I made my first SMB acquisition last Spring. Here are a few things I learned from the introduction until now:

1. Understanding the financial statements of a small business can be very different than what is taught in an MBA program

@BrentBeshore 2. The seller isn't telling you nearly the whole story. Sometimes they don't even know the story. Account for that.

3. The business is often worse than the seller will admit and can be improved more than the seller realizes.
@BrentBeshore 4. The employees that have been there the longest don't want to change and don't give a rip about your acquisition. They simply want to continue receiving a paycheck without much hassle.
@BrentBeshore 5. The company competitors have been waiting on a chance to pounce on your key customers. Change of ownership presents that.

6. You'll lose sleep and won't even be able to identify the problem. It's just the pain of owning a business that keeps you up.
@BrentBeshore 7. It's easy to wake up one day and realized you've been around your family but haven't been emotionally engaged in months. You'll drive down to a park during lunch last week and cry your eyes out. Did I just say that out loud?!
@BrentBeshore 8. I realized my wife doesn't know much about running a business but she has the most important role in it. If your spouse isn't 100% supportive then don't even consider trying it.
@BrentBeshore 9. When you take a large career risk like leaving a job to make an acquisition, you'll have people who rush to help you and others will rush to criticize you. Some of them will be close friends and family.
@BrentBeshore 10. You'll get to the end of your first year and realized it was the hardest but best year of your life. You'll look back and realized growth happens through small but good habits executed on a daily basis.
@BrentBeshore 11. You'll see all businesses in a completely different light. You'll focus far more on real cash flow and not just the kind that is discounted 5 years out.

12. You'll get asked how many hours you work and you're never really off.
@BrentBeshore 13. Employees will come to you with personal problems and you begin to see that God really put you there to serve people and not just to grow your net worth.
@BrentBeshore 14. I went into it with a customer focus but quickly realize your suppliers are just as important.

15. If you sign up to pay in net 30 then pay in net 30. Stretching payment terms isn't shrewd, it's dishonest.

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Last week Hizbollah's finance institution Al Qard el Hasan was hacked by Spiderz. A group of people took that Data and tried to make sense out of it. Below are the findings

https://t.co/eGLqvb28o5


Loans are provided to borrowers for gold deposits or other guarantees, to the association's members and to unsecured applicants.

AQAH had a carried forward loan balance of $450 million as of December 31, 2019. This balance has been increasing at a yearly rate of 13.4%.


AQAH laundered around $475 million in 2019 in the form of disbursed loans paid to more than 20,000 borrower accounts; mostly to borrowers with gold deposits.

Deposits accounts have been offered to 307,000 members of the association, 83,000 contributors as well as to 600 companies. AQAH closed 2019 with an overall depositors accounts balance of around $500 million.

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)