Hello everyone,

First, thank you to everyone who emailed me with their startup pitches. From AI-powered teeth to a drone with human skin, the ideas we’re seeing from tomorrow’s innovators are truly inspiring. We’re still reviewing applications for who will ultimately be joining the Cronus team, so I will keep you updated on that. For now, please send any other pitches to toomeycronusteam@gmail.com

As you might remember, in my last installment I had just gotten a mysterious contact from esteemed tech journalist Eric Thompson (nominee of the Tri State Area Award for Excellence in Multimedia Storytelling Amongst Asian Gen X Reporters Celebrating Caucasian Reporters, 2002). The contact he gave me had no name and no last name - just spaces. Typical Eric stuff. Very cool and very entrepreneur, which I aspire to become.

After my autonomous taxi left, I went back to my hotel room and texted the number Eric gave me.

Hello. This is Dan Toomey - former journalist now turned tech entrepreneur currently building Cronus, the Gateway to Western Expansion. Congratulations on getting in at the ground floor. How much money will you give me? 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

Immediately, a response.

Call.

So I did.

One ring, a beep, then a woman’s voice-

You’ve reached the offices of Derek Laslo. Please state your project and the requested amount of funding. Someone will be in touch.

Derek Laslo.

The phone fell to the floor.

Derek. Laslo.

It’s a name I’ve heard said with the same weight as titans like LeBron James, Jesus, Zendaya and Dick Cheney. “It’s funded by Derek Laslo,” “Derek Laslo is interested,” “Derek Laslo just moved to Serbia,” “Derek Laslo is gay,” “Impossible, Derek Laslo had sex with my wife.”

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As a former business journalist, I’ve written about Derek Laslo extensively. How could you not? Even if a story didn’t involve him, we were ordered to insert “Derek” and “Laslo” as keywords somewhere in our headlines so the article would get clicks.

“Ken Griffin Seen in Miami with Snoop Dogg, Whom Derek Laslo May Have Met Once”

“Violent Manhattan Crash Kills Seven - Derek Laslo Not Involved, Was in Spain”

“Novel Coronavirus Spreads Across Globe. Was It Started By Derek Laslo? Unlikely.”

The man is a lightning rod. Trying to summarize him biographically will do little to encapsulate a being of such power, wealth and contradiction - yet we often tried to.

Throughout the early 2010s, I was employed at NUZ - a publication that revolutionized journalism by prioritizing speed over everything. “People don’t want to read,” an editor once told me whilst in line at our smoothies-only cafeteria. “They want information fucked in their face.” I’m not sure what that meant and he was fired two weeks later for underage drinking (he, and every digital media editor, was 17). But that experience was representative of working in the newsroom as a whole - all writing was kept as brief as possible in the era of tweets, posts, boops and bops.

Like any newsroom, we had to constantly update pre-written obituaries of living celebrities in case they died and we had to get to the story first. For maximum efficiency, obits at NUZ were no more than four bullet points. This meant that I was constantly juggling which four facts were the most important to include when trying to give people a sense of who Derek Laslo was. Ultimately, this was the final obituary I had for him by the time I left.

• Derek Laslo was born in Lawrence, Kansas in 1970.

• In 1999, Derek Laslo founded Gimli - a software service that matches advertisers with people hovering their mouse over things on the internet which quickly made him millions of dollars, later to become billions of dollars.

• In 2009, Derek Laslo became a majority owner in VictorVentures - a venture capital firm that strictly funds businesses started by ivy league dropouts under the age of 25.

• Derek Laslo’s left eye is made of glass.

For what it’s worth, Derek Laslo is a majority owner of NUZ. So the bullet points I included above were also deemed the most “appropriate” to include about Laslo, according to his assistants that would do things like visit the office, talk to reporters and write half the articles we published.

Obviously, from this list I’m missing out a ton. You don’t know about Laslo’s impressive ping pong skills, his lacking any sense of humor, his submarines, his minority ownership of the Golden State Warriors, the plane crash in 1982 outside of Chicago that killed his father and six of his siblings, his bowie knife collection, his bankrolling of senate races in states he does not live in, his lifelong sobriety, his biomedical startup aiming to expand the width of the human vein, his assistant that self-immolated in front of the St. Louis arc, his illegitimate children, or his very legitimate children.

The one thing you do hear about - and often - is Derek Laslo’s left eye made out of glass. Anyone who’s had to see him speak onstage has watched Laslo pop it out from its socket like a tic tac, spin it around in his fingers and ask the host, “you drop this?”

A fleet of BCG consultants got a writer from The King of Queens to come up with that line for $2 million.

The truth, Laslo often tells you, is that he lost the eye when he was a child. At age two, he was playing with his brothers in his front yard when he stepped on a stick that flicked into his socket and popped out his left peeper. It rolled into the neighbor’s yard where it was eaten by their pug.

“That’s why I can’t have pets,” he once told our newsroom. “I’m too delicious.”

Eight million for that one.

Now, I could go on speculating about petty things like Derek’s sexuality, oversized influence in our country’s elections, or his true number of bowie knives. But there’s no point. Try to pin Derek down and you’ll never reach an answer. The most definitive thing I can tell you about him is that Derek Laslo crafted his life around becoming the manifestation of power which is an amorphous, elusive thing.

Even thinking up as eloquent a sentence as that had my brain running hot. I was hyperventilating. In fact, I realized I just spent the last thirty seconds breathing heavily into the voicemail I was leaving for the one and only Derek Laslo. Good lord. I was new to this entrepreneurial game, after all. Is this what it’s always like? I needed to practice more.

“Watch Shark Tank compilation video tonight on YouTube,” I said.

Then I realized that was a thought I had for my own head and not out loud.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Three more seconds remaining on voicemail,” the phone said back.

I’d never heard of a phone doing that before. Damnit Laslo! Always wielding cutting edge technology. Sweat beaded at my brow. My throat dried up. I was bungling my best chance at getting the funding, and the world would soon be left without its next Silicon Valley. I needed to aim quickly and aim high.

“Uhhh, uh, 80 million. No more, no less.”

No more? Of course I want more! Why would I say no MORE?!

“Or, actually more. A whole lot more. Uh, please-”

The phone clicked. The screen faded to black, and I stared at myself sweating into my phone.

The man I saw didn’t look like an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs didn’t do this. They were confident, with big watches that had the day and month on them.

I walked to my window and stared out into the street. A tour van was pulled up to the entrance of the hotel, emptying a flock of men in their 40s carrying luxury golf bags.

“Those are real businessmen,” I forgot to say inside my head again.

Then, another buzz from my phone. I shuffled across the room and poked the screen awake.

Ha. Done. $80m wired soon. DL.

Boom. Entrepreneur.

Hi everyone,

Dan here again providing an exciting update to Cronus: The Western Frontier of the West.

This is regarding some of the recent media buzz we’ve generated.

You may have recently listene

d to my appearance on Questionings, a fantastic new podcast from esteemed business journalist Eric Thompson where each episode has to be a nine hour long conversation between two people. It’s incredible. Eric is, of course, famous for his 15-year reporting stint at The Wall Street Journal covering technology, which he tells me ended because of the frankly outsized reactions to his column advocating that we switch mother’s babies at birth to determine that it is in fact upbringing and not race that determines a child’s future.

Apparently he did this switcheroo with a nearby polycule in his neighborhood which is how a 5’5 white single fella in Berkeley ended up with eight children of Sudanese, Honduran, Korean and Peruvian heritage. You should see it. Each of Eric’s children hate him to the core. Whenever he tries to hug them, they hiss and call him “the white devil.” He said he caught one of his children Aidan floating a few inches off the ground one night, miming the sharpening of a machete while whispering “wear Daddy’s skin, bring honor to the land of my blood.” It’s hilarious. They’ll all be billionaires one day.

Eric Thompson is a humble and insatiably curious man. His podcast studio is a temple to inquisitiveness. It’s in his garage, if you can believe the humility! I mean, this is a guy who’s been honored multiple times with a New York Print Technology Journalists Press Club Honorary Distinction nomination.

The garage is incredibly understated when considering the other garages in Berkeley, California. One Tesla. Two bikes. Some kettlebells near the bike pumps. Rooftop sauna. It’s the shittiest Berkeley garage I’ve ever been inside. I said that exact sentence to Eric when he pressed a button near the lightswitch, causing a toolbox to shift aside and reveal a hidden door.

We walked inside, revealing a state-of-the-art studio built to honor the art of endurance conversing. A pair of microphones float over two jet black eames chairs, each flanked by nightstands that have every beverage you could ever dream of: tap water, sparkling water, coffee. Unbelievable.

Between the chairs is a poster of a rocket lifting off into the cosmos, with Eric’s silhouette superimposed into the Milky Way. When you sit across from Eric, you feel like the only person in the world. Of course, on the other side of us were 14 podcast producers watching us through a giant sheet of polished glass. They sat there motionless throughout our entire conversation, save for one guy whose job it was to control a laptop that could magically look up anything Eric and I had been discussing like robot boxing, vodka, stealth camping or Bridget Moynahan in 2006. None of them made any expression at all, which is how I prefer my assistants.

At about 7:15:29, our conversation had drifted into the supposed forced homosexual rituals of Spartan culture and how we would have fared when met with such a situation. But I had to tell Eric about Cronus.

“What? What is that?” he asked. “I’ve literally never heard of that shit.” Eric sometimes doesn’t research anything about the guest that comes on his show, so as to ask questions “from the most genuine source of curious truth” he says.

I told him Cronus will be a thriving outpost in the heart of Texas. An oasis for incubation where the bravest, most driven founders can cohabitate and focus solely on building the businesses of the future. Since the modern founder gets too caught up in the bureaucracy that comes with traditional venture capital -- we are providing the closest environment one can get to building at the frontier. Free. Innovative. Exciting.

At this point I looked back at Eric who had gotten distracted and was now watching a Vice video from 2014 about rappers getting addicted to codeine but making great music. All the producers in the studio were watching along intently as well.

In our past hangouts, Eric and I have agreed to allow each other at least a half hour of phone time to relieve ourselves from the mental exhaustion of focusing on another person.

Since I wasn’t going to interfere, I had nothing to do but stand there, looking around at all of the trophies that Eric had won or - more often - been nominated for: AI Print Reporter of the Year (2023), Technology Multimedia Storyteller Special Achievement Award (2022), Remote Business Podcast of the Year (2020), Most Successful Pivot to Video Strategy of American Journalists Prize (2018), Dad of the Year (2014). It was admirable -- that such an accomplished man in the industry had the bravery to go completely independent with this podcast, taking matters into his own hands and standing up for journalism that’s unfettered by corporate interests.

The video ended and Eric said it was time to read an ad for Shaft: a new pill by Eli Lilly that helps men stay erect for the entirety of a long weekend.

“If you’re a guy like me,” he said “then you love being hard.” He then repeated that line eight different times to make sure it sounded right.

As Eric listed off all the circumstances during a long weekend in which it’s beneficial to be erect (sex, intimidating the men around you at a cookout, boxing out someone in basketball, opening a loose door when your hands are full and so on),I was beaming, proud that this man I’ve known for so long is now finally self-funded.

“See, it’s that kind of energy I’m hoping to bring to Cronus,” I told Eric.

He finished his ad read and looked through my eyes. “What are you talking about?” he said.

Just then the podcast studio flashed bright red. One of Eric’s podcast producers whacked a giant gong they keep in the booth to signal once the nine hour mark had been reached. Eric then immediately went back to his phone, stood up and walked out of the room.

The gong-smacking podcast producer, so thin that he commanded the mallet with both hands, gave me a bottle of water and thanked me for my insights. “Really fascinating stuff, my guy,” he said. “This should be up in about a week, we’ll let you know once it’s uploaded - tag you, collab request, all that stuff.”

I had no idea what this rat child was saying to me, but I nodded and said a mix of “totally,” “for sure,” “completely,” and “had a ton of fun.”

The producer then shuffled me out of the studio, through the garage, down Eric’s driveway and into an autonomous vehicle that whisked me off to the airport. I texted Eric “thanks so much for having me, had a blast.” He responded with an AI-generated emoji of a rocket with testicles and an Amazon link to Shaft pills that I could get at a discount as long as I ordered before Memorial Day, using the code “TECH.”

My car was steadily on the freeway by now. I’m always intimidated by the freedom these things give me. My friends in tech always talk about the hijinks they get up to in a driverless ride: smoking, drinking, reading Abundance, calling your wife. Sometimes I wonder if it leaves man with too much choice - that we’re better off being forced to sit with another human who’s much worse at driving, but much better at improving your ability to talk to someone and ask follow up questions.

My phone pinged. I received an email from the Cronus account I created the other week. It’s subject line: “IDEA.” It was from Eric.

“Ur thing sounds cool, won’t work w/o investors. Sending you a guys number. Rich, smart and bored. What more do u need? Never forget what I do 4 u”

I was occupied wondering who still uses the number 4 to represent “four” anymore when a contact popped up on my phone. The car pulled over at my hotel and the door opened. I smiled down at my palm, knowing that today was worth it - that we were set on changing the world.

“Thanks so much,” I said to the car.

It pulled away.

Happy Sunday and I hope you’ve all been well.

About a month or so ago, I attended a gala on behalf of the Rothschilds’ Children’s Foundation. It’s a foundation to raise money for supporting the Rothschilds’ children, like Liam Rothschild, Vivian Rothschild and so on. They really need the cash. This applies to both public children and those kept in the dark. They’re good kids, mostly undeformed, and I’m glad to do what I can to support them. One of them recently started a boogie board company after rehab. She’s one of the deformed ones, unfortunately, but she won’t be modeling for the boogie boards so I think they will sell well.

I was not ten minutes into my time at the gala when I felt a slap on my back. I turned around and saw this hulking tan slab of a man standing over me, long hair falling from his head and over his eyes like some type of demi god. Normally, when confronted by supposed adversaries this large I try to expand my lats, hiss and wield my pocket machete - but not to this one. I’ve known him since he was a young boy. This was the assistant to an old polo buddy of mine, Chaucer, who revealed himself behind the muscly, venous calf of his aide whom he uses for various physical greetings like backslaps, fistbumps and so on.

Chaucer and I got to talking and both agreed that life in Manhattan hasn’t been that exciting recently. Everything is so monotonous! We go to dinners, talk to people, drink our drinks then are whisked away back home by private driverless vehicles. And for what? There has to be more to this thing we call life, we said in unison.

So we whipped out ChatGPT and asked it what the most fulfilling things in life are. At first, it spit out this big long answer but I wasn’t gonna read 350 whole words. So I asked ChatGPT to condense it into singular, bite-sized infobits that the average consumer like me would find appealing given the fast-moving nature of modern media. What it produced was still too long, so I deleted 8 other bullet points at random, thus leaving one. And it said:

• Leave the world a better place than when you arrived

ChatGPT’s capacity for brilliant answers never ceases to amaze me! Chaucer threw a $100 bill on my phone as a tip to Mr. GPT. I then tossed both in a nearby trash bin, due to my belief that men of a certain stature should only use one phone per inquiry - keeps your data untraceable! If you’re a business leader reading this, write that down on your remaining phone.

• Leave the world in a better state than when you arrived.

Such a powerful command. But what to do with it? C and I went back and forth all night.

At one point we thought the answer was children, but almost immediately put that feeling aside. Children, we’ve been told, take quite a lot of time. Too much time, in fact. Ideally, you find a woman who can give birth to a child when the child is the seasoned age of 18 and already capable of joining your marketing team. In fact, a few years ago Chaucer and I put quite a bit of money into a startup that attempted the first ever birth of an 18 year old child, but the technology was too ahead of its time and several mothers exploded.

At around 3am and several pills later, Chaucer had his assistant slap me clean across my face, meaning Chaucer had an idea he thought must be brilliant.

Originally from Texas, Chaucer told me about the brilliant wonders of open space. Dirt, he said, looking at me with bloodshot eyes and a grip so tight I wish it came from a woman I loved. They got dirt everywhere where I’m from. He spread his arms out wide, slamming against the walls of the bathroom stall we had been sharing.

“The potential is in the dirt!”

Chaucer spoke of a town called Thurbur, Texas -- an old mining town that was just a few miles from where he was born. Legend has it that a mass murder in one of its last bituminous coal mines left it empty, cursed by the locals never to be touched again. But I had no time to believe in the ethereal. I believed in the vision that C was selling me.

“The West is in decline,” he said while holding one finger in my mouth because I asked him to. “Don’t you agree?”

It wasn’t that I disagreed, but I certainly didn’t not agree. Over the past few years, I suppose I had seen The West fall in its global standing. Maybe it was Benghazi? Or when KFC came out with that sandwich that replaced the bun with two pieces of fried chicken? Or maybe that one day a few years ago when I woke up and suddenly realized that I trust none of my neighbors or anyone I see on the street for fear that they want my blood and money? I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I knew Chaucer was right.

“It’s China,” Chaucer said. “China’s the new West, and they’re going to fuck us.”

Of course, China. I just remembered that I always hated China.

“China is going to fuck us?” I asked, lisping because of Chaucer’s thick index under my tongue. “Where?”

“Everywhere,” he said. “They’ll just fuck us everywhere.”

If there’s one thing I didn’t like, it was getting fucked everywhere.

“We’ve lost our way of innovation in this country. All the kids are fat and lazy off their fucking phones,” said Chaucer who originally made his money developing an app called Monkey Spank where you spank a monkey’s ass to earn fake gold coins that, with a paid tier subscription, can be used to buy special gloves for heartier spanking. Several of the Rothschild kids were addicted to the game beyond the point of them being able to eat solids anymore.

“What we need is a nucleus. You and I break ground in Thurbur and form an incubator of American excellence - a hub where young men and women can live and collaborate to launch valuable, future-shaping startup companies. Rockets. Blasters. Hoses. Stuff like that.”

“Don’t they already have something like that in Silicon Valley?”

“Gay and expensive. Not the place for rogues like ourselves. Texas. Texas is where we need to be.”

Chaucer’s assistant wiped some foam that was trickling out the corner of his mouth.

“Will these companies make money?”

“Of course. That’s always the brilliant byproduct to any innovative idea: if it’s good enough you will make money. You’ll be so rich you won’t know what to do with yourself. But what we could build in this incubator - in this habitat for ingenuity and greatness - will matter much more than money. It will come to define who controls the world order in the years to come. Do you hear me?”

The louder he got the more convincing he sounded. I promised to myself that one day I would figure out why that was.

“Wow, that certainly sounds interesti-”

“But you and I need to commit right now. Either we’re doing this and saving the fucking world from going to fucking Chinese shit, or you say no to financing this and I’ll literally never speak to you again.”

A cool circular tube pressed against my stomach. I looked down to see Caucher nuzzling the nose of his pistol into my belly button through my shirt. If you knew Chaucer, you wouldn’t be surprised. It was why I was okay with all this and completely could have run if I wanted to.

“Absolutely,” I said in the most certain voice I’ve ever heard from myself. “What are we going to call it?”

Chaucer looked at his assistant, then hoisted the gun up to his temple.

“Name a Greek god. Any.”

“Zeus,” he replied immediately.

“Too famous,” Chaucer said, turning the gun on himself. “Name another, more niche god or I shoot myself right here right no-”

“Cronus,” said the assistant, emotionless.

Tears welled in Chaucer’s bloodshot eyes.

“Yes,” he whimpered. “Oh god yes it’s perfect.”

I had no idea who Cronus was or how C’s assistant could wield this immediately and encyclopedic knowledge of Greek gods, in the same way a precocious fourth grader might.

C collapsed in the bathroom stall, resting his arms on the toilet bowl.

“W- we’re going to save the fucking world.”

C’s aide patted me on my left shoulder, which I’ve long known to mean I should leave them both alone for the night. I opened the stall door, brain overflowing with ideas about what we could build at Cronus -- the independent, self-funded nation we could raise from the untouched virgin soil in the great state of Texas. For the first time in my life I was energized at the prospect of making the world a better place than I left it.

I walked out of the stall and heard a moaning from the other side of the bathroom. It was a Rothschild child -- one of the most deformed I’ve seen. It was lapping water into an eye socket located where most people’s ear is.

“I’m doing it for you,” I told the child. “I will bring you a better life.”

It turned to me and laughed.

---

As of now, we are actively accepting applications to start your business in Cronus, Texas. We are also looking for investors who might want to join our efforts. It’s a very exciting feeling to be at the frontier. Why not join?

toomeycronusteam@gmail.com

Happy New Year everyone.

This is my first letter to investors I’ve released to the public. For the past decade I’ve published these writings privately, solely for the eyes of a handful of prominent venture capitalists that fund my g̶r̶i̶f̶t̶s̶ operations. We have a great system where they send me money and, in return, get laminated photos of my scrotum. I’m not sure how A16z does business with you other folk, but this has made me a millionaire, a slut, and quite shameful of the path I’ve chosen in life. I get the feeling a lot of you can relate.

My name is Dan Toomey. Many of you may know me for my work as a CEO and Entrepreneur, often featured on the sex-forward dating app, LinkedIn. I also post the occasional video to YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok and any other platform that brainwashes your Gen Z son into using steroids. It’s not much, but it’s honest work.

My father was an Irishman who got rich by creating Kerrygold Pure Butter, an invention he hoped would “bring flavor when life gets dreary.” I got much richer by using my inheritance to invest in a series of militarized drone startups. It’s a humble immigrant’s story that I carry with pride.

The point is, I’m loaded. Therefore, I have won. And since I’ve won, it is thus necessary for me to splooge out my thoughts on the internet, since I must be right about everything and you must all want to hear from me like I’m some kinda desk treadmill Jesus.

Also as a business leader, I’m physically incapable of documenting my thoughts without a 2012-era buzzfeed-style listicle. If things have numbers on them, it strokes my brain all rightway like, and that makes me feel good.

So without further adieu, in this edition of my Letter to Investors, here are 24 things I - Dan Hussein Toomey - learned in 2024:

1. Taping a stick to your employees back and hanging a Zyn canister from it so it dangles in front of their face will make them get to meetings faster. In some cases, they will run through walls.

2. The best dry martini in the city can be found at 345 E. 6th Ave, apt 3L. Buzz the door. My old CFO Steve will answer. Pick him up, shake him around a bit, lift him up and wait for the liquid to spill out of his mouth. It’s a vile process, but you’ll never go back. $345.

3. If the intern class asks you to Split the G with them, it does not mean prostitution. I’m not sure why I thought it would, but please do not make the same mistakes I did.

4. Ken Griffin has a dinosaur skeleton and you do not. Use this as jealousy fuel for your business ambitions.

5. Mongolian horse raves are an appropriate business expense.

6. The era of corporate swag is over. Out with company-embroidered vests or jackets. If your employees truly love where they work, they’ll get a tattoo. More visible placement = faster promotions. Our new CFO has a neck tat of The Rock but with my face.

7. Here’s the best way to remember someone’s name at a networking event: ask them their name. Then ask, “are you important enough for it to be beneficial for me to remember your name?” Trust me, they’ll thank you.

8. Privatization is the future. If there’s any public utility, your company will be smart to acquire it. I’ve already made plans to purchase every public water fountain in my area and retrofit them with bear traps to clamp on the mouth of anyone who doesn’t pay $5 per sip.

9. All CEOs should beef up security in light of this year’s horrific shooting. In addition to a North Korean-esque armada of jogging lackeys I keep by my side, I’ve also convinced Mayor Eric Adams to arrest any hot young 20-somethings with Italian American names in my area.

10. On that note, any adolescent within 200 miles of Hoboken named Tony or Enzo will be put in solitary confinement. I’m assuming that’s most of them.

11. Out: pickleball.

12. In: krav-maga.

13. Also in: attacking the testicles of your business partner using the art of Israeli hand-to-hand combat. This will not only force them out of the company but also ensure they don’t have children who will one day seek revenge on you.

14. Public school education is bad for your child. So is private school. And homeschooling. All school is bad. In the past year, I’ve been inspired by the novel Hatchet to educate my children by leaving them in a treehole for several weeks deep in the Quinault Rain Forest. They have come back feral, rabied and, most importantly, men.

15. Listing 24 things is harder than I anticipated.

16. The longevity industry is one of the best investments you can make right now. Which means it’s also an ideal place to grift. If I were a young founder, I would be cranking out BS aging creams like there was no tomorrow. A black sea salt pomade that gives you monthslong erections. Boom there’s an idea. Someone make that.

17. Steakhouses are no longer where deals are made. It’s all about omakase. I once ripped sake shots off the shining dome of Masayoshi Son and in three hours I was a billionaire. Watch this space.

18. The young employees are all really into American Psycho for some reason. Use this to your advantage. Have them competing for best business card until they’re confident enough to murder a homeless person. Only then will you be able to scale your B2B SAAS company or whatever it is.

19. Sports gambling is a robust and growing industry, but there are dangers to getting addicted. Best to get your assistant or child hooked to FanDuel so you can observe their self-destruction from a safe distance, like the nerds in Oppenheimer watching the bomb go off with those funny goggles on.

20. Youtube has shorts. IG has reels. TikTok has shopping. Spotify has video. Google has AI. Chick-fil-A has a streaming service. Every company is now every company. If your boutique insurance outfit isn’t cranking out k-dramas, I don’t know what to tell ya, pookie. Adapt or drown.

21. Business school yacht week is a real thing but the Kellogg grads said if I talk about what I saw there they will light my dog on fire.

22. Kellogg grads love a good game of naked chicken.

23. If you ever find yourself asking, “am I getting my money back?” the answer is probably no.

24. ChatGPT will write these for me in the future.

As always, this was a big year. 2024 was filled with life, lessons and the life lessons we learned along the way.

Until next time.

Sincerely,

Dan Toomey