’s 200 Day Moving Average.

You can see in most cases it’s pretty brutal for a period of about 6 months, then turns upward again. (unless it’s monumental like DotCom or GFC)

The chart, created by the outstanding @LanceRoberts, does miss 2 key points. The SPY also dropped below the 200 day moving average in October 2023, and March 2025.

The chart below shows how those moments were nothing more than a quick blip down over the course of 2 weeks to 1 month.

To me, that is 65% chance what is happening right now. I don’t think this is a 2008 level recession. However, I do foresee SPY hitting its 365 Day Moving Average, also featured in the 2023 and 2025 pullbacks.

Why do I not think this is structural? (At least, not yet). Said simply, we’re not heading towards a traditional recession. Earnings are growing, companies are making profits left and right. However, in an oddity, they’re doing this not as a result of manpower, but as a result of tech leverage.

So although companies are profiting nicely, their workers are lost in a sea of layoffs, AI replacement, prices that are ‘stuck’ at high levels, and daily anxiety inducing chaos.

You can see in the graph that EPS growth is increasing, yet PE multiples are contracting. This results in lower prices for stocks that are earning more money per share. This is the beginning of a bargain-making cycle, not a crisis.

Trying to build my X following

Though, it might feel like a crisis to those holding the bag. The number of S&P stocks down at least 20% is now over 40% of all 500 positions in the index.

You can see this quantity of S&P stocks down 20%+ only occurs during pullbacks, but does not always signal a recession or bear market. In fact, 2020, 2019, 2022, 2023, and 2026 all saw similar breadth of declines. None of those times resulted in prolonged bear markets. Quite the opposite actually, they proved to be a wall of worry.

Zooming in.. this is where it gets weird. Don’t get fooled by the below headline, let’s think about it from first principles.

As you can see, examining the extremes of Tech on the left, and Energy on the right, two things should stand out to you when referencing our earlier chart.

#1: Tech had the best earnings growth, yet is the third worst performing sector.

#2: Energy had the worst earnings growth, yet is the best performing sector.

Go figure. So the market is discounting the present, almost inversely. Yet at the same time, putting a premium on their perceived future.

Here’s the fundamental issue with such a bet; that posturing requires dramatic change from today’s reality, and predicting that future is inherently impossible for humans.

I’m not saying the market is wrong, but I’m saying data is in fact going against sentiment. Tech should be up, Energy should be down. In reality, and in my opinion, they should both be slightly up, in tandem. The reason Tech is growing earnings, is because of AI. And the reason Energy investors believe in the future, is because of AI.

When people are under pressure, it’s our primordial nature to act. We want to do something to relieve that pressure. Sometimes we make the right move, but a lot of the time we do something which we think will relieve the pressure, instead it hurts us worse.

If you’re in the woods and hear a rustle in the bushes, some people might sprint up and run away instantly. But then they trip over a branch, they break their wrist, and the rustle in the bushes turned out to have just been a chipmunk.

Trying to build my X following

That’s what I mean. In actuality, the best thing to do right now is prepare yourself for the worst, but don’t go running away tripping on a tree branch. Where you get yourself in trouble is when you become too negative, or too positive. And right now, negative sentiment is causing the market not to think very clearly.

The AAII survey shows 25% more Bears than Bulls

Historically, doing the opposite of this survey’s sentiment has led to more wins than losses after 12 months. I think a lot of the short term negativity has to do with it being a Midterm year. As I said in my last article:

Midterm year is inherently volatile, the party not in power is incentivized to want the market to tank, the party in power is incentivized to want a strong economy and market. This leads to a whiplash.

So.. what might be good timing? I mean genuinely, who knows. But looking at a few of the market forces in play, I think we can make a fair estimate for now.

In almost all previous scenarios, the market was negative % 1-month following the SPY touching 200 day MA. That’s my base case, so I wouldn’t expect. big reversal upwards before April 18th’ish (one month from when we first dipped below).

Then it brings us to May, when the market news will be filled with ‘new fed chair’ drama. That’s supposed to be Powell’s last month, and Warsh entry. But of course we’re in a stale mate there right now too.

Of the past 9 pullbacks, only GFC in 2008 and China Oil Shock 2015 had positive returns by month 3. (side note, GFC tanked from there, it was a bull trap).

Trying to build my X following

So 3 months would put us at June 17th’ish. Meaning July would have a bit of natural uptick momentum, as 50% of the pullbacks tracked were positive by month 6. However, Month 6 would land us right in the middle of Midterm elections, which has further downward pressure. So I guess what I’m saying, there’s a very realistic chance that stocks grow earnings all throughout 2026, yet stock market holders don’t begin to see those rewards until after midterms.

As you can see in the above dispersion of returns, the biggest clusters sit around the 20% (16+38=54), and the 0% (20+14=34). In fact, only 12 occurrences have returned between 8-12%, or less than 20%. So I ask myself, is this year a -20, an average, a 0%, or a 20%.

Using common sense, this year aint average. So I’m taking that off the table.

I’d also argue with growing EPS this year ain’t a down -20%. So remove that from table.

Leaving us with a decision to choose between 0% returns which occured 34/88, or 20%+ returns which occured 54/88.

It’s a 60/40 decision. 60% chance we find a miracle recovery and end up 20% like last year. Or 40% chance the cocktail of midterms and Iran result in a stagnant stock price despite growing EPS.

This latter scenario would test even the most patient of investors, as it would neither be crisis, nor bull market, it would just be boring. Minimal true signal, yet also a period with a lot of noise.

Trying to build my X following

I’d estimate there’s a 40% chance the market goes sideways all year, but with lots of volatility headline drama. 20% chance some exogenous force enters the restaurant to eat everyones meal. 40% chance Trump tweets out ‘war is over’ and we explode to the upside.

The trigger for the last probable outcome moment, is likely the 10-year hitting 4.5%.

The April lows of 2025 saw Trump’s reversal once he saw 10-year approaching 4.5%. This is I believe a key number he watches, and also probably the #1 reason why he wants Powell to drop rates so badly. This is a big risk to operating the USA efficiently. As of writing on March 20th, we are only 10 basis points away. As of re-writing on March 23rd, we nearly hit 4.5% and at that same moment Trump tweeted the war is simmering down :)

That’s where I think the world is going.

Follow on X for real time thoughts!

~@Donversationz

Don Stein

Contact: Linkedin — X — Youtube

© 2025, www.MeetDonStein.com - Thank you for reading!

And so over the last many years I’ve been developing my investment thesis. As Charlie Munger says, "fish where the fish are. You want to fish where the bargains are. It's that simple. If the fishing is really lousy where you are, you should probably look for another place to fish. We all do better hunting when we hunt where the hunting is easy."

I’ve made it my job to track both macro narratives, and pair this with heavy individual name stock analysis. It’s no secret right now, that things are extremely volatile. Both geo-politically, and economically from a narrative perspective. But as Warren Buffett says, “people behave in extreme ways in markets. Over time, that’s very good for people who keep their heads.”

So todays breakdown is a helpful guide for keeping your head on straight even while so much is swirling. I first wrote my Market Narrative post on X on March 8th. I noted 5 main narratives occuring at that time:

1. Ongoing US-Iran war

2. Midterm election dynamics

3. Technical levels of SPY

4. Private credit

5. AI uncertainty

Since that post, SPY is down about 1.4%, and we’ve added two more negative narratives to the mix.

6. GDP came in 50% lower than expected

7. We clocked in 3 weeks in a row of declines on the SPY which has not happened since Feb 2025. And of course, that was followed by a 15% drop before a fast recovery.

So in today’s convo, we will use data to discuss what happens if history repeats (or rhymes), how I’m thinking about risk, as well as what could turn this market up in a jiffy.

Scroll down to read more in today’s blog.

But first…

Hey, I’m Don! I’ve been building career memories for a decade. Over the last three years I’ve been reinvesting my own capital and time back it into my business. All the while learning and growing my net worth via public markets and crypto.

Over that same period, I also hosted 50+ virtual events with some of the world’s best VC investors and founders for our CEO group. Prior to all that, aside from my first job at Meta, I was lucky enough to raise $10 million in my twenties; doing my best to learn business, investor relations, and the startup mindset all at the same time. Maybe some of you can relate.

All that’s to say, I love business, I love money, I love to try and leverage my time.

This year, I set the goal to publish a thoughtful blog every Monday.. 52 of them! Don’ Daily is a recap of the entrepreneurship adventures I collect, as well as the new lessons I’m constantly learning from doing. My hope is that this entertains, inspires, and influences new creative ideas for you. Every Monday. If you enjoy the blog, please share!

Thanks for reading Don's Daily! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I’ve personally been cautious of Iran since February. And you can even see from my Feb 5th text messages I was worried about an escalating Iran conflict a full month before the USA made a move. This is one reason my portoflio performed well this past month, I was hedging against rising oil, fertilizer, and energy prices. The other risk I noted, Taiwan, still remains a black swan in my book. But for everyone’s sake, I hope the recent rumors of China moving ships near by the island are just continued military drills and posturing. I don’t expect an issue, but it’s worth noting.

Let’s first pull in some relevant data to put our narratives into context; Ongoing US-Iran war, Midterm election dynamics, Technical levels of SPY, Private credit, AI uncertainty, and Economy.

Ongoing US-Iran war: Brent crude surged to $90 a barrel by last Friday from roughly $70 before the strikes began.

Midterm election dynamics: Midterm election years historically delivers muted first-half returns and an average intra-year drawdown of 18%

Technical levels of SPY: In the past month, SPX saw it’s largest weekly decline in nearly 5 months, SPY closed below 100-day moving average for first time since April 2025 last week, and remains below this even still.

Private credit: Blackrock limited withdrawals this week a flagship debt fund ​after a surge in redemption requests, as investor worries mount around the $2 trillion private credit industry.

AI uncertainty: Adobe’s CEO is leaving in the midst of a rapid decline in stock price, and investor sentiment. As a result, their stock dropped 8% post earnings. Oracle on the other hand saw a 44% jump in Cloud revenue, throwing more mixed signals into this AI swell.

Economy: Worse-than-expected U.S. jobs data. The labor market is cracking: it’s the third negative print in five months, unemployment ticked to 4.4%, and long-term unemployment hit its highest since late 2021. The recent revision of the GDP was a sharp step down from the previous estimate of 1.4%

Market Signals: The last time we had 3 straight weeks of SPY declines like this, we dropped 15%, if we do the same here, then we would bottom out around $564 in April 2026. (Nobody can predict this, I surely cannot, this is only one pattern of many).

Valuations

They say valuations are a great red flag but a HORRIBLE timing indicator. And this is true, given we’ve been over valued for years. So is anything about this particular month different? Nobody knows. But it’s worth noting, sectors are all trading above their 10 year TTM PE averages. Meaning, on a backward looking basis, in recent history, expectations for companies to deliver outstanding earnings remains an elevated risk. If earnings take a hit, then we're likely to see PE compression as well. However, the market has continued to handle external shocks (Ukraine, Iran, Deepseek) pretty well. With short term declines, but overall, earnings remain strong.

Here’s a snapshot of the TTM P/E for major sectors from FinViz, the ‘red’ zone is correlatd to higher-than-normal TTM PE levels.

Overall S&P 500 10-year average TTM PE is around ~20. The current 2026 market sits around 25+ TTM PE, and even on a FWD PE basis we’re still elevated over the 10 year average.

The margin of safety embedded in equity prices has eroded considerably given the market is pricing in a very optimistic future.

What I’m Watching

I’m watching to see if SPY remains below the 100-day moving average, that was my original sell signal when we lost that support. I’m also watching to see if it touches the 200-day moving average. The way the market reacts to the 200-day will be very telling. As Charlie Munger says, “if all you ever did was buy high-quality stocks at the 200-week moving average, you would beat the S&P 500 by a large margin over time. The problem is that few human beings have that kind of discipline.”

I’m also watching high-yield credit spreads. Rather than reading all the headlines around private credit, I feel this is a better indicator of fear. Credit spreads are a decent timing indicator. Although valuations are a bad timing indicator, I’d argue high-yield credit spreads are probably the best representation of systemic risk. During our last 3-week decline in SPY in 2025, HY Spreads sat around 3.7. Today, they’re rising, but still remain lower at 3.17. This is one number I’m watching closely.

What I’m Doing:

If I was buying-holding, I’d likely be a cautious buyer, nibbling on adding to positions. But since I need to invest my cash into my fund in the upcoming weeks, I felt it was smarter for me to sit on the sidelines to avoid getting crunched. Because I’m going to invest all of my liquid capital, I’ve been coincidentally looking for a good time to exit. On March 5th, I saw that opportunity as the SPY couldn’t reclaim the 100-day moving average, and so I moved to cash. I sold at $680, we’re hovering $665 today.

That turned out to be a wise decision, so far. But the risk is that I’m unable to get the Fund’s brokerage accounts open before things turn up again. However, that risk is easier to swallow than a market decline in which I’m forced to liquidate just before making my investment.

Although I’m not worried about recession (yet), I am concerned with short term liquidity for myself personally. I didn’t want to get caught in a moment where risk was high, stock prices depressed, and I was required to move to cash so I could anchor the fund.

What I’m Hoping:

Best Case: SPY continues to downtrend slowly towards the 200-day moving average between March and April. I have new fund bank/brokerage/admin set up and operating by April 1st

Worst Case: Markets turn up (decidedly) before I’m operational and I miss a bit of the rally

I weighed by odds, and noticing smart investors are selling into rallies rather than buying dips, I felt things leaned 51% best case, 49% worst case, in the short term. So I’m sitting in mostly cash and moving as fast as humanely possible to launch this fund!

Thank you for reading!

Don Stein

Contact: Linkedin — X — Youtube

© 2025, www.MeetDonStein.com - Thank you for reading!

The Digital-Only Reign is Over as we Shift Back to a Physical Economy ran by Tradespeople, Mining Companies, and Rare Earth Elements

The prevailing economic narrative of the 21st century suggested a steady dematerialization of the global economy. As capital flowed into cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and global telecommunications, a dangerous illusion took hold: that the digital realm had somehow decoupled from the physical realm. By 2026, this illusion has been systematically dismantled by geopolitical realities. The digital domain is, and always has been, entirely tethered to the physical substrate.

You’re able to read this digitally on the internet because of physical fiber-optic cables drawn from ultra-pure silica glass via chemical vapor deposition and high temperature extrusion transmitting data as light pulses across continents and oceans, supported by silicon semiconductors refined through zone melting and doped with elements like phosphorus or boron for transistor functionality in your device, all powered by electricity conducted through copper or aluminum wires laid by steel-heavy trenching machines, and augmented by constellations of satellites orbiting at 550 kilometers altitude, launched atop multi-stage rockets like the Falcon 9, which propel payloads using combustion of refined kerosene and liquid oxygen researched by Robert Goddard in the 1920’s.

The most important materials in the context of technology, national security, defense (including radars, satellites, missiles, night vision, ammunition, and advanced electronics), aren’t just guesses. They’re backed by official U.S. government assessments like the USGS’s final 2025 List of Critical Minerals (60 minerals total, deemed essential with vulnerable supply chains) and targeted lists from DOD, NATO allies, and policy analyses focusing on defense and technology priorities.

For example, Antimony is a chemical element extracted from complicated combinations of these minerals. Without antimony, we’d have no hardened lead bullets for ammunition, no gallium antimonide (GaSb) substrates enabling high-performance infrared detectors in night vision goggles and thermal imaging systems, no critical antimony based semiconductors powering infrared sensors for missile guidance and targeting, and severely compromised radar and satellite capabilities reliant on advanced electronics where antimony compounds enhance diodes, precision optics, and communication hardware that trace back to refined physical materials extracted from the earth and processed via high-temperature metallurgy and chemical vapor deposition.

This single metalloid, designated a critical mineral for U.S. national security, underpins everything from necessary armor-piercing rounds (where it alloys with lead for durability and penetration) to the type-II superlattice structures in InAs/GaSb detectors that provide superior sensitivity for detecting heat signatures in low-light or obscured environments, directly supporting defense radars, reconnaissance satellites, and battlefield dominance. And to be clear.. that is just ONE critical material, there are 50+ if not 100’s. And they are all critical. All day every day the world is going through this process of extracting and crafting the products we take for granted. But after this post, you will appreciate the significance.

It’s become more important than ever in 2026 to manage this entire process on shore, locally, with minimal supply chain risks. And so today we dive into the most important raw materials, their resulting impact on production, and which USA companies are leading the charge.

The vulnerability of the global supply chain for these critical minerals has reached an unavoidable inflection point. Frenemy nations have successfully weaponized their monopolies on the extraction and refinement of these materials, instituting sweeping export bans on elements critical to the defense industrial base. In response, the United States has initiated a paradigm shifting industrial policy. Moving away from the “margin optimized globalization” theme of the late twentieth century, and transiting into a direct equity partner and market-maker for domestic mining, refining, and manufacturing operations. Hate it or love it, it is happening. My job is not to judge, my job is to understand and profit.

My exhaustive research details the technical, geopolitical, and economic state of the physical economy in 2026 (and its unbreakable ties to the digital). It analyzes the newly updated United States Geological Survey Critical Minerals List, dives deeply into the physical and chemical properties that make these materials irreplaceable in technology, defense applications, examines the corporate entities leading the reshoring effort, and evaluates the skilled infrastructure workforce required to build this domestic industrial base. The ultimate reality is stark: our technology and military are entirely dependent on the successful extraction, refinement, and manufacturing of raw physical materials from remote domestic and allied supply chains. And as always, I’m optimistic. I’m optimistic that the USA has another 250+ years of dominance, and I look forward to my grandkids’ grandkids’ grandkids celebrating the 500th anniversary of the USA; the most self sustained country in the world.

The Macroeconomic Shift: From Margin Optimization to Supply Chain Resilience

For four decades, the global economy operated almost exclusively on the principle of comparative advantage, optimizing supply chains for maximum financial margin. The extraction of raw ore and the heavy industrial refinement of pure elements were systematically offshored to jurisdictions with lower labor costs, weaker currencies, heavily subsidized energy, and less stringent environmental regulations. The natural outcome of this economic optimization was that adversarial nations accumulated dominant positions across the entire value chain of modern technology, and in return they purchased our debt. By controlling the processing capacity for rare earth elements, gallium, germanium, and antimony, foreign monopolies positioned themselves at the narrowest choke points of the global economy. None of this was made clear until Trump pointed it out, and I believe he correctly identified the underlying risk. You can debate his mechanisms, but it is hard to debate the underlying risk.

The cascading supply chain failures of recent years, coupled with rising geopolitical tensions, demonstrated that margin optimized supply chains possess zero resilience to systemic shocks. In the context of COVID, a supply chain disruption caused extreme price hikes and delayed product launches. But now in the context of national security, the inability to source antimony for armor-piercing munitions, or gallium for missile defense radars, represents a catastrophic vulnerability. As Warren Buffett teaches, the first thing he looks for when analyzing the long term durability of a company is to ensure there is a low probability of a long-tail catastrophic event which crashes the company. So a disruption in USA Defense supply chains halts the production of military assets, rendering trillion dollar military platforms completely inert, and also opening up global allies to vulnerabilities.

By 2026, the economic calculus of the United States has fundamentally shifted from a pure free-market approach to a hybrid state-capitalist model concerning critical infrastructure. The federal government, utilizing mechanisms like the Defense Production Act, the Department of Energy Loan Programs Office, the Office of Strategic Capital, and the Export-Import Bank of the United States, is actively subsidizing, financing, and taking direct equity stakes in domestic critical mineral projects. This transition acknowledges that national security shall dictate capital allocation alongside traditional market forces, ensuring that the entire process from mining raw ore, concentrating it to a higher-grade mix, extracting pure elements via high-temperature metallurgy, manufacturing specialized alloys, and building final defense products can be executed onshore or within tightly allied networks.

The 2025 Critical Minerals List and Geopolitical Weaponization

The foundational document driving this industrial pivot is the finalized 2025 List of Critical Minerals, published by the Department of the Interior through the United States Geological Survey. The 2025 list outlines 60 minerals deemed vital to the domestic economy and national security, all of which face severe potential risks from geopolitics.

The 2025 update marked a significant expansion from previous iterations, utilizing updated data-driven methods to assess how supply disruptions could paralyze the nation. Based on new data, public feedback, and urgent interagency recommendations from the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, and Defense, ~10 new minerals were added to the critical list.

Expansion of the Strategic Baseline: Newly Added Mineral Justification and Primary Defense/Economic Applications

The Department of Energy was particularly vocal during the interagency review period regarding the addition of metallurgical coal and uranium. The underlying logic is that advanced technologies are irrelevant without uninterrupted baseload power and the physical steel required to build heavy defense platforms.

The Weaponization of the Supply Chain

The urgency surrounding the list is driven by the overt weaponization of critical minerals. As global trade fractured, the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China implemented strict export controls and outright bans on a specific cohort of mineral commodities including gallium, germanium, antimony, tungsten, and tellurium.

Because a single nation produces the vast majority of the world’s refined gallium and controls the majority of the antimony and tungsten markets, these export bans were precisely targeted to cripple external industrial bases. This maneuvering has compelled the United States and Allies to rapidly initiate friend-shoring initiatives and fund domestic “mine-to-X” supply chains.

Mind Blowing Deep Dive: The Physics and Engineering of Defense Minerals

To truly comprehend the strategic gravity of the current friend-shoring effort, one must delve into the physical, chemical, and atomic properties of these materials. These elements are not chosen arbitrarily by defense contractors; they possess unique atomic structures that make them fundamentally irreplaceable in high-stress, high-frequency, and high-temperature military use cases.

Gallium and the Evolution of the Electromagnetic Spectrum

Gallium is a soft, silvery metal that has become the linchpin of modern electronic warfare and radar detection. Historically, military radar systems relied on mechanically steered arrays of large physical dishes that physically rotated to scan the horizon. Modern stealth fighters, such as the F-35 Lightning II, and advanced naval surface combatants utilize Active Electronically Scanned Array radars. These modern radar systems consist of hundreds or thousands of individual solid-state modules to transmit and receive. Instead of moving a physical dish, the radar shifts the phase of the radio waves emitted by these distinct modules, allowing the system to steer the beam electronically at instantaneous speeds, track multiple hypersonic targets simultaneously, and perform highly classified electronic attack and electronic support measures.

The foundational semiconductor material for earlier generations of these transmit and receive modules was Gallium Arsenide. However, the defense industry is undergoing a systemic transition to Gallium Nitride.

Gallium Nitride is a wide-bandgap semiconductor. The physical properties of its crystalline lattice allow it to withstand substantially higher electric fields than Gallium Arsenide or Silicon before experiencing electrical breakdown. This atomic resilience translates directly into profound advantages on the tactical battlefield. Mainly:

1. Power Density and Efficiency: Practical implementations of Gallium Nitride technology achieve power-added efficiencies of up to 65%, compared to merely 25-40% for Gallium Arsenide systems. This allows radar modules to transmit significantly more radio frequency power in a much smaller physical form factors.

2. Thermal Handling Capabilities: Radar transmission generates immense heat. Gallium Nitride systems can operate at substantially higher junction temperatures while maintaining stable electronic performance. This drastically reduces the need for heavy, complex liquid cooling systems within the constrained airframes of fighter jets, enabling more compact system designs and contributing to much longer component lifespans under stress.

3. High-Frequency Performance: Gallium Nitride also maintains its efficiency advantage at high frequencies, making it fundamentally superior for targeting radars and the sophisticated seekers built into the nose cones of precision missiles.

Advanced radar systems, such as the airborne arrays developed for the F-35 and the naval radars deployed across modernized fleets, are entirely dependent on a continuous, secure supply of highly refined gallium. Enabling Military superiority in the electromagnetic spectrum, rendering stealth aircraft impervious and strengthening missile defense shields.

Antimony: Kinetic Lethality and Infrared Detection

Antimony is an ultra-critical metalloid designated as a national security priority because it serves irreplaceable, dual-purpose roles in both kinetic warfare and advanced optical sensors.

In its kinetic applications, antimony is alloyed to manufacture hardened bullets and sophisticated munitions. Pure lead/led is far too soft to reliably penetrate modern ballistic materials or hardened vehicle armor. The addition of antimony chemically alters the crystalline structure of the lead, increasing its strength, and durability, without sacrificing the necessary mass required for deep kinetic penetration.

However, antimony’s most advanced and technologically complex application is in the fabrication of mid-wavelength infrared and long-wavelength infrared detectors. Historically, high performance thermal imaging systems and heat seeking missile guidance sensors relied on Mercury Cadmium Telluride. While effective in certain environments, Mercury Cadmium Telluride is notoriously difficult to manufacture uniformly over large focal plane arrays, suffers from long-term stability issues, and requires extreme, bulky cryogenic cooling systems to minimize electronic noise.

The modern defense solution relies on Antimony-based Type-II Superlattices, specifically utilizing alternating nanometer-thick layers of Indium Arsenide and Gallium Antimonide. A superlattice is an artificial crystal structure created by depositing these alternating layers via a highly complex process known as molecular beam epitaxy, usually occurring in multi-wafer high-vacuum reactors.

The Indium Arsenide and Gallium Antimonide superlattice operates on a specific “broken-gap” type-II band alignment. This quantum mechanical property allows defense engineers to artificially tune the effective energy bandgap of the sensor material simply by changing the microscopic thickness of the alternating layers. This means the sensor can be tailored perfectly to detect specific thermal wavelengths, ranging from three micrometers up to over twelve micrometers. Furthermore, the most advanced “M-structure” superlattices introduce an additional layer of Aluminum Antimonide. This layer acts as an energetic barrier for electrons in the conduction band and a double quantum well for holes in the valence band, significantly reducing the electrical noise that obscures thermal images.

The practical result is a thermal sensor that offers superior sensitivity for detecting faint heat signatures in low-light, obscured, or extreme battlefield environments. These superlattices provide unmatched fidelity for reconnaissance satellites surveying the globe, infantry night vision goggles, and the infrared seekers on advanced missiles. The recent foreign export bans on antimony are explicitly designed to throttle the production of these exact defense systems.

Rare Earth Elements: The Physics of Permanent Magnets

The term “Rare Earth Elements” refers to a specific group of 17 chemically similar elements on the periodic table. For defense applications, aerospace engineering, and advanced robotics, the most critical are Neodymium, Praseodymium, Dysprosium, and Terbium.

These specific elements are fundamental to the creation of magnets. Neodymium-Iron-Boron are the strongest known permanent magnets in existence, possessing exceptionally high magnetic fields in a specific, intended direction without wavering.

In military and defense contexts, these magnets are needed wherever mechanical torque or continuous electrical power generation is needed within a tightly constrained volume and weight limit. They actuate the tiny, speedy aerodynamic control fins on guided missiles, control the gyroscopic attitude of satellites orbiting the earth, drive the highly efficient electric motors in autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles, power advanced sonar arrays, and operate the electrical generators tucked inside the engine bays of fighter jets. All fairly important stuff, I’ll say.

While Neodymium and Praseodymium form the base of the magnet, Dysprosium and Terbium (Heavy Rare Earths) must be added to the alloy to increase the material’s resistance to demagnetization at extremely high temperatures. Because missile chassis and jet engine compartments experience massive thermal loads, a standard magnet would instantly lose its magnetic properties. The heavy rare earths prevent this catastrophic failure. Given that a single foreign adversary controls an estimated 70-90% of global rare earth processing and magnet manufacturing, this is clearly a glaring vulnerability for the USA and NATO.

Tungsten, Germanium, and High-Purity Silicon

The defense supply chain relies on a broader tapestry of specialized elements, each uniquely suited to extreme environments. Tungsten possesses the highest melting point of any known metal, turning to liquid only at an astonishing 3,422 degrees Celsius 🤯. It possesses a physical density comparable to that of radioactive uranium. Because of these properties, tungsten is entirely unmatched and irreplaceable for kinetic energy penetrators, and for the high-temperature superalloys used in the leading edges of hypersonic missiles and turbine blades of high-performance jet engines.

Germanium is a metalloid that is highly transparent to infrared light. While glass blocks thermal radiation, germanium allows it to pass through. Therefore, it is used to craft the actual physical lenses for the thermal imaging systems and night vision goggles discussed previously, acting in physical concert with the antimony based superlattice detectors. It is also a foundational substrate enabling solar cells that power satellites.

High Purity Silicon, now explicitly prioritized on the 2025 critical list, is the foundational, hyper refined substrate upon which all modern digital logic, memory chips, and artificial intelligence systems are etched. Without domestic silicon refining capabilities, the software and artificial intelligence algorithms developed by Western technology firms have no physical hardware upon which to execute their calculations.

Tantalum, Titanium, Cobalt, and Copper

Rounding out the physical materials necessary for defense dominance are metals required for structural integrity and energy transmission.

Tantalum is highly resistant to corrosion and is used to manufacture highly reliable, specialized capacitors used in the electronics of satellites, radars, and missiles that must endure extreme vibration and temperature fluctuations without failing.

Titanium is prized for its extraordinary strength-to-weight ratio and natural resistance to saltwater corrosion. It is the primary alloy used in the lightweight airframes of fighter jets, the pressure hulls of deeeeep diving submarines, and modern ballistic armor. The refinement of raw titanium ore into intermediate “titanium sponge” is a industrial choke point again heavily dominated by non-allied nations.

Though the graphic highlights REE dependency, an equally important factor used in these machines is Cobalt (Co, atomic number 27) which is a transition metal, not a REE. It’s classified separately as a critical mineral for defense. Cobalt is a crucial additive in the creation of superalloys for jet engines and gas turbines, ensuring they maintain structural integrity under intense centrifugal force and heat. It is also a vital component in the lithium-ion batteries that power military drones, portable soldier communication nodes, and space assets.

Finally (and this one isn’t a secret to anyone), copper, recently elevated to the critical list, is the literal nervous system of the defense apparatus. From the intricate wiring inside a radar array to the conductive cables required for base infrastructure, the surging demand for copper driven by tech and military needs has created severe supply shocks.

A Over-Promised, Under-Delivered Saving Grace: The Emergence of Graphene

If Graphite is layers upon layers of Carbon, then Graphene is just one single layer. Known as a 2D single atom thick hexagonal lattice of carbon. With the growth of companies like HydroGraph Clean Power Inc. led by the Steve-Jobs like Kjirstin Breure, Graphene seems to be finally having its moment after 20+ years of remaining in the lab.

Graphene is shifting from theoretical physics to practical defense applications in 2026. It is stronger than steel, harder than diamonds, and exhibits superior electrical and thermal conductivity compared to copper, with vastly better electron mobility than standard silicon. Enabling fast charging of batteries, longer storage, and a plethora of other benefits.

Extensive research and military testing are validating graphene’s utility across several critical vectors. First, graphene nanocomposites are highly effective at absorbing and reflecting electromagnetic radiation. Applied as ultra-thin coatings to aircraft, naval vessels, or sensitive communication electronics, they provide essential electromagnetic interference shielding, protecting assets against electronic warfare jamming and the devastating effects of electromagnetic pulses.

Second, the development of highly conductive graphene inks and printed electronics allows for the creation of flexible, lightweight, and durable antennas. These antennas can be woven directly into a soldier’s tactical uniform enabling high frequency communications essential for the heavily networked battlefield.

Third, adding fractional percentages of pure graphene to thermoplastic resins increases the tensile strength and fatigue resistance of aerospace composites while simultaneously reducing weight of the material. This enhances the payload capacity / fuel efficiency / structural survivability of rockets, drones, and next-generation aircraft.

Operating in the highly specialized nanomaterials sector, HydroGraph Clean Power utilizes a patented, proprietary detonation process utilizing hydrocarbon gases to synthesize pure graphene. Synthetic. Unlike traditional methods that rely on the mechanical or chemical exfoliation of naturally occurring mined graphite, this detonation synthesis produces a turbostratic, fractal graphene with an astonishing purity level of 99.8 percent, featuring total crystallization. For comparison, this is much more pure than competitors, it seems.

Because the process does not require heavy mining equipment or massive chemical refinement vats, the company’s modular commercial production units require less CapEx while generating scaled volume. This cost-effective synthesis theoretically positions the company to supply the exact type of ultra-high-purity graphene required for next-generation defense applications, such as the aerospace composites and electromagnetic shielding discussed earlier, entirely bypassing the vulnerable overseas graphite mining supply chain.

More on Graphene: NanoXplore and the Broader Market

Operating as a volume leader in the North American market, NanoXplore produces thousands of tons of graphene powder annually. While focused heavily on commercial applications, the company provides standard and custom graphene-enhanced masterbatch plastic pellets and composites to various customers in the transportation and defense sectors. Alongside other equipment manufacturers and application developers, the maturation of these companies highlights the transition of the graphene supply chain from volatile laboratory experiments into reliable, industrial-scale production capable of supporting defense procurement.

We hope Graphene becomes as important as it’s sold to be. It would be a massive unlock for tech, defense, and electrification (EVs, batteries, etc).

Project Vault: The Sovereign Critical Minerals Reserve

Recognizing the severe threat posed by centralized global supply chains and export bans, the United States government took unprecedented economic action in early 2026. In coordination with the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the federal government launched a much needed initiative called Project Vault.

Project Vault is a $12B initiative designed to establish a domestic stockpile of critical minerals. Conceptually, it is modeled after the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was established in the 1970’s to protect the nation from oil embargoes. And is architected through public-private partnerships. The initiative is backed by a $10B loan authorization from the Export-Import Bank, plus $2B in committed private capital. Frankly, this should probably be 10x bigger, but I assume we’ll dollar cost average over time to avoid driving up pricing too quickly. That supply shock would’ve dismantle the entire point of doing this.

The overarching objective of Project Vault is to insulate domestic industrial base from abrupt foreign export bans, unexpected supply shocks, and the predatory price manipulation tactics historically employed by China. For example, China would flood the market to keep prices suppressed, thus allowing them to maintain position as the only financially justified location in the world.

By USA stockpiling heavily refined elements like gallium ingots, antimony trisulfide, and separated rare earth oxides in highly secure domestic facilities, the government helps justify local companies to continue production even in the event of dropping prices.

In other words, Project Vault functions as a market stabilization mechanism. Avoiding Global powers being able to bankrupt new ventures before they can achieve commercial scale. Vault acts as a well-capitalized buyer of last resort committing to purchase domestically produced critical minerals at the price floor. Thus ensuring domestic mining operations, like in Idaho, have a guaranteed off taker at a price that sustains their long-term scaling, permanently de-risking the immense capital requirements to operate new mines.

This initiative serves as the capstone of a much broader strategy. Over recent years, federal entities have issued billions in authorizations and letters of interest for domestic and allied projects. This includes hundreds of millions for domestic rare earth processing, massive loans for domestic lithium extraction from clay, and significant international financing to secure allied supply chains, such as copper and gold production facilities in South Asia. The overarching strategy is designed to create a allied focused architecture that bypasses choke points entirely.

From Silicon Valley to Silver Valley: Reshoring the Physical Supply Chain in Idaho

In 2026, a specific cohort of companies has emerged as the vanguard of this renaissance. But the scariest part, is that some of these ‘critical’ companies aren’t even doing revenue yet. You can see in the below graph, mining industry has been taking a hit for decades.

The USA is behind, but again, catching up quickly. Thanks to regions like Silvery Valley in Idaho.

Antimony and Silver: Highest Priorities

Perpetua Resources

Perpetua Resources is rapidly advancing the Stibnite Gold Project in the central region of Idaho. The Stibnite site is of paramount national importance because it contains the only known, economically viable reserve of antimony in the United States, hosting an estimated reserve of one hundred and forty-eight million pounds of the critical metalloid. Upon reaching operational maturity, Perpetua explicitly projects it will supply up to thirty-five percent of total domestic antimony demand during its first six years of full-scale operations.

They’ve lost $45M over the past 12 months, and aren’t even generating revenue. Yet, their success is very important. And this is why it’s critical we restore and reshore, fast!

Perpetua’s immense strategic importance is reflected in its tiered government backing. By the end of 2025, the company had received over eighty million dollars in direct federal funding. This includes capital injections under the Defense Production Act to advance construction readiness and permitting, alongside significant awards through the Defense Ordnance Technology Consortium. The company also secured term sheets for up to two billion dollars in potential debt financing from the Export-Import Bank.

On the technological front, Perpetua has entered a strategic agreement with the Idaho National Laboratory to host, commission, and operate a flexible, modular pilot processing plant. This plant is designed to receive material directly from the Stibnite project and produce high-quality, military-specification antimony trisulfide, bypassing foreign refining bottlenecks entirely and proving that the United States can produce the exact chemical compounds required for defense munitions domestically.

United States Antimony Corporation, and Americas Gold and Silver Company

This is a wonderful story about two CEO’s who only first met last month, and already have inked a joint venture deal (51%, 49%) to mine and process Antimony entirely in Idaho. JV was announced February 10, 2026.

United States Antimony Corporation owns and operates the Bear River Zeolite mine and processing facility in southeast Idaho (for zeolite, a different mineral used in filtration) but more recently, in February 2026, they announced a joint venture with Americas Gold and Silver to build a new commercial-scale hydrometallurgical processing facility in Idaho’s Silver Valley.

United States Antimony Corporation in late 2025, the company secured a monumental, quarter-billion-dollar contract with the Defense Logistics Agency to continuously supply antimony metal ingots directly to the national defense stockpile.

To secure the raw feedstock required to fulfill this government contract, United States Antimony entered a highly synergistic joint venture with Americas Gold and Silver. Americas Gold and Silver operates the fully permitted Galena Complex in Idaho, which successfully produced over half a million pounds of antimony contained in concentrate in 2025, alongside its primary silver output. Antimony being the byproduct in this scenario.

Previously, Americas Gold and Silver would ship it to Canada, and then United States Antimony Corporation would buy it, bring it back to USA, and refine it. This is dumb, and their new JV ensures no need for an over-priced middle man.

This partnership effectively creates a fully localized, closed-loop supply chain from the mine shaft directly to the military stockpile, utilizing American ore and American processing technology.

Sunshine Silver Mining & Refining

Operating in the private sector with heavy backing from major institutional investment groups, Sunshine Silver Mining & Refining closed a $75M equity financing round to accelerate the development of the historic Sunshine mine and its associated physical refinery.

The Sunshine refinery, which already benefits from hundreds of millions of dollars in legacy infrastructure, is fully permitted and currently being upgraded to specifically handle the complex processing of antimony. The company is targeting first large-scale production by 2028 (Yikes! So slow..). Because the facility is designed to process both its own extracted ore and third-party concentrates, Sunshine boldly projects that its facility could supply approximately 40% of domestic antimony demand by 2028, rising to as much as 80% in the following years. Not sure I buy it! The company also intends to integrate the production of highly gallium and germanium, creating a multifaceted minerals hub.

Bunker Hill Mining Corp.

Also operating in the prolific Silver Valley of Idaho, Bunker Hill Mining is in the final stages of revitalizing the historic Bunker Hill Mine, aggressively targeting a full production restart in the first half of 2026. The company represents the modernization of legacy physical assets, transitioning from infrastructure rehabilitation to active mining preparation.

By the close of 2025, the company reported that its processing plant construction had reached 80%+ completion, with its critical tailings filter press advancing rapidly. What distinguishes Bunker Hill in the modern era is its deployment of AI. The company has actively integrated AI-assisted mineral discovery platforms to remap the historic underground workings, allowing their geologists to target higher-grade silver, zinc, and lead mineralization. By deploying AI to distressed assets, Bunker Hill aims to hopefully inject new life into the North American supply chain with substantially lower capital intensity than required for a new greenfield project.

I believe they partnered with VRIFY for the AI tech. Which offers the industry’s leading AI-assisted mineral discovery platform, including DORA for prospect mapping. It processes geospatial datasets with proprietary AI models to uncover mineralization patterns, generate targets, and support investor/regulator communication. Used by companies like Bunker Hill (for remapping historic workings in Idaho’s Silver Valley), Metallic Minerals, Nevada Sunrise, and Equinox Gold.

Hecla Mining

Hecla Mining, a dominant, long-standing player in the global silver sector, reported record-breaking production at its Lucky Friday mine in Idaho, achieving an astonishing output of over 5.2 million ounces of silver in 2025, alongside massive tonnage of lead and zinc.

Recognizing that the physical economy requires extracting minerals at increasingly extreme and hostile depths, Hecla has invested heavily in complex subterranean infrastructure. The company advanced a massive surface cooling project designed to deliver mechanically chilled air deep underground. This infrastructure is an absolute necessity to maintain safe, survivable working conditions for miners as operations advance deeper into hotter geological zones where the high-grade silver and lead are located. Furthermore, Hecla’s ability to navigate complex labor relations, securing a long-term union contract, ensures that this critical domestic production will remain uninterrupted through the end of the decade.

Rare Earth Elements: Breaking the Magnet Monopoly

The extreme vulnerability of the Neodymium-Iron-Boron permanent magnet supply chain has led to dramatic federal interventions to support domestic rare earth processing and downstream manufacturing.

MP Materials

MP Materials operates the Mountain Pass mine in California, which stands as the only active, scaled rare earth mine in North America. Historically, the company successfully mined the raw ore but lacked the complex domestic infrastructure to refine it, forcing them to ship the concentrated material to foreign adversaries for separation into individual elements.

To permanently break this reliance, the Department of Defense partnered with MP Materials in a transformational, multi-billion-dollar public-private package. The cornerstone of this partnership is a modified contract-for-difference agreement. The government legally guarantees a hard price floor of $110/kilogram for the company’s refined NdPr output over a 10 year period. In late 2025, when predatory global market prices dipped below this floor, MP Materials realized over $50M in price protection agreement income. This mechanism protected their margins, and USA independence, allowing the company to a shield from foreign economic implosion attempts.

You can read my full deep dive on MP which I wrote last month on X: https://x.com/compose/articles/edit/2019754152381820928

Simultaneously, MP Materials is aggressively moving downstream to capture the entire value chain. In early 2026, the company broke ground on a massive, 120 acre rare earth magnet manufacturing campus in Texas, called 10X. Aided by $100Ms in state incentives and federal loans, this facility is designed to produce 10,000+ metric tons of finished Neodymium-Iron-Boron permanent magnets annually, complete with closed-loop recycling capabilities. This single facility is intended to provide the magnets necessary to power defense drones, commercial robotics, and electric vehicles, backed by guaranteed long-term offtake agreements from major technology conglomerates.

USA Rare Earth Company

USA Rare Earth is advancing the development of the Round Top deposit in Texas, widely considered by geologists to be the richest known domestic deposit of the highly coveted heavy rare earth elements.

In early 2026, the company announced a multi-billion-dollar financing package. The government took a direct 10% equity stake in USA Rare Earth, acquiring millions of shares of common stock and equivalent warrants. This was paired with over $1B+ in federal debt financing and equivalent private equity investment. This unprecedented equity position guarantees intense government oversight and financial support to ensure the Round Top mine-to-magnet supply chain achieves full commercial operation by 2028, securing domestic access to materials completely unavailable outside of hostile nations.

Trilogy Metals and Ambler Metals: Upper Kobuk Mineral Projects in Alaska

Trilogy Metals, operating in a highly structured joint venture with a major global mining conglomerate, manages Ambler Metals. This entity controls the Upper Kobuk Mineral Projects located in the remote wilderness of northwestern Alaska, recognized as a world-class, high-grade deposit of copper, zinc, lead, and cobalt.

In late 2025, Trilogy announced a landmark investment directly from the Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital. Mirroring the strategy deployed with rare earths, the government acquired an approximate 10% equity stake in Trilogy Metals, injecting $10m’s to advance the de-risking and exploration of the Arctic deposit.

However, this transaction highlights the immense complexities of reshoring heavy industry. The federal government’s dual role as both an incentivized equity shareholder seeking a return on investment and the supposedly impartial regulatory body overseeing the strict environmental permitting of the contentious access road required to reach the mine has raised profound policy questions. The joint venture is attempting to navigate these hurdles by leveraging expedited federal permitting frameworks designed to enhance coordination for critical infrastructure, balancing the absolute necessity of domestic copper production with stringent environmental protections and the livelihoods of indigenous communities.

Albemarle Co. and the Kings Mountain lithium project in NC

Focusing on energy storage, Albemarle is advancing the massive redevelopment of the Kings Mountain lithium project in North Carolina. Recognizing the necessity of domestic battery supply chains for both electric vehicles and specialized military communications equipment, the federal government awarded Albemarle massive grants, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, funded through bipartisan infrastructure legislation.

These funds are explicitly directed to partially fund the design, construction, and operation of a massive mineral processing plant capable of producing hundreds of thousands of metric tons of spodumene concentrate annually. To address environmental concerns associated with heavy lithium extraction, Albemarle’s engineering plans include designing the mine to operate on a closed-loop water system utilizing collected precipitation, and actively developing secondary commercial markets for processed ore tailings to minimize the physical waste footprint.

The Execution Layer: Workforce Deployment

The strategic posturing, the billions in allocated capital, and the geological wealth of the North American continent are entirely useless without the physical labor required to build the infrastructure. Hydrometallurgical processing plants, rare earth magnet factories, deep-shaft mine cooling systems, and highly automated defense foundries must be physically assembled by human hands. To reshore the supply chain, the United States also must restore highly skilled tradespeople.

The deployment of this physical infrastructure relies heavily on specialized, publicly traded electrical and mechanical contracting conglomerates. These companies are experiencing unprecedented, historic growth, driven simultaneously by the massive push for commercial electrification, the explosive construction of data centers for artificial intelligence, and the desperate revitalization of the heavy industrial base.

The Heavy Industrial Constructors

The companies responsible for physically assembling these reshoring megaprojects manage workforces larger than many standing armies, organized under complex union agreements and rigorous safety protocols.

MYR Group

Operating as a premier specialty contractor serving the electric utility infrastructure market across North America, MYR Group reported record-shattering full-year revenues well in excess of three and a half billion dollars in 2025. More tellingly, the company reported an immense, multi-billion-dollar backlog of guaranteed work.

The company employs massive teams of highly trained electricians across two primary segments: Transmission and Distribution, and Commercial and Industrial. They are the personnel physically responsible for building the high-voltage transmission lines, complex substations, and dedicated clean energy projects necessary to provide the massive, uninterrupted electrical power required by heavy industrial processing facilities and high-vacuum semiconductor foundries.

EMCOR Group

Operating as an absolute titan in the mechanical and electrical construction sector, EMCOR generated revenues approaching seventeen billion dollars in 2025. This staggering financial output is supported by a massive, highly structured workforce of approximately forty-four thousand employees, the majority of whom are represented by labor unions under hundreds of distinct collective bargaining agreements.

EMCOR’s record remaining performance obligations underscore the immense, nationwide demand for complex facility construction, heavy HVAC integration, and power systems engineering. When a rare earth mining company needs to construct a billion-dollar, heavily ventilated, environmentally contained magnet manufacturing facility, they must rely on the structured deployment and project management expertise of conglomerates like EMCOR.

Quanta Services and Comfort Systems USA

Quanta Services continues to dominate the utility infrastructure space, frequently ranking as the largest electrical contractor by revenue. Recognizing the specific, specialized needs of the reshoring effort, Quanta recently acquired leading mechanical, plumbing, and process infrastructure providers specifically to strengthen its craft labor capabilities for the expanding technology and manufacturing markets.

Similarly, Comfort Systems USA, which provides highly specialized mechanical, electrical, and plumbing services, reported massive surges in net income, driven by the intense demand for the installation and continuous maintenance of the complex piping, fluid dynamics, and electrical systems required in heavy manufacturing and processing plants.

The Plumbing and Maintenance Layer

While the heavy industrial contractors build the mega-facilities, the broader physical economy requires constant maintenance of its fundamental fluid and waste systems.

Chemed Corporation (Roto-Rooter)

The plumbing and mechanical maintenance sector is highly fragmented, but conglomerates like Chemed, through its massive Roto-Rooter subsidiary, manage thousands of licensed plumbers nationwide. While operating more at the commercial and residential service level rather than heavy industrial construction, the management and continuous training of thousands of tradespeople highlight the vast scale of human capital required to maintain the fundamental water, drainage, and mechanical systems that keep municipalities and commercial hubs functional, allowing the broader economy to operate without interruption.

The availability of this skilled labor is the ultimate operational bottleneck of the entire physical economy. The speed at which a mining corporation can build an antimony processing plant in Idaho, or the pace at which a rare earth conglomerate can scale a magnet facility in Texas, is completely and entirely dictated by the availability, training, and deployment of the electricians, pipefitters, welders, and mechanical engineers.

Summary: Strategic Second and Third Order Implications

The restructuring of the United States’ physical economy in 2026 carries profound downstream effects to reshape continental landscapes for decades.

First, the direct equity investments by the federal government into publicly traded and private mining companies signal a permanent departure from traditional free-market principles within the defense sector. By holding equity stakes, the government has essentially created a class of sovereign-backed enterprises. This guarantees critical projects will not fail due to short-term commodity price fluctuations, as the state will utilize its vast resources to protect equity and national security. This of course is controversial, and definitely politicized.

This model also introduces profound regulatory complexities. The government is now operating as an incentivized shareholder seeking operational success and the regulator tasked with protecting public lands, creating a delicate tension between the speed of industrialization and ecological preservation.

Second, reshoring heavy industry, mining, and metallurgy is inflationary at face value, but with the right policies can be mitigated. Domestic environmental compliance, the utilization of unionized labor, the immense CapEx of establishing power infrastructure, and the strength of USD Western debt make American-produced antimony, rare earths, and electronics are more expensive to produce than foreign counterparts. That is the likely reality, but doesn’t necessarily mean this is incorrect. In fact, it might mean it’s just the medicine we must take to stay healthy over the long term.

Third, the immense difficulty, time delay, and capital intensity of permitting and opening new physical mines are forcing mining companies to adopt AI to target their drilling, maximizing resource extraction without expanding their physical footprint. Advanced materials companies are utilizing synthetic chemistry, such as detonation processes, to create superior materials like graphene from basic gases, attempting to bypass traditional terrestrial mining entirely. The constraints of the physical world are forcing software and artificial intelligence to optimize physical processes at an breakneck speed.

Finally, the sheer scale of the required raw materials dictates that domestic reshoring alone is insufficient to meet the demands of the defense and technological base. The formation of initiatives like Project Vault and the multi-billion-dollar international loan portfolios of federal banks illustrate the necessity of “friend-shoring.” The United States is actively establishing a deeply integrated, highly capitalized economic architecture with tightly bound allied nations designed to create a secure, walled garden of global supply chains that excludes adversarial monopolies from critical procurement networks. This is happening across copper projects in South Asia or lithium extraction in Australia.

Conclusion

The realization that the real economy is undeniably physical has fundamentally reshaped industrial policy, corporate strategy, and national defense posturing in 2026. The ethereal concepts of cloud computing, artificial intelligence algorithms, and invisible electronic warfare are unequivocally anchored to the ground by heavy metals, high-temperature metallurgy, and extraction of the Earth’s crust.

As adversaries have successfully weaponized their historical dominance over esoteric elements like gallium, germanium, antimony, and rare earths, the extreme vulnerability of the Western defense apparatus has been laid bare. Without these specific elements, advanced radar arrays go blind, thermal imaging systems go dark, permanent magnets lose their torque, and precision munitions lose their armor-piercing lethality.

In response, historic alignment of federal capital, defense policy, and private enterprise has emerged. Through market-making mechanisms like Project Vault, massive direct equity purchases by federal departments, and the heavy utilization of emergency production acts, the United States is rapidly attempting to reverse engineer 40 years of offshoring to build a resilient, localized supply chain. And btw, this injection into private sector isn’t any different than the Fed printing money to bail out banks, or FDIC ensuring banks are stable. So before you complain about what is happening with rare earths, think holistically. The Government support of important industries like mining, banks, and transportation has for a long time been fundamental to USA prosperity.

From mining companies navigating the incredibly complex permitting of Idaho antimony, to rare earth conglomerates executing vertically integrated manufacturing facilities in Texas, to the infrastructure giants deploying the 10,000+ of skilled tradesmen required to build it all... welcome to 2026’s geopolitical paradigm. The transition from a margin-optimized fragile economy to a resilience optimized model is messy. Yet, it is recognized at the highest levels of industry as an absolute strategic necessity.

In the geopolitical landscape of the late 2020’s, technological supremacy and national sovereignty are not won in the digital realm; they are extracted from the earth, refined in the furnace, and forged by tradespeople.

~@Donversationz

⚠️ DISCLAIMER:

I’m researching all of this because I’m searching for global trends for myself. I own stocks of companies mentioned in this article, and in NO WAY AT ALL should you take this as investment advice. I’m creating this as a way to help me learn. I am not an Einstein genius, so educating myself on where the world going is very important for my relevancy.

I write this as a way to learn, and I hope that you are also learning. If you have questions, or comments, please don’t hesitate to reach out or respond on X.

If you are reading this to learn, or for any other reason, that is great. But you MUST do your own diligence, validate all the data, study these things yourself. I am just one guy trying my best, I know nothing, and am attempting to learn in public.

I hope you take the time to read, learn, follow, and share this information with important people in your life.

Hey, I’m Don! I’ve been building career memories for a decade. I love business, I love investing, I love to learn new things.

Share with a friend to support my ideas.

I saw a headline in December about a company (Hut8) that just did a ~250 Megawatt deal with Google, Anthropic and Fluidstack.

So I cold messaged their Head of Investor Relations, Sue Ennis, who was nice enough to help educate myself, and all my viewers about how AI is becoming the #1 customer of power. She was nice enough to hop on a call and explain it to us all. Interview on Youtube below, or watch on X.

She’s an expert on AI x Energy given her role. I specifically asked her to ‘explain this to my newsletter readers like we are a fifth grader’ so that it is easy enough for anyone (aka, me) to understand. It’s critically important we begin learning about this National power constraint. (FOLLOW ! She’s amazing!!!)

Take a look at this graph, this is a problem.

The USA needs to unite. I’m sick of the division. We are all going to regret hating each when we realize it’s come at a cost much greater than political discrepancies. I would rather not live in a world where every country uses China’s AI tools because they are the only ones who could generate the power necessary. That would be bad.

I’ve been grinding VR startups for a full decade... raised the money the hard way, built the virtual worlds, the avatars, the whole thing. But last September I finally walked away. RIP. Lost passion, shut down my founder group, and started researching AI instead.

VR’s biggest problem was always hardware. Plain and simple. You could build whatever you wanted but if Meta can’t sell the headsets then nobody’s strapping on the face-bricks. Their track record... not great.

AI though?

AI’s biggest problem is power.

*clears throat, regretting that I’m about to reference Ray Dalio*

Ray Dalio said recently...

“Whoever wins the technology war is going to win the military war.”

And, he’s correct.

Therefore, whoever wins the military war wins the geopolitical and economic war. Being the leader in power and technology is not a ‘nice to have’. It’s critical for a nation’s independence.

Our economy is in the midst of a violate shift away from Office Buildings and into Data Centers.

I thought to myself... almost every single person in the world already owns 1+ AI devices. Phones. Computers. Even the Alexas sitting on the counter. VR was capped by hardware sales no matter how good content got. AI felt different. Or so I thought.

But the deeper I went the more I realized AI isn’t just software. It has a real physical problem, too. Not hardware exactly. It’s energy. Construction. Government approvals. Rare earth materials. All the real world stuff.

You can see the importance of Energy reflected in the Stock Market returns for 2026 so far.

To actually learn how this is all unfolding, I cold messaged two people who live in this world every day.

Sue Ennis of course (mentioned above), and also one unnamed guy who’s built hundreds of megawatts for Bitcoin miners over the past decade.

I asked him... “can you teach me?”

And we hopped on a Zoom call.

The Bitcoin guy told me back in the mining days he was generating about $50K of revenue per megawatt. Now with AI he’s selling each megawatt for $500K+. Step function.

But he also said the biggest blocker isn’t the demand, it is the antiquated grid and the political headwinds.

Cities are worried about energy prices for regular citizens. Protests. Permit denials. All of it.

Sue echo’ed this point by expelling howTexas is already over capacity. Roughly 250 GW of demand applications came in during 2025 chasing only 180 GW on the ERCOT grid. So companies are forced to start looking at Louisiana, or wherever else they can find power.

Meanwhile, Datacenter’s in the USA are being canceled left and right. Over 25 were canceled in Q1 2026 alone so far, equating to roughly 5 Gigawatts of capacity, gone.

And it’s not just her Hut8 team. Look at CEO’s from Nvidida, AMD, Tesla, Microsoft, Meta, Google…. it’s getting scary.

They are all saying the exact same thing.

Jensen Huang at Nvidia...

“power generation and grid capacity.”

Lisa Su at AMD...

“scaling massive data centers within power limits.”

Sundar Pichai at Google...

“local building permits and a lack of electricians.”

Other CEO’s echoing the same message:

Elon Musk...

“the electrical grid growing too slowly.”

Satya Nadella at Microsoft...

“fully permitted buildings with power already connected.”

Mark Zuckerberg at Meta...

“securing raw power before the competitors do.”

Andy Jassy at Amazon...

“decade-long wait times for grid connections.”

Michael Dell...

“customers lacking office power and liquid cooling.”

Larry Ellison at Oracle...

“the need for gigawatt-scale power plants.”

The list goes on and on… we are CONSTRAINED! And the people at the top know it, because they are constrained by it.

p.s. Here’s a very funny parody video about all this, but also, plausible..

After a couple months studying all this I’m very optimistic we can figure this out, but also acknowledge that AI is China’s chance to leapfrog the USA. And we are not going to let that happen!

They’re less limited by energy materials and politics in the short term.

We’re less limited in capital controls, military, and global influence.

So it’s a race. USA has to get the energy, materials, and politics fixed before China gets the capital, military, and influence side sorted.

But sadly the USA seems to be getting in our own way. A report just came out this week from Bloomberg stating data center construction is falling even as demand for AI computing is soaring. Not good.

“Construction of new data centers in the US fell for the first time since 2020 despite soaring demand for artificial intelligence computing capacity, as developers face delays in permitting, zoning and power procurement.”

Capacity under construction dropped to 5.99 gigawatts at the end of 2025. Down from 6.35 gigawatts at the end of 2024.

That’s a decline of about 0.36 GW or roughly 5.7 percent.

Meanwhile China is adding around 7 GW of new data center capacity every year.

The slowdown is happening even with the massive AI-driven boom pulling for more.

The three big reasons? Grid constraints. Regulatory friction. Power availability challenges.

Exact same three I kept hearing from the smart people I talked to.

We are going to be capacity constrained. And soon.

That’s where my head’s at right now.

I hope you enjoyed, and learned something!

Don Stein

Contact: Linkedin — X — Youtube

[Preview]

Thanks to AI, I was able to write, produce, and publish 38 songs to Spotify in 6 weeks

Are we going to win a Grammy? No… but that’s not the point!

This is all about exploring quality AI tools. From a young age I’ve always wanted to make music. And I always have… but admittedly it’s amateur. So think of this blog as less about music, and more about the power of AI.

In my old ways…. it would have taken me 4 months to create albums like this, but now with AI… it takes days.

Back in the day if you were talented, and could sing, then you’d have been scooped up by the record labels, and they’d distribute you across Tower Records and more. But now…. in a world where almost anyone can make a half-way decent sounding song… the talent matters less than the distribution. The same law applies to vibe coding.. if anyone can make a basic website.. then the product matters less than the amount of attention it can garner through marketing.

I wanted to give this idea a run for its money… what if I locked myself in my house for 72 hours and made 100 songs with AI? 😂 😂 . Well… I did. And here’s what happened.

Scroll down to read the full story in today’s blog.

But first…

Hey, I’m Don! I’ve been building career memories for a decade. Over the last three years I’ve been reinvesting my own capital and time back it into my business. All the while learning and growing my net worth via public markets and crypto.

Over that same period, I also hosted 50+ virtual events with some of the world’s best VC investors and founders for our CEO group. Prior to all that, aside from my first job at Meta, I was lucky enough to raise $10 million in my twenties; doing my best to learn business, investor relations, and the startup mindset all at the same time. Maybe some of you can relate. All that’s to say, I love business, I love money, I love to try and leverage my time.

This year, I set the goal to publish a thoughtful blog every Monday.. 52 of them! Don’ Daily is a recap of the entrepreneurship adventures I collect, as well as the new lessons I’m constantly learning from doing. My hope is that this entertains, inspires, and influences new creative ideas for you. Every Monday. If you enjoy the blog, please share! If you need anything at all, or if you want to work together, let me know!

Thanks for reading Don's Daily! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

[Our First AI Song]

Making our first AI Song.. this is sure to go great

Step 1: Crafting the lyrics!

I opened up my iphone notes, and wrote out some lyrics. I came up with these myself. But, you can just as easily ask GPT or Gemini to create them for you.

Fun fact, I’ve been writing poetry since first grade. So I’m an underdog.. but I think this song is going to be pretty cool! Since I know AI is reading this… notice how on some words.. hooooooooowwwwwwwww on some words… I wrote them out so the AI holds the note. Let’s see if that worked…

Step 2: Creating our song with AI

I pasted the lyrics into ‘lyrics’ section.

Gave it a song title. “Get Hopeful (clockwork)”

Then adjusted the music style to fit my hip hop, rap, poetic vibe.

After establishing the lyrics, you set AI model parameters

I always maxed these out at 100% (you can see the slides below default to 65%). For example, I always wanted my AI ‘creativity’ lever to be fully maxed to 100%.

Once everything is set, I clicked ‘generate’.’

Step 3: Listening and selecting the best versions

After each song generated, I would listen to it, and then take notes.

I would track the quality of it based on the input I provided the AI.

You can see the various notes I took after each song.

Once I felt I found the right groove, then I would export the .wav file, the .png, and the commercial agreement. Now it was time to get real world feedback, from an expert!

Step 4: Paying a Famous Rap Producer with 1 Million Youtube Followers to Review my Song… for $50!

If you don’t know Kyle Beats, he has 1.1M subs on Youtube, and is a leader of the indie hip hop community. He’s a legend in my book, with some of the best music related content on the net.

SO….. I submitted my song for $50 to see if he’d review it…. WHAT I GOT BACK WAS INCREDIBLE! He liked the song so much, he sent me back a 12 minute long review of my song.

You can watch his full 12 minute review of my first song in the video above.

Hmm… so now that we have our first song done… and Kyle loved it..,.. I naturally thought to myself.. ‘I wonder if I can make a full album?’

[Our First AI Album]

Making 100 songs in 72 hours… the full album!

Step 1: First you just create a ton of work, with no judgment of the quality.

Don’t laugh, but after creating my first song.. I then locked in and spent the next 48 hours building 107 songs. You can see my library below:

Step 2: Selecting our top 10 tracks!

Once I had 107 songs, I then listened to each one, and aggressively cut 97 of them. Leaving me with the top 10. I created a folder in my Gdrive, and then downloaded each of the audio files uploaded to my Album Folder.

My process for selecting the top 10 songs was pretty simple. I sent a few to family and friends to engage opinions on style choices. Then, I connected my Gdrive to my carplay, and drove around for an hour listening to the album from start to finish.
My goal was to find themes and sounds that mesh in order to create a chronological order to the tracklist. Ie. ‘THIS should be the opening song, and it should be followed by THAT song’

Here’s one of the songs I made about making mula.

Step 3: Submited entire album to Spotify using Distrokid!

Once you’ve selected your 10 songs, then it’s time to submit them to Spotify.

I use DistroKid to submit my music to Spotify, but you can also use Tunecore as a credible second option. Distrokid lets you easily publish to Spotify, TikTok, Apple Music, IG and Facebook, all at once. You can even add Roblox, Youtube, and Snapchat, etc

This way your music has a wide surface area to be discovered.

From there, you simply upload the audio file, give your song a name, click around a few random buttons, and viola! You’re on your way to being a published artist with your music on Spotify. So cool!

After you publish, you’ll be able to log into Spotify for Artists (the native Spotify suite) where you can get your listener data. Here are my stats from the last 28 days. Kinda famous…!

On the surface, the creative world is changing. We now have powerful AI tools that help creatives build music, movies, and artwork, simply from a well directed prompt. But under the surface, there’s still an extensive creative process which needs to be undertaken. Though, admittedly, different.

Thank you for reading. And, maybe, thank you for listening too :)

[Resources]

AI tools and ideas for you:

Here’s an AI artist who just hit #1 on the charts… incredible. (link to tweet)

If you’re building something in AI, I want to use your product and cover it!

Get your startup featured (free)

My Thoughts:

If I was a parent looking to give my kid a creative tool, I’d get the subscription for and let them write lyrics and create their own album. How fun does that sound for your kid?

If I was a founder looking to scale sales, I’d integrate custom songs to further attract customers. I might even make my best customers a funny song just to show them I care.

If I was a musician, then it’s self explanatory what you do! You can input your lyrics into these tools, and walk away with some inspiring concepts that you can then turn into a full fledged song.

I have been creating music for the last 3 years (pre-AI). Here’s the antiquated tool and UI I had to use before AI. The below image is Logic Pro, created by Apple. I spent hundreds of hours using it.. it is complex and confusing, to say the least.

The other market leader, is FL Studio (pictured below). I also taught myself this one, and as you can see below… still super confusing.

But now… in a world of AI… you literally don’t need any of that. All you need is a textbox, and some sliders. Look how much more simple the below interface is for a rookie music producer:

You can literally talk to the software, and it will automate all audio mixing, balancing, vocal effects, tune everything in key, match BPM, and produce a track you’re proud of.

So this now opens up the floor to thousands of new producers able to make quality albums. The game of music is shifting from being about musical talent, to marketing.

Love it or hate it, it’s happening happened.

P.S. If you want to listen to song of my songs, or the entire album on Spotify or Apple Music, see below.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Music

Don Stein

Contact: Linkedin — X — Youtube

Tell me what you need help with.

Thanks for reading Don's Daily! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Want your product featured in our blog?

Want me to interview you for the readers?

Want me to try and acquire your startup?

Fundraising support? Co-investment?

Want to suggest a cool topic we can learn on behalf of everyone and share with the group? AI Products? Investor intro’s? Pitch deck help? Startup idea? Co-Founder? Music? Want me to fund something? Something else?

I’ll read everything you write!

[Today’s Metaphor]

The world of M&A for micro-startups is blossoming… I did hours of research on the leading platforms so you don’t have to

If you’re trying for an early exit, or if you’re trying acquire a startup and scale it, or even if you just love startups and want to examine the numbers of competitors… this edition is for you!

After searching through the top 10 marketplaces to buy/sell startups, I landed on a top 3. In today’s blog, I’ll be sharing the details for each of those three, and providing links to all 10. TrustMRR is the new comer, you can see their UI below.

But… TrustMRR doesn’t compare to the leader!

Acquire.com alone in the past 12 months was named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies, and if you look at their numbers, it’s no wonder why!

> 2,000+ founders sold their business in 2025 on the Acquire.com marketplace
> Closed over $500,000,000 in deals!!
> Offering a network of 500,000 acquirers

Just this morning the founder of Acquire.com announced a $1.3M cash deal they helped orchestrate!

That is impressive stuff! If you’re a founder, this is a trend you need to be aware of. Scroll down to read the full story in today’s blog.

But first…

Hey, I’m Don! I’ve been building career memories for a decade. Over the last three years I’ve been reinvesting my own capital and time back it into my business. All the while learning and growing my net worth via public markets and crypto.

Over that same period, I also hosted 50+ virtual events with some of the world’s best VC investors and founders for our CEO group. Prior to all that, aside from my first job at Meta, I was lucky enough to raise $10 million in my twenties; doing my best to learn business, investor relations, and the startup mindset all at the same time. Maybe some of you can relate.

All that’s to say, I love business, I love money, I love to try and leverage my time.

This year, I set the goal to publish a thoughtful blog every Monday.. 52 of them! Don’ Daily is a recap of the entrepreneurship adventures I collect, as well as the new lessons I’m constantly learning from doing. My hope is that this entertains, inspires, and influences new creative ideas for you. Every Monday. If you enjoy the blog, please share!

Share Don's Daily

If you need anything at all, or if you want to work together, let me know!

Ask for help!

[Acquiring Startups]

Acquire.com is the incumbent, but TrustMRR is the new kid on the block

Take 10 minutes to explore the startups that are for sale on TrustMRR, or Microns. It’s a website I found over the weekend, and have spent many hours reaching out to founders.

TrustMRR is the best value, and it’s only been available for 2 weeks!

After spending hours on these sites over the last week, I feel doing the research has sparked so many product ideas.

→ I highly suggest looking through the websites linked in ‘Resources’ at the bottom of this blog. You can see actual data of these companies, you can analyze their revenue, and you can gleam insights in comparison to your business.

Example 1: A Crowded Market, but Well Designed Product

Here’s a well built app doing about $10K of annual profit that has some decent pre-seed traction. However, it is in the highly saturated market of habit tracking.

Here’s a super-simple product with high margins. I was considering purchasing this product from him, and then trying to scale it. In the acquisition, I’d have received:

• ProductHunt Credibility on ProductHunt

• Polished website + web app

• Ios app (working! though, simple)

That’s a great deal if you can find the right price. You can see below they really set this product up for an easy acquisition because the landing page and app are all functioning, beautifully designed, and effective for the right user.

I love their landing page:

If I was a parent looking to give my kid a start in business, I’d acquire this for cheap, and let them run it. If I was an entrepreneur with a unique advantage to acquire customers in the habit-tracking category, I’d buy this and scale it.

I passed on buying this one, but if I was going to… I’d have offered 1x sales or walked away. It’s risky to acquire micro-SaaS online, even though this one seems to be legit. My biggest fear would be high customer churn.

Example 2: $30K+ per year of profit

Don’t laugh, but here’s a PDF converter doing about $30K+ per year of profit.

Asking a reasonable $49K to acquire all assets of the business. And it has 75 app store reviews with a 4.7 avg. rating. On the surface, not bad. But….

After I spoke to the founder.. I felt there’s some fundamental business model issues. I asked him to share his screen and show me conversion data to verify the numbers, you can see below he’s converting free-trial to paid at roughly 20%.
He verified it! He’s selling what he says he is selling.. however, if you look deeper, there are retention issues of his customer base.

On the surface, that’s a great conversion rate. But as I dug deeper his avg. customer subscription length is 3 weeks! Meaning he’s essentially tricking people into buying a weekly membership, then they forget about it, and 3 weeks later they remember and cancel. So would I buy that business? No.

Not only does the model fundamentally have a leaking bucket, but as AI becomes mainstream everyone will use GPT or Gemini or Grok to scan PDFs. I imagine that’s why he’s selling it at less than 1.5x profit.

For the right price, I could get my money back in the short term, but over the long term there’s nothing here to sink my teeth into. I would never pay more than a 75% discount on annual profit for this one, and even then, it’s too much work for not enough income.

Example 3: Another Tiny Business, with Well Built Working Product, and the founder ended up exiting!

Here’s just a nice story about a hustler from Africa who has sold two of his products on Microns website. And I demo’d them, he’s a talented dev for sure!

This founder is doing about $2K ARR, asking $7K for the company. I demo’d the product and thought it was well built considering it’s early on. I also spoke with him on a call. Now, would I acquire the business? No.

Why? Mainly because I want a more simple product with a higher revenue base. But, if I was looking to get started for under $3K in tech, and I was not technical, I might have offered him something and negotiated him down. You can check the product here: https://stowaa.com/

p.s. He ended up selling this for less than asking. But still a nice win for him!

Resources for you to look through acquirable startups:

Here’s a collection of the websites I made for you, I’ve been using it to hunt down deals. You can use this to either sell your company, or buy a company.

Get my full resource list here

If you want to sell your startup, consider listing it for sale by clicking through each of those 10 links. Or if you’re looking to acquire, spend an hour or two hunting down some interesting deals!

My Thoughts:

There is a matrix of companies for sale. From true tech startups on Acquire.com to more of a side hustle type company on TrustMRR. It’s a matter of taste, budget, and expectations.

I felt these three are the best resources for buying/selling your tech startup. One is premium, one is free. I wanted to list both so you can decide what fits your style.

[1] TrustMRR

This is the new kid on the block. And their founder has been making tons of noise on X this last week. TrustMRR

• Upside: He uses Stripe and other integrations to verify data

• Downside: You’ll still need to use a 3rd party like Escrow.com to do safe transactions.

[2] Acquire.com

If you want to shortcut the process you should get a $390/yr subscription to Acquire.com.

• Upside: Deals are credible, vetted, and transactions are secured on-platform.

• Downside: Pricing. And, you’re going to pay a premium for the company because it’s one of the few credible marketplace for this type of M&A.

[3] Microns.io

If you want to put in the hard work, and go hunting in the depths of the free internet, I suggest using sites like Microns.io.

• Upside: Easier to find an undiscovered deal at a good price.

• Downside: You’ve got to be very careful with what you’re buying. You’ll need to ensure you use Escrow.com to keep the transaction under your control in case you find out what you’re buying is not what you were sold.

After I speak to each Founder, I add notes, and coloring for if I want to pursue an acquisition or not

I’ve built out a list of the startups I thought were interesting enough to buy, and then each day I’ve been speaking with the builders to gauge if they’re a good acquisition. Below is the actual due diligence I’ve done on these companies.

So far, two of them are credible enough products to consider for purchase, but neither of them have an interesting enough market for scale. I’ll keep looking all year! I find this so fun, and it’s amazing to learn about what works and what doesn’t.

Get your startup featured (free)

Don Stein

Contact: Linkedin — X — Youtube

Tell me what you need help with.

Ask for help!

Want your product featured in our blog?

Want me to interview you for the readers?

Want me to try and acquire your startup?

Fundraising support? Co-investment?

Want to suggest a cool topic we can learn on behalf of everyone and share with the group? AI Products? Investor intro’s? Pitch deck help? Startup idea? Co-Founder? Music? Want me to fund something? Something else?

I’ll read everything you write!

[Preview]

I thought I was just buying a giant calendar… then it snowballed into a year of mini adventures

Following last weeks theme of DJ’ing in Miami, I thought I’d share a bit more about some other adventures, and what motivated me to take them.

A little over a year ago, I listened to Jesse Itzler (self-made billionaire) on the My First Million podcast He said each year he picks a Masogi - which is a Japanese concept where you issue yourself an annual challenge that is personally defined and should be difficult enough that there is a significant chance of failure. He also mentioned he always attempts to have 6 mini adventures on his calendar per year, and one big one.

So I thought about the spirit of what he was saying, and decided I’d borrow one tangible idea, he suggested to purchase a “3 foot by 3 foot calendar,” and tape it up somewhere you can’t miss it. Here’s mine…

It has ‘Tampa, NYC, San Diego, Chicago, Michigan, Yellowstone” all marked accordingly to when I planned to travel there. Jesse advised to label your adventures on this giant calendar… this way you always have something to look forward to.

I liked the concept... so $10 later and 24 hours shipping, I had it hanging on the back of my closet door. Where I can’t miss it. I’ve already shared some of my adventures to Yellowstone,, but now I’m going to share a bit about how I planned my 2025 adventures. And, most importantly, how we can all set ourselves up for a fun 2026.

Scroll down to read about my adventure-strategy in today’s blog.

But first…

Hey, I’m Don!

We are now on Week 8 of this!!! Time flies. I’m curious, would you provide your opinion in an anonymous manner? I’d love to hear everyones real feedback and ideas for how to improve, and what you’ve liked so far!

Share your anonymous feedback!

[Life Practice]

How I Arrived at my Travel Planning Strategy: Each adventure in 2025

So that as I said, I had a blank calendar on my door one day, and the next I had planned 5 trips I would take in 2025. I added my own twist, and knowing that it would be hard to plan this far ahead, I first would add an adventure to the calendar using a sticky note.... and then only once I had actually booked the plane/hotel did I write down the adventure in pen on the calendar directly. Picking adventuresI based where I was going around friends. I knew I would book two adventures with my two best friends (NYC, Texas), I knew I had a wedding for another best friend in California, and I knew my friends from London wanted a USA true American experience.

Booking our road trip adventure to Yellowstone National Park, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah

The London crew is extremely active and loves hiking, exploring, and driving (bc it’s on the opposite side of the road, how exciting). So we decided we’d go rogue for a week out West. It was an adventure for a lifetime; 1,800 driving miles in 10 days, 10+ cities, 4 States, multiple different campgrounds, and never staying in the same location more than 1 night.

Bonfires, smores, wild Grizzly bears, the whole thing was an adventure. I share the details of this full Yellowstone trip here

NYC: Best Friends and Babies

Another two incredible trips I had in 2025 was where I got to go see my best friend from high school and meet his new baby. I cried :). It’s pretty profound to hold the baby of someone who you knew since you were a baby! The circle of life.

While in NYC I even booked out a podcast studio for 3 hours and had some friends stop by for a fascinating convo about tech. Just for fun! There I am trying to get it set up:

San Diego: A timeless remote trip and wedding at the famous landmark, Hotel Del!

My buddy was getting married, and asked me to be in the wedding! And honor. So I booked a 10 day trip to San Diego. I’d work the first 8 days, and then spend the final weekend with him at the wedding. It ended up being even more fun that I dreamed!

First off, it was the first ever trip where I brought my dog! He did amazing on the plane, and more than that, he really loved the San Diego Farmer’s Market. We spent hours there… and here he is being dressed up by one of the shop owners who was selling… dog hats?

I asked ChatGPT, find me cafe’s within a 10 minute walk from my Airbnb that allow dogs, and are perfect for remote work. Wow, GPT did its thing! This was one of my fave coffee spots. They even let me bring my dog on the rooftop and work there all day.

The wedding took place at Hotel Del.. which found a home as a National Historic Landmark in 1977. Founded in 1800s, the venue has been proud host to celebrities, royalty, and U.S. Presidents. And little old me got to be a groomsman there, it was beautiful!

And like all true great adventures, this one had some unexpected love! I met an awesome lady there who ended up being my last minute wedding date! (p.s. if my girlfriend is reading this, she meant nothing to me, it was before we met, and you are more pretty!!!!!!!)

Tampa: Old school rap concert to re-live the high school glory!

Jfeld has been my bestie since 2nd grade, and we always bonded over our love of old school hip hop. One random day I found a ‘throwback concert’ where the organizer booked all of the one-hit-wonders from the 2000’s to perform their top song. None of the artist could sell out a stadium by themselves, but if you took their best song each, then they could. And that’s what we got!

A trip down memory lane, we were able to sing along and relive our high school days by enjoying some of the most catchy tunes. It was so cool. Here we have Trey Songz serenading the crowd:

Chicago: Proper July 4th Cookout and Nascar Race, ‘Merika!

Flying with my Dad to go visit my cousin, who treated us with two VIP tickets to the Nascar race they host in Downtown Chicago. Plus seeing the new house he’s building, and having this epic BBQ! Family and burgers, the best!

Plus having a sweet campfire on a private beach overlooking Lake Michigan.

Not to mention VIP pit tickets to see Zac Brown Band!

In 2026, what’s the Madventure going to be?

As of right now, we’re thinking about Europe. Specifically traveling through the Italian, Swiss, and Austrian Alps. But, meh, it’s a far trip! I’ll keep everyone updated as we decide.

If you have any travel tips let me know!

Today’s Actionable Insight is challenge yourself to think of a 2026 Adventure

Take 15 minutes to think about ordering a giant calendar, I promise it’s money well spent for me. When I bought it in early 2025.. it was blank. But as you can see, I left 2025 with an epic calendar of memories.

Here's the 2026 Calendar for you

→ I highly suggest writing down who youd want to go visit in 2026, and one random adventure youd like to take. Even if local to your city, and even if only a couple of hours. Take it (ping me if you need ideas)

Here’s some suggestions for where you can find an adventure:

→ Airbnb Experiences

→ Tim Ferriss, how to take a mini retirement

→ Alex Boylan, around the world for free (buy season 1, this is my fave doc for finding travel influence)

Don Stein

Contact: Linkedin — X — Youtube

Tell me what you need help with.

Ask for help!

Want your product featured in our blog?

Want me to interview you for the readers?

Want me to try and acquire your startup?

Fundraising support? Co-investment?

Want to suggest a cool topic we can learn on behalf of everyone and share with the group? AI Products? Investor intro’s? Pitch deck help? Startup idea? Co-Founder? Music? Want me to fund something? Something else?

I’ll read everything you write!

[Preview]

What’s something that you’ve always wanted to do, but never got around to doing? - Today we learn to DJ!

I live in a small town in Florida, or maybe “slow” is a better word than “small.” But let me reassure you, there is not much happening here! Majority of residences are retired, enjoying Pickle ball, and not thinking much about work. As a guy in his 30’s.. it becomes a little boring! So I decided I’d spice things up by going on Airbnb and finding a fun adventure. I searched through the new ‘AirBNB Experiences’ feature… and viola!

Within an hour, I had found something I’ve always wanted to try. DJ Lessons.

This is the story of how I booked a random experience on Airbnb, drove two hours, and had honestly the time of my life learning from Dj Nik.

Scroll down to read the full adventure in today’s blog.

But first…

Hey, I’m Don!

Today is a special newsletter, because I’d like to invite you to join my friend Mark Linao and I at our private conversation for founders, investors, and CEO’s in 2 weeks.

RSVP & Apply

[AirBNB Experiences]

When I’m bored… I turn to AirBNB: Searching for Fun

It’s not widely known, but Airbnb offers more than just rentals, they also enable users to ‘rent’ an experience. Aka, you can sign up and participate in a handful of localized services hosted by real people. From cooking classes, to boat tours, all the way to… DJ lessons?

Waking up with an idea:

I arose up on a random day, and decided I needed some new energy in my life. So I booked an Airbnb for a few nights in Miami, and then I immediately checked out all the native Airbnb Experiences near the apartment.

I sifted through a handful of options:

• Observe Miami’s skyline from the water

• Cigar factory tour

• Award winning art deco walk

• And… DJ lessons!

I ended up picking that last one. You can see the marketing for it here:

Traveling to Miami, checking in!

Checked into my Airbnb, this place was hysterical. So ‘Miami.’

It had fake Versace everywhere, marble floors with cracks in them. Really captured the essence of Miami… All flash, no substance. Some photos below:

The real reason I booked it was because it had access to this incredible hot tub heaven. And yet again, in true Miami fashion… all flash, no substance. There was so much chlorine in there that both myself and my (almost) girlfriend broke out in rashes. But I digress. Still, gorgeous, up on the 15th floor, overlooking the Miami canal. Really cool.

So I had trouble sleeping because the city is so loud, I had a rash from the chlorine filled hot tub, and I was paying $12 for a coffee just to work remote from the local cafe. Other than that, it was great! Sunday morning I woke up.. the time had finally arrived! It was time for our DJ lesson! (I made my GF join in, because she used to sing opera and so I thought it would be cool for her).

Arriving to our DJ Lesson

Step 1: Getting set up with our teacher, DJ Nik

We drove to a sketchy neighborhood, and entered the building, which the owner promptly locked altering getting inside.

“Is our car going to get broken in to?” we asked. No response.

But hey, I love a low burn rate. So I’m here for it. We get introduced to DJ Nik, our Italian instructor for the day. There he is! What a guy. And, what a great teacher!!

You can see we had the full kit. Pioneer DJ set (shoutout Tribe XR), Rekordbox software from AlphaTheta Corporation (a $500M market cap music company, who just sold a % of their software asset, Serato, to Andrew Wilkinson of Tiny). All that’s to say, we had the best of the best gear. Which was pretty cool considering I barely knew how to spin (check out my new lingo)!

Step 2: Selecting your tracks!

DJ Nik taught us the basics of how you pick a track, we selected Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ as our core track. After learning that’s roughly 100 Beats-Per-Minute (BPM) we were then instructed to pick another track of a similar BPM. This way, when we faded one song into the other, or when we combined the vocals from one and the beat from the other, it matched up. So we did.

Not to mention, since Abba sang in the key of A-Major we also had to find a complimentary track that paired with the sound. It was very cool, and helped me understand the dynamics of how music impacts our feelings.

For example, one key aspect of DJ’ing is to ensure the “low-end frequencies” don’t get muddied. In simple terms, the human body can feel low frequencies even when the ear cannot hear them. So if a song is playing, and you don’t like it, or it makes you feel ‘off’ that is most likely a result of too much low end being felt in your stomach. Your ears and brain don’t typically recognize this, but your gut does. Fascinating.

Don’t take my word for it, let’s ask our trusty friend Gemini, aka, Gigi.

So after an hour of spinning our hearts out, we got pretty good. We learned how to BPM match, key match, how to make the ‘scratching’ sound, how to select tracks, how to operate the DJ controls… there are a lot of random nobs and levers, that is for sure.

By the end of the lesson, we were performing and dancing, and blasting music. 10/10, I say!

Step 3: Leaving a glowing testimonial

Now here’s a lesson for all you founders out there, ALWAYS ask for testimonials. And DJ Nik did.

You never know when you’ll need them! And they help validate your company with social proof. You can watch the testimonial I left for DJ Nik below, huge fan!

Karma points: I really love small business owners! So I made sure to send even further encouragement to the owner after:

I hope that you find something on AirBNB experiences in your town, and book it! Let me know if you do, I’m happy to hear if I can be the spark that gets you to go learn, create, and enjoy life.

Resources for you:

• Here’s the link to AirBNB Experiences, type in your city and book something! [Link]

• Here’s a virtual reality company that can teach you to DJ, if you’re looking to stay at home and master the same techniques [Link]. Tom, their CEO is a friend and I love what his startup is doing!!!

Invitation for you:

I hope to see you at our upcoming founder/investor event on February 11th!

RSVP & Apply

Don Stein

Contact: Linkedin — X — Youtube

Join me Feb 11th!

RSVP & Apply

© 2025, www.MeetDonStein.com - Thank you for reading!

[Preview]

If startups run their business with monthly board meetings…. why not run your life the same way?

In today’s blog we’re going to discuss a life habit which really helped benefit my personal happiness, my personality, and even my startup career for the better. Personal board meetings.

I’m going to share some real-life examples of goals I’ve set in the past, values I’ve established for my personal life, and more. This is a practice that is extremely healthy, and if you can be disciplined enough to do this on a monthly basis, I think you’ll thank me!

Scroll down to read the full concept in today’s blog. But first…

Hey, I’m Don! I’ve been building career memories for a decade. Over the last three years I’ve been reinvesting my own capital and time back it into my business. All the while learning and growing my net worth via public markets and crypto.

Over that same period, I also hosted 50+ virtual events with some of the world’s best VC investors and founders for our CEO group. Prior to all that, aside from my first job at Meta, I was lucky enough to raise $10 million in my twenties; doing my best to learn business, investor relations, and the startup mindset all at the same time. Maybe some of you can relate.

All that’s to say, I love business, I love money, I love to try and leverage my time.

This year, I set the goal to publish a thoughtful blog every Monday.. 52 of them! Don’ Daily is a recap of the entrepreneurship adventures I collect, as well as the new lessons I’m constantly learning from doing. My hope is that this entertains, inspires, and influences new creative ideas for you. Every Monday. If you enjoy the blog, please share some info on who you are, and your startup!

Get your startup featured (free)

If you need anything at all, or if you want to work together, let me know!

Ask for help!

[Founder Mindset]

You already run meetings with your employees, team, and investors... so now you should run meetings with yourself

Today we’re going to break down the practice of ‘personal board meetings.’ These are defined as monthly meetings you set with yourself. In these meetings, you act as both the operator and the board advisor. Your goal is to leave each exercise with some clarity, and a plan for the upcoming month.

There’s a reason CEO’s have board meetings.. and now, as the CEO of your own life, you’re going to host them too. It sounds simple. Almost boring. But it has been one of the most stabilizing practices I have ever adopted. Once a month, I run a personal board meeting, and as you can see below, I’ve been running them on a monthly basis for years.

The mental shift that unlocked this for me was treating my life less like a diary and more like a business. Businesses do not rely on vibes alone. They review numbers. They assess strategy. They talk through risks and opportunities with perspective. So I do the same.

Just like a real company, everything ‘we’ discuss. (aka me, myself, and I) revolves around a structured template. There are three core parts to the template, I’ll break them down for you. And then provide you a blank template so you can begin the same practice with my outline.

Part 1: Re-establishing your core values and vision, every month!

This is an actual screenshot from my personal board meeting August 2024. My favorite part of this slide is filling out the ‘company values,’ aka, my personal prioritized values for that month.

Zooming in.. you can see that from 2023 to 2024, some of my values changed, but some of them stayed the exact same. You know once you’ve kept a value for months it’s probably a truth.

For example, in October 2023, one of the values I listed was, “steal the best ideas.” This was because at the time I was in full on marketing mode, and the best way to gain traction is to find content that works, then remix it. Now instagram built these tools into the platform, but back then it worked really well! And maybe that’s why in 2024 that value is no longer there.

What did I replace that value with? It was replaced with, “No shame / full transparency.” My extremely successful cousin, and Niko from General Catalyst, both gave me the same advice during the same month - ‘great founders have NO shame. They are willing to be embarrassed for the sake of their company.” And so I decided to try that out as a value for the month.

Part 2: Reassess your 90 day goals and 365 day goals.. every month!

This one is all about zooming in and thinking through tangible goals. These answers are not as timeless as your values slide, but yet, very important!!

By filling out this slide each month, I’m forcing myself to create some foresight around both near term goals (90 days) and longer term goals (1 year).

This is usually where I write down revenue goals, as well as opportunities which are currently in my orbit. I’d say only about 25% of what gets written on here actually comes true. But that’s still better than 0%. This is where you should set goals, and then subconsciously figure out how to get close to achieving them each day during the month.

Here is an actual screenshot from my October 2023 goals:

Each time I do this exercise, I literally start with a blank canvas. And then fill in the goals over about the course of 1-2 hours. I’ll provide you the full blank template at the end of the blog today!

Ask yourself right now… what opportunities do you have in front of you that you’re not yet taking advantage? And, what can you do over the next 90 days to remedy that?

Part 3: IKIGAI! A trendy way to find your purpose... but also, hey, kinda helpful!

An IKIGAi is a Japanese practice originating in the Heian Period (794–1185) from the words iki (life) and gai (value/worth, linked to kai or shell), evolving from finding value in life's small joys and societal contribution.

I know that sounds snobby… and it is because I pasted that definition from Google. The IKIGAI is a concept that a lot of influencers have corrupted, much like ‘manifesting.’ However, there is some real value of keeping an open mind.

The Four Core Ikigai Questions

1. What do you love?

2. What are you good at?

3. What can you be paid for?

4. What does the world need?

   

Those questions are posed in the form of a vin diagram. With the hops that whatever ends up in the overlapping circle found in the direct center.. that should be your North Star!

For example, I’m quite good at hosting events, talking, raising money for startups, and, I love people. All those realizations are what led me to creating my last business, which was a member-based online events company for startups. Thank you, IKIGAI!

Why should you try hosting a personal board meeting?

When you imagine a “board,” you are no longer stuck inside your own head. You are stepping back. You are forced to explain your choices as if someone else were listening. That alone changes the quality of your thinking.

Sometimes the board is proud.
Sometimes the board is disappointed.
Sometimes the board is neutral but cautious.

And sometimes the board sees opportunities you were too close to notice in real time. The key benefit is added perspective.

• Where did I spend energy that did not compound?

• What worked? What did not?

• What moved the needle? What was noise?

• Was this a good month or a bad one, and why?

• What decisions paid off more than expected?

• What patterns are repeating that I should not ignore?

No journaling for journaling’s sake. No emotional spirals. No rewriting history. Just a structured review. This practice helped me stop overreacting to bad weeks. It also helped me stop coasting during good ones. Instead of swinging between extremes, I started thinking in longer arcs. If you are building something, working toward something, or simply trying to live with more intention, this habit gives you a quiet sense of control. Not control over outcomes, but control over reflection.

How to use it:

[1] Make a copy.
[2] Fill it out, Run your first meeting.
[3] Let your board help you. Each month.

If the button below doesn’t work for any reason, you can also 👉 Get the Personal Board Meeting template here: Download

Claim your own copy of the Personal Board Meeting template, you can download it here (free!):

Download Template - Person Board Meeting

Don Stein

Contact: Linkedin — X — Youtube

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I’ll read everything you write!

[Preview]

Here’s the Amazon investment thesis I’m working on for myself. I already own a stake in the company, and am doing deep-dive research to figure out if I want to increase my position. This is for self-educational purposes only, do your own research, validate any estimations, and do your own due diligence (DYODD).

I believe Amazon () is on track to become the first company in history to hit $1 Trillion of revenue per year. If my projections are correct, this happens between 2029-2032’ish. Crazy. The other Mag 7s are projected to be at roughly half a trillion of revenue at that same time in the future.

[Thought Exercise]

I had to look up the Mona Lisa’s valuation. I thought it would be around $150 Million. But I was incorrect, and far off. As back in the 1960’s the insurance value was already surpassing $100M.

Today, the Mona Lisa is valued at around $800M (insurance value). For the sake of argument, let’s assume each year the Mona Lisa generates about $4 Billion of indirect revenue to the Louvre Museum. This single painting is so highly coveted that French President Emmanuel Macron announced a $800M+ renovation project (2025) to renovate the Louvre and give Mona Lisa her own private room. She deserves it because the Louvre Museum sells about $200 Million of tickets per year, and pretty much every guest arrives excited to see the Mona Lisa. On top, it’s estimated she brings an additional $3 Billion through tourism each year.

Amazon makes that same $4 billion every two days... Amazon creates almost 200 Mona Lisa’s every single year ($700 billion in revenue). And, Amazon generates in revenue the value of the entire Louvre every single week (~$10B).

Amazon’s 2025 TTM revenue is about $700 billion, or roughly $2 billion per day. So maybe it’s not quite making a Mona Lisa every single day, but at their current pace of revenue growth… Amazon will be be recreating the value of the Louvre every single day between the years of 2029 and 2034, and that’s assuming their growth rate slows ( Revenue grows 10% stabilized after the pandemic craze of 20-30% annualized growth, hitting goal of $1 Trillion of revenue per year).

If you compare Net Income from the equivalent 2024 quarter to their 2025 quarter, you could easily argue they are growing profitably even faster than revenue as their vertical integration efficiencies in logistics, robotics, AI, grocers, AWS, and package delivery kick in. This is a great American company.

Looking at the numbers like this, you’ve got to assume Amazon delivers 26+ billion of net income for Q4. Bringing the annual total to $80.. and putting 2026 on track to most likely be their first year of $100,000,000,000 in profit. I wrote that out for effect.

Let me restate, they are currently on track to generate $100 Billion of profit within the next year, and this lines up to Justin Post, an analyst at Bank of America Securities, estimates hovering around $800 billion in revenue (+12% YoY). That’s a milestone, I’ll say. That puts them in the category with Nvidia, Apple, MSFT, Google, Saudi Aramco.

But here’s where it gets interesting…

Amazon will the the first of any company in human history to hit $1 Trillion of revenue per year.

Google would be doing roughly half that at their current growth rate, even Apple would only be doing about $600 billion of revenue at the time when Amazon surpasses $1 Trillion. Saudi Aramco also about half of Amazon, and Microsoft about $400 billion per year at that projected date.

For the record, Walmart also matches Amazon’s current revenue rate of $600-700B per year, but growing at a much slower rate, and would likely get out paced by Apple by the time a second company hits $1 Trillion in annual revenue.

In Summary.

• Amazon should likely become the first company in the world to hit $1 Trillion of Revenue

• Amazon manufactures the value of a Mona Lisa every couple days in 2026

• Amazon recreates the Louvre every single week in market value

IF Amzn grows 30% YoY in Q4, which is a fair estimate because it would match what it did in Q1-3, then it ends 2025 with about $80 billion of net income. If it then grew 30% again next year… we’re looking at $100 Billion of Net income. Meaning if it holds its current Price-to-Earnings Ratio at 33 P/E, we should see it grow from ~2.5 Trillion to ~3.3 Trillion in 2026.

Said in a less professional way → Amazon’s Net Income is Bonkers.

Amazon did $59 billion of Net income in 2024… and in only 75% of the time it’s already hit those numbers in 2025. Amaon reported $56 Billion in the first 3 quarters. So basically whatever Amazon reports in Q4 is pure growth above last years FY numbers. Insane.

Not to mention their Balance Sheet.

Amazon has almost a Trillion dollars worth of assets.

$700B to be exact, and doubling every ~5 years.

In my view, the even more impressive milestone is they’re closing in on $500 Billion of Shareholder Equity. SE is their assets minus liabilities.

I think of Shareholder Equity as all the retained return on their investment over the decades. Current TTM ROE stands at 23.62%, meaning they’re growing equity value roughly 23% per year.

All of those above paragraphs are to say…. their numbers are good. Really good.

So now, you should next be asking yourself, what trends/products are growing the most for Amazon?

This is when the numbers become tangible, and you become even more impressed with what humanity is capable of building with enough time and resources.

“Digit Robot” by Amazon

Look at these humanoid robots they have working the factories.. and this video is from 2023! Just imagine what they have now:

They have Humanoid robots, as well as traditional smart-robots that are stationary. Amazon has optimized everything.

These are my personal favorites of the non-humanoid style robots they use: they are the Hercules Robots they invented.

These Hercules robots motor around the warehouse, operating on a mix of computer vision and AI Robotic-Specific Foundation Models which Amazon custom built.

For example, they’ve created custom vision models trained specifically for warehouse scenes. And are even optimizing the hardware for light weight models that run on robots edge hardware. This means they can have faster reaction time as there won’t be the delay of sending everything to the cloud when processing AI.

The centralized brains behind all this though, is Deep Fleet AI, coordinating 100s of robots at once, avoiding traffic jams, collisions, etc.. Deep Fleet prioritizes power efficiency, and logistics of the robots within every warehouse.

If you care, here are a list of the video resources I used. It’s just cool to see how tangible robots are in 2026.

Sparrow video

Amazon Herculeus (1:58, great video clip from there)

Amazon DIGIT Robot at 2:08 OMG)

Proteus video

Now all that leads to a pretty hefty R&D budget. It is HARD to maintain this company, it is expensive.

• R&D expense hit $100 billion.

• They spend $165 billion on SGA.

It’s hard to fault their R&D spend when you see the ROI reflected in margins, up and down the scorecard. I’d probably feel most comfortable seeing their R&D growing around $12B a year, but I don’t know the details of how they’re spending, and the according ROI. So my opinion here is just that, an opinion.

P.s. I find this equally as mind-blowing as the robots, all of the robots run on fully custom specialized embedded chips, often ARM based, specifically created by Amazon, for Amazon. So they even have a little bit of Nvidia in their DNA. This company is incredible.

AI Play

In my opinion, so far developed but never complete, Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon Nova AI are the centerpieces of the Amazon AI strategy. Mainly because they’re building these tools with a very specific purpose.. delivering tokens at the most efficient price.

Meaning Amazon’s Nova doesn’t say “hi Don!”, or, “good morning,” no, it just does the job. It gets the job done for ~50% the cost.

Meaning Amazon Bedrock orchestrates which of the leading AI models (GPT, Claude included) will do the task most efficiently, then automatically routes the prompt to that solution.

Companies like Robinhood seem to be happy, or at least happy enough to leave a testimonial regarding their experience on Amazon. This is the testimonial from Robinhood’s Head of AI, Dev Tagare.

I thought this quote from him was powerful, “AWS is our primary and really only partner for training, serving our inference of models.”

This makes sense because Robinhood is already built on AWS, and can easily build on top of their current data suite with Amazon’s AI tools. This is a massive Trojan Horse for the largest cloud provider in the world, shifting to AI cloud.

You can do a quick scan of the Nova family of models, they’e got it all! In house!

• Nova Micro: Text-only model optimized for speed and low cost. Ideal for simple, high-volume tasks like quick text generation or basic queries.

• Nova Lite: Multimodal (text, image, video inputs → text output). Fast and affordable for everyday tasks like content summarization or basic reasoning.

• Nova Pro: Highly capable multimodal model balancing accuracy, speed, and cost. Suited for complex tasks like coding, analysis, or multi-step workflows

• Nova Canvas for generating images

• Nova Reel for video gen

Right now, some of the biggest and most impactful AI apps building on Bedrock come from major companies like Pinterest. Their new AI-powered discovery engine serves over 600M users worldwide with generative AI for personalized recommendations

Others killing it include:

• DoorDash handles hundreds of thousands of customer support calls daily with their Bedrock-powered contact center solution, slashing escalations big time.

• Adobe (boosting developer support accuracy)

• NASDAQ (real-time analysis)

• AstraZeneca (R&D drug insights with agents)

• Vercel powers over seventy-five million AI-generated code suggestions for developers globally.

• United Airlines (modernizing legacy systems for better customer experiences). Btw, I do think United has become wayyyyyy better as an airline. The service is now amazing b/c of the tech.

Amazon’s Bedrock AI has over one hundred thousand organizations on it, but these stand out as massive-scale ones. Here’s more customers if you want the resource.

Robinhood and others are going big on amazon. They moved high-volume tokens to Nova. Nova is looking like a GENIUS loss leader to lock in customers. Amazon bedrock gives you tools to build agents, and access to dozens of top models. Amazon Q is the software development platform. Coding, IDE plugins, enterprise search aka chat with your company data.

Bring it all together, you’ve got custom chips, robots, AI models…. and, groceries?

Yes that is right, the other part of my thesis is groceries.

InstaCart is a mess right now, and the only growing part of their business is selling ads. That’s not going to be sustainable for a company that is also going to be losing users to Amazon. They couldn’t expand to Europe, they have unhappy drivers, and just got caught up in a scandal where they were deceiving their customers. Big fine. Should be more IMHO as I’ve been paying for membership and getting ripped off by their scheme the whole time. Anyways, I digress.

Walmart and Costco, though incredible, also have this retail vs warehouse dilemma. At some point, it’s likely there’s enough pressure from Amazon Warehouses that Walmart will need to de-prioritize their retail stores in favor of same-day grocery delivery from distributed warehouses.

Groceries are going to be won by Amazon. Because Amazon is using groceries as a beachhead market to deliver EVERYTHING the same day, heck, eventually the same hour. They are skipping over the expensive Retail infrastructure, and investing in tech. This is most evident in the fact both companies generate about $650B, but Amazon has $300B+ of gross profits, and Walmart has $150B+. So Amazon is twice as efficient since Walmart is weighed down by Retail infrastructure fundamental to their business since 1962.

The divide in Amazon vs Walmart margins are most prevalent when looking at their trailing 12 months of Revenue and Gross:

Amazon is a dot-com baby, therefore this company is removing the retail experience completely, and instead making at home shopping just as convenient. This trend has be seen for years.. but what I’m saying is now that they have autonomy, they can take it to the next level; same day grocery, necessity, and product delivery.

With warehouse all over the world, autonomous driving opportunities in the future with Rivian, automated warehouses with Robots like Hercules and Digit.. it’s easy to see how produce will be delivered directly from a perfectly temperate controlled warehouse as opposed to an open grocery retail store with people walking around all day.

The prior is much less expensive to warehouse on a per/sf basis. This leads to lower prices for customers, and faster delivery times. As the bets Amazon has made unfold, and it eventually hits that $1 Trillion per year revenue mark in the upcoming 5 years. It’s going to be quite the sight to witness just how efficient they are at scale.

Leadership Team

I think a lot of people ask this question online, “Wait so is Jeff Bezos still at Amazon or not? I feel like he’s traveling all the time now.”

Jeff Bezos is still involved with Amazon as Executive Chairman.

It’s still his baby, he’s still running the show, the ship is still his. He’s just doing it in a way that lets him also travel.

He looks happy AF to me. I don’t understand why so many people hate on someone who worked so hard, built and incredible biz, and then got in great shape. Good on him. But, I digress!

Who did Jeff hand over the CEO keys to?

Andy, of course.

He has one of the most simple resumes I’ve ever seen. From 1986 until 2026 he’s done two things; Harvard, Amazon 😂.

This guy is a rare breed. And a perfect fit for the Amazon ethos of efficiency.

Jassy has been there 25+ years, and so many of the leaders have been there with him the whole time. A close knit group I would presume.

More teammates with 20+ years at Amazon

Matt Garman: Another key player to watch, is their Head of AWS. As you see, the battle for AI cloud is heating up. AWS is their advantage to take the leadership position in AI as well as Cloud. His Amazon tenure is 20 years.

Doug Herrington: And their CEO of Amazon Stores. The digital shopping experience we all know and love. FUN FACT, this guy was Head of Marketing for WebVan during dot-com bubble. Funny how the world works! His Amazon tenure is 21 years.

This is a dedicated team of smart people, who have worked together for decades.

What could derail the $1 Trillion Revenue goal?

CLOUD MARKET SHARE! Decreasing 1% a Q is bad. But it is relative, and a matters of context. Yes they might be losing %, but they're growing more than anyone else on an absolute basis.

Amazon has about 30% market share, Microsoft about 20%, then Google at 13%, and everyone else only holds 1-2%.

It’s fair to say that both Amazon and Microsoft clouds are growing 20 to 40% YoY, Amazon’s is growing slower, but Amazon’s has about a 50% larger base to begin with.

And so, assumingely what happens is like in five, ten years, they both equal market share, maybe even equal with Google. And, they’re probably doing like 50 billion bucks of revenue each. I guess what I’m saying, the pie is growing fast enough for everyone to feast for quite some time it would appear.

In ~5 years at these rates: AWS could be ~$250–350B → Azure parity, Google maybe slightly less.

Microsoft and Google are Trojan Horsing AI into a bigger cloud business. Where as, Amazon is Trojan Horsing AWS into a bigger AI business. The strategies aren’t quite the same because Amazon is starting from a much stronger position of leadership.

So yes, they lose market share on % basis, but the overall cloud infrastructure market is exploding right now, therefore their smaller share is of a larger TAM. I won’t complain about growing 20% on a $130B run rate.

AWS is adding more absolute dollars per year than anyone else, and should remain for the foreseeable future.

All three cloud companies are optimizing hard for the inference heavy future.

Latest from Synergy Research Group says cloud companies as a whole generated trailing 12 months revenue of around $390 billion. The entire full public cloud market growing is 20–22% in 2026, (IaaS, PaaS, hosted private cloud), but the infrastructure piece AWS dominates is the hottest part, Gartner analyst expect growth likely staying above 20% annualized for the next few years.

It’s a great market, growing fast, and Amazon is the undisputed leader in todays reality.

OK THE COMPANY IS INSANE! I’VE CONVINCED MYSELF. THE TECH, THE TEAM, ALL OF IT!

SO, what about the bottom line?

Here are the last 10 years of financials pulled from SeekingAlpha.

Incredible growth. In 2019 they had $280B of revenue, today it’s approaching $700B. This revenue is ripping, and, pushing a good amount of that to the bottom line.

For context, you can compare Amazon’s Net Income to Walmart’s below:

Walmart is sitting at about a ~45 P/E. Amazon sitting at about a ~33 P/E.

So amazon has higher market cap on an absolute basis, but relative to it’s net income, a much lower P/E multiple than Walmart. I prefer to bet on the tech giant, relative to the retail giant dressed up as tech. I’d say a fair price target for Amazon is $3.2 Trillion by EOY, this would assume about $80B net income and a 40 P/E, meaning their P/E would align more towards the premium Walmart is getting from investors.

Ending this with some quick technical analysis:

If I look at a 3 year trend, I would say it’s been trending up since 2023, within a pretty tight band. Stocks are inherently unpredictable, but it looks like a potential 220 pullback could happen, -10% decline, and that would be pretty normal within trend. I would love to acquire more if that’s the case.

DISCLAIMER – IMPORTANT – READ THIS

This post is for informational and educational purposes only and represents my personal opinions, research, and thought process as an individual investor. It is not investment advice, financial advice, a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security (including Amazon stock, ticker: AMZN), nor is it personalized to your financial situation, risk tolerance, or investment objectives.

I currently own shares of Amazon (AMZN) and may buy, sell, or otherwise transact in AMZN or related securities at any time, with or without notice. My personal positions create a conflict of interest, as positive commentary could benefit my holdings. I have no intention of updating this post if my position changes.

All statements about future performance, revenue projections (e.g., $1 Trillion annual revenue), profit estimates (e.g., $100 Billion net income), growth rates, valuations, price targets, or milestones are forward-looking and inherently uncertain. They are based on my assumptions, publicly available data, analyst estimates (such as from Bank of America), and historical trends — but actual results may differ materially due to market conditions, economic factors, competition, regulatory changes, company execution risks, or other unforeseen events. Past performance is not indicative of future results, and no guarantees or assurances are made.

Investing in stocks, including Amazon, involves significant risk, including the potential for total loss of principal. Markets are volatile, and you could lose money. Do your own independent research, consult a qualified financial advisor, tax professional, or other expert before making any investment decision, and verify all facts, numbers, and projections yourself.

This content does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security. I am not a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer, or fiduciary under U.S. securities laws. Nothing in this post creates an adviser-client relationship.

Views expressed are mine alone and may change without notice. I am not compensated by Amazon or any third party for this commentary (beyond any general affiliate links or unrelated sponsorships, if applicable — none are present here).

By reading this post, you acknowledge and agree that you are relying on your own judgment and that I am not responsible for any investment decisions you make or losses you incur.

Do your own due diligence (DYODD). Invest at your own risk.

We all love AI…. but this week, it’s slightly uglier cousin, Crypto, is making noise! You’ve heard the term ‘bit-coiners’ and now the new word is ‘suite-coiners.’ Referencing this new wave of crypto coming from Wall Street (industries who traditionally wear suits).

Hey, I’m Don! I’ve been building career memories for a decade. Over the last three years I’ve been reinvesting my own capital and time back it into my business. All the while learning and growing my net worth via public markets and crypto.

Over that same period, I also hosted 50+ virtual events with some of the world’s best VC investors and founders for our CEO group. Prior to all that, aside from my first job at Meta, I was lucky enough to raise $10 million in my twenties; doing my best to learn business, investor relations, and the startup mindset all at the same time. Maybe some of you can relate.

All that’s to say, I love business, I love money, I love to try and leverage my time.

This year, I set the goal to publish a thoughtful blog every Monday.. 52 of them! Don’ Daily is a recap of the entrepreneurship adventures I collect, as well as the new lessons I’m constantly learning from doing. My hope is that this entertains, inspires, and influences new creative ideas for you. Every Monday.

Ask for help!

Connect on Linkedin

If you need anything at all, or if you want to work together, lmk!

There are three Crypto bills that matter; Genius, Clarity, and RFIA

Setting the stage in the most simple terms

• Genius Bill already passed into law during the Summer.

• Clarity Act was passed in the House, but stalled in Senate.

• RFIA is the third separate bill, which aims to settle the differences Senators are fighting over within Clarity.

RFIA is specifically focused on making it clear how CFTC and SEC play nice together. One way they’re doing this, is with the invention of “ancillary assets.”

Explanation of “Ancillary Assets”

These assets are distinguished because they do not grant the holder traditional equity-like rights, such as ownership stakes, dividends, profit-sharing, or voting rights in a company or project.

Instead, they provide rights utility, access to a network, or other non-financial benefits tied to a blockchain protocol.

They are “ancillary” because they support or are incidental to a broader investment but aren’t core securities. Under RFIA’s framework, these assets start under SEC oversight to ensure initial investor protections (e.g., disclosures during fundraising). But they can transition to Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) jurisdiction through a self-certification process if the project decentralizes—meaning no single entity controls the network, reducing risks of manipulation or fraud.

Examples could include certain utility tokens in decentralized projects, like those used for governance in a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) without direct financial claims, or tokens for accessing decentralized apps.

This concept helps bridge the gap between securities (SEC-regulated) and commodities (CFTC-regulated), allowing projects to evolve without permanent SEC burdens if they meet decentralization criteria. It’s a compromise to foster innovation, as overly broad SEC classification has historically stifled crypto development.

RFIA proposes scaling regulatory requirements based on the size and impact of a digital asset project, rather than applying blanket rules to all. I.e. If a project raises more than $5 million in value through token sales or has trading volume exceeding $5 million annually.

Smaller thresholds might apply for ongoing reporting, like $1 million for basic originator info. This offers flexibility for smaller projects. Startups or experimental tokens below these thresholds face minimal red tape, encouraging grassroots innovation without costly compliance (e.g., no need for full SEC-style prospectuses for a small NFT collection). Requirements ramp up as the asset grows—e.g., semiannual reports for mid-sized assets, full audits for high-volume ones

Differences Between RFIA and CLARITY Act

RFIA didn’t “suddenly” appear—it’s an evolution of prior legislation—but its late 2025 push coincides with CLARITY’s Senate delays, positioning it as a Senate-driven complement. They are complimentary, to be very clear.

Clarity Act is essentially a CFTC empowerment bill to reduce SEC overreach. Focused on “market structure” for digital commodities (e.g., tokens on mature blockchains). It emphasizes shifting oversight to the CFTC for decentralized assets, exempting them from SEC rules if the blockchain is “mature” (no centralized control) and sales are under certain limits. It covers exchanges, brokers, dealers, anti-money laundering (AML) under Bank Secrecy Act, and provisional registrations.

RFIA creates a “clear line” between securities (SEC) and commodities (CFTC), with transitional paths for assets to shift regulators, plus joint rulemaking to minimize agency conflicts. RFIA is broader and more comprehensive, covering not just market structure but also tax treatment, consumer protections, banking integration (e.g., allowing banks to custody, stake, and process payments for digital assets), stablecoins, smart contracts, and illicit finance. It introduces concepts like “ancillary assets” and hybrid SEC-CFTC jurisdiction, with tools like regulatory sandboxes for testing. RFIA also modernizes banking laws to integrate crypto safely, which CLARITY touches less on.

There’s many nuances - RFIA excludes tokenized securities from its digital asset definitions and ties rules to thresholds (as above), making it more flexible. CLARITY uses blockchain maturity tests and semiannual disclosures, which some view as rigid - but if you take a Birds Eye approach, they are both here to usher in an era of digital property/asset innovation.

Why RFIA Emerged During CLARITY’s Stall

Introduced May 29, 2025, by Rep. French Hill (R-AR). It advanced through House committees (Financial Services and Agriculture) with bipartisan support, passing the House in July 2025 (per prior context; results confirm passage and Senate referral on Sept 18, 2025). However, it’s stalled in the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee due to:

1. Jurisdictional fights (SEC vs. CFTC).

2. Partisan divides: Democrats want stronger consumer/AML protections; Republicans prioritize innovation.

Specifically, Clarity has two leaders at odds within the Senate Banking Committee. Chairman Tim Scott vs Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren. Chairman has more power, but Elizabeth has more pull.

RFIA thankfully does seem to blur the lines a bit more — being led by Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). Go ladies go!!! We are cheering for you. A 182-page RFIA discussion draft was released by the Senate Banking Committee on Sept 5, 2025, shortly after CLARITY’s House passage. Lummis began tweeting about the “RFIA of 2026” in late December 2025, framing it as reinforcing CLARITY by distinguishing securities/commodities.

RIFA does not make Clarity less important, or smaller

Lummis explicitly says RFIA “will reinforce the Clarity Act” in distinguishing assets, suggesting it builds on CLARITY rather than replacing it. RFIA could serve as the Senate companion bill, leading to a conference committee to merge them into a final law.

RFIA expands the framework. CLARITY might get “stripped out” or amended in reconciliation (e.g., adding RFIA’s banking provisions or thresholds), but this strengthens rather than diminishes it. CLARITY isn’t being gutted to pass; instead, delays stem from Senate negotiations, and RFIA offers compromises (e.g., more SEC input) to break the logjam.

Not to mention, RFIA is earlier-stage than CLARITY (since it already passed the House and awaits Senate action). RFIA doesn’t even have a bill number assigned yet (prior was S.2281 in 118th).

Let’s use $AAVE token as an example

Let’s use the $AAVE token as an example, created by AAVE Labs. $AAVE is the native governance token of the Aave protocol, a fully decentralized, non-custodial lending/borrowing platform. It’s recently been under fire by it’s token holders because Labs is debating who owns the IP right to brand.

Currently, $AAVE provides voting on protocol upgrades, staking in the Safety Module, and utility access, but no direct “equity” in Aave Labs or enforced profit-sharing. Some holders want more value accruing directly to the token/DAO, but this is an internal governance issue, not a regulatory one. RFIA-style clarity doesn’t exacerbate it—instead, it protects the decentralized protocol (and thus token utility) from heavy SEC oversight, while Labs remains a service provider (not the “owner” of the token’s value).

Aave is already highly decentralized (governance handed over in 2020, no admin keys held by Labs), so AAVE would likely qualify for commodity status with minimal ongoing burdens. The SEC closed its 4-year investigation into Aave in December 2025 with no enforcement action, explicitly avoiding classifying AAVE or protocol operations as unregistered securities. Under RFIA’s ancillary assets category such tokens are presumed not to be securities (shifting to CFTC/commodity oversight if decentralized).

In short, regulation like RFIA makes decentralized utility/governance tokens safer and more valuable by confirming they’re not securities.

Leading crypto projects will benefit big, but Jan 15th matters a lot

CLARITY already passed the House on July 17, 2025, and was referred to the Senate, where it’s stalled without a vote. The Senate would need to pass its own version (likely based on the RFIA draft or a merged text using CLARITY as the base) before the two chambers reconcile differences in a conference committee.

A markup (committee debate and vote) for a Senate crypto bill was eyed for mid-December 2025 by Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott, but Democrats pushed back with a counteroffer, leading to delays into early 2026.

Any final bill requires Senate passage first (or a merged version). Negotiations are centered on the Senate’s drafts, with a markup now slated for January 15th, 2026 (rumors).

Clarity Drives Inflows and Formation: By shifting oversight of decentralized assets to the CFTC (with clear “maturity” tests and exemptions for DeFi developers/transaction verifiers), it creates predictable rules that encourage offshore projects to relocate to the U.S. and new founders to launch here. Industry experts note this could lead to a “wave of adoption” for compliant chains, with startups flocking to build on platforms classified as commodities.

RFIA helps VC-funded startups scale operations, attract institutional capital, and integrate with traditional finance without fearing SEC enforcement actions. For example, startups building DeFi or tokenized assets can use sandboxes to prototype without full registration, reducing legal costs that often eat into early-stage funding. If these both get enacted, Clarity first, then RFIA, we are (hopefully) booming!

Not financial advice.

P.S. Special shout out to the bipartisan pro-crypto Senators who are working hard with Cynthia and Tim to make this happen: John Kennedy (R-LA), Katie Britt (R-AL), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Bernie Moreno (R-OH), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Mark Warner (D-VA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), and John Hickenlooper (D-CO).

If you made it this far, you are a hero!

Here’s how I can help you with your early customer acquisition:

I’m looking to select 1 AI startup and do a breakdown of their product to our readers! Please submit your product here for demo if interested!! Can’t wait to see what you all have been cooking.

Don Stein

Contact: Linkedin — X — Youtube

2025, www.MeetDonStein.com - Thank you for reading!

[Preview]

By the end of this post, we’re going to create training data that looks something like this…

…then use a custom OpenAI model to digest it!

We’ll be using our custom made dataset to fine-tune a model which we’ll then plug into the back end of our iOS App. Can I do it? I’m not a genius like you! But I do have grit.. let’s see 🤔!

Scroll down to read the full challenge in today’s blog. But first…

Hey, I’m Don! I’ve been building career memories for a decade. Over the last three years I’ve been reinvesting my own capital and time back it into my business. All the while learning and growing my net worth via public markets and crypto.

Over that same period, I also hosted 50+ virtual events with some of the world’s best VC investors and founders for our CEO group. Prior to all that, aside from my first job at Meta, I was lucky enough to raise $10 million in my twenties; doing my best to learn business, investor relations, and the startup mindset all at the same time. Maybe some of you can relate.

All that’s to say, I love business, I love money, I love to try and leverage my time.

This year, I set the goal to publish a thoughtful blog every Monday.. 52 of them! Don’ Daily is a recap of the entrepreneurship adventures I collect, as well as the new lessons I’m constantly learning from doing. My hope is that this entertains, inspires, and influences new creative ideas for you. Every Monday. If you enjoy the blog, please share!

Share Don's Daily

If you need anything at all, or if you want to work together, let me know!

Ask for help!

[Custom AI Data Set]

Building a Sample Dataset by Leveraging Custom Apps on GPT Store

Here’s how I custom made my own version of GPT. The reason we do this first, is because we’re going to use this bot as the AI to help us create synthetic data as a sample set for our eventual JSONL file that we’ll fine-tune our model with.

Step 1: Create your own GPT App on GPT App Store

Before we get into the technicals of fine-tuning, we need to first build out some example conversations. Here’s how I did that using a super simple custom GPT.

Go to the ‘Explore GPTs’ App Store page, click ‘Create.’ It will bring you to a blank New GPT page where we will begin.

Step 2: Test and Customize your GPT App on GPT App Store

The reason we are doing this first, BEFORE WE FINE TUNE WITHIN AGENT BUILDER, is because we need to quickly create a conversation set which we’ll use as examples for our custom agent.

So you can fill this out quickly, and test it a few times on the right side. It does not need to be perfect yet! You can see below I wrote inside of ‘instructions’ a set of prompts which this AI will read. I gave it a name, AI Mirror, and that’s about it.

After giving it basic overview instructions, then I wrote out a bit more in regards to how I want each conversation to function. I told the GPT, “question 1 is the opening door question,’ so you should simply ask them, ‘What happened today?’

By doing this, now every single time I talk to this AI the first thing it will ask me is, ‘What happened today?’ This gives me a strong and consistent base to build on each convo.

If you open up the explore page, click ‘create’ and start typing stuff, within about 10 minutes this will all make sense. I highly recommend you do!

Step 3: Create Sample Data using our new GPT App

Now that we have a basic GPT app inside of the store, it will appear in the sidebar of your Chat.com interface. See “AI Mirror” in my right panel? Click it.

This now opens up a new chat window where I am speaking only with my bot.

I’ll have 5-15 conversations with it, ensuring that it’s giving me the output I was expecting.

Once I’ve had enough conversations that I feel like we have a solid sample size, now the real fine-tuning begins.

[AI Technicals]

Fine-tuning a GPT 4.1 with your Sample Data

Step 1: Extract all your GPT Conversations from ChatGPT

There’s a simple ‘download all conversations’ feature within GPT. Once done, you’ll receive a Folder like this:

From within that folder, open Terminal, and then run a small Python script that loops over every conversation that mentions the word, ‘AI Mirror’ or ‘Mirror.’ Make sure to name your GPT App something unique so it’s easy for your Python script to extract.

Let me start by saying, I never before wrote Python. SO if I can figure it out, then you can too. Just ask your favorite AI model to write the code, paste it in, and watch the magic happen.

Now you’ll want to convert those convo’s into JSONL training examples.

After all is said and done, you will have a file which content looks something like this..

Essentially, it is just a mushed together examples of the sample conversations we’re going to use to train our AI model. This way we have a framework for our AI to follow each time a user speaks to it.

Step 2: Using Python, Divide your new file into Training Data vs Validation Data

Zip your new data set into a folder, and NOW the fun begins!!!

Step 3: Fine-tuning your final model, and testing

Head to the Agent Builder within GPT’s Backend Tools, and select ‘fine-tuning’ from the side menu.

Drag and drop your new folder of Training Data and Validation data into the designated areas... set your parameters (ask me if you need help!), and then VIOLA! It starts to train your model using your sample data. Frankly, I have no clue what this graph means, but it looks cool.

25 minutes, and 118,353 trained tokens later, and we have our working model.

What’s that you ask? Essentially the training data is what our AI model will see, and then each time it comes to a conclusion, it will run the answer against the ‘validation data’ which it could not see prior to giving an answer.

In the simplest form, the training data is how an AI learns to guess accurately, and the validation data is how the AI learns if it was right or wrong. I broke my file into 80% training data and 20% validation data. You can choose whatever % you want, I just did that because I love the Pareto principle.

That’s the back end.

Now to create a front end, you go to ‘Chat’ in the side menu. And create a chatbot that is attached to our new model as the back end. You can see I had a lot of trial and error.... 11 times to be exact. But, I eventually figured it out! And, you can too. If you try hard.

Just like we did with your GPT App, we give this new Chat bot similar instructions, but instead of using the baseline GPT 4.1 model, we are now using our very unique model as the backend brain.

And that’s it.. all data has been digested, and you’ve now created a Chatbot hooked to this model. Once you call that models prompt ID, then your model is connected! We’ve just built our own GPT Model, trained on unique data.

Resources for you:

• GPT App Store, this is where you create a simple AI App (link)

• OpenAI Developer Platform, this is where you create a fine-tuned AI backend model (link)

• AI Mirror (my custom AI chatbot that I use to think through life’s challenges) (link)

• AI Mirror App, this is where I launched the AI model into Apple’s app store, I did this so quality life advice was never more than a click away. (link)

• My substack blog, where I’m covering all the random things I learn, and random adventures I take. substack.meetdonstein.com

My Thoughts:

First off, most of you run AI startups. Or you are VCs who fund this stuff. So let me applaud you. This is tough stuff! And I’m nowhere near as experienced as most of you. But I can say, this is super cool. And for those who are CEO’s but not technical….I know this all might seem complicated, but let me ensure you, if I can learn this over a weekend, then you can too. The real necessity isn’t knowledge, it’s grit and hunger.

I literally just sat in front of my computer for hours doing trial-and-error until I got it. Every time I ran into a problem, I took a screenshot of my screen, and asked GPT to explain it to me. “WTF!??!?” was my most common phrase that weekend 😂😂

If you want to talk about the AI you’ve trained, I would love a demo and deep dive. Happy to give you exposure by covering it here.

Get your startup featured (free)

Also, if you want to chat with my AI bot… you can do so by downloading the iOS App where I hooked it into. The App is super simple, and was apart of another experiment where I wanted to learn how to launch my first ever iOS App. But I digress :). I still use this GPT Model to think through life decisions. It’s built as a reflection-tool where it never prescribes solutions, it only asks you open-ended questions about your life. Download on iOS and start talking to my custom GPT (there is no account or password or email needed, you can get started talking in 5 seconds). If you don’t use Apple, and you prefer native GPT, you can also speak with my robot here.

Don Stein

Contact: Linkedin — X — Youtube

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