Rectus 🎤 CEO at @BeeSageCo 📈 music • bees • AI • fitness • kickboxing
The Hague, The Netherlands
Joined August 2009
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Smart Beehive Scales v3 by @BeeSageCo coming out this year so we’re getting there
My former hometown 😢
I love London, I have lived here my whole life and I am immensely sad to be writing this.
In the last week I have seen 4 phone thefts and tonight had my phone stolen by a bike gang for the 2nd time.
I pay $2M in taxes per year, the lawlessness is off the charts, the entrepreneurs have left, the taxes are higher than ever.
London is sadly falling.
It’s been an eventful year in podcasts. Perhaps this is one we have to wait for a little bit longer…
ALT Joe Rogan interviewing Jesus on his podcast
Having spent a significant amount of my time over the last few years managing a company with entities across two countries, it really shouldn’t be this complex. We can do better, Europe.
Sign this petition for a unified pan-European startup entity! eu-inc.org 🇪🇺
Ru Wikmann 🐝 retweeted
At the YC Alumni Reunion, I got lots of questions from new founders about how to build a successful company, but realized that they all had the same answer. And it’s this:
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DO TOO MUCH
As a new founder, I’d often look at the CEOs of successful companies and wonder, “How do they do it?”
As Scale grows and as I learn on the job, I’ve come to realize that leaders of great organizations never just do it. They overdo it.
As a leader, you are the upper bound for how much anyone in your company will care. You need to do more, care more, attempt more than would seem reasonable. It will seem like overkill. But too much is the right amount.
This is true in big and small ways.
- What people say is overoptimism is just optimism.
- What people say is overcommunicating is just communicating.
- What people say is overdelivering is just delivering.
- What people say is micromanagement is just management.
- What people say is ruthless prioritization is just prioritization.
Actually living this way will seem crazy, and that’s ok. There is no Apple without Jobs’s “obsessive” attention to detail. There is no SpaceX or Tesla without Elon’s “maniacal” drive for execution. I have never seen ordinary effort lead to extraordinary results.
If we had not done too much, Scale would not be the company it is today.
When AI really started to take off in 2022 and “generative AI” became a thing, within 6 months Scale shifted the vast majority of our team to working on generating data for scaling LLMs.
Most companies would go through quarters of bureaucratic planning cycles and only move after a competitor started eating their lunch. In our case, the change was drastic and abrupt — some might say jarring or extreme.
What people might have reasonably described as overreacting was just reacting. And in hindsight, that reaction to developments in AI was what made Scale’s subsequent path possible, including growing 4X over the last year.
What we’ve accomplished to date represents the compounded results of everybody embracing the culture of overdoing. Scale will do things incumbent companies wouldn’t, because it’s simply too scary or painful, but others not going to the same lengths is a feature not a bug.
Creating something meaningful is a beautiful, and yes, scary and painful thing. And if you’re not overdoing it, you’re underdoing it.
Ru Wikmann 🐝 retweeted
If you want to fix a broken system, you have to pull money OUT, not put more money IN.
If you put more money IN, the system interprets it as a reward and uses the money to become even more broken.
We get this for businesses. We forget it for nonprofits and governments. 🤔
Crazy how the time flies. Joined this platform 15 years ago. Neglected it for the last 10 years. As it’s improved so much lately, I’m ready to become active again #MyXAnniversary
Ru Wikmann 🐝 retweeted
Prediction markets and Community Notes are becoming the two flagship social epistemic technologies of the 2020s.
Both truth-seeking and democratic, built around open public participation rather than pre-selected elites.
I want to see many more things like this.
Well said
Recently I’ve been engaging with people who feel rich people are the problem in the UK. They have a lot of negativity towards anyone earning a lot, owning/running a business or holding assets.
There are 3 ideas people seem to come back to:
1. - Workers earn what employers will pay them.
2. - Rich people avoid taxes through dodgy tax schemes.
3. - Wealthy people have so much and we could run the economy if we just take it from them.
Let's discuss:
1. Workers don't earn what employers pay them. Workers are free to sell their labour to the highest bidder. Employers must bid the highest amount necessary to secure people in a job. If they can't find someone for that job at that price they have to be willing to pay more or find another way to get that job done. Workers are completely free to leave any job that isn't paying them a high-enough rate and to switch jobs to work for anyone who will pay then more. They can also set up a business for about £150 and deal directly with customers if they chose. To use my personal experience... I worked at McDonald's for £1.25 per hour, then I discovered the local bar paid £2.50 per hour then I delivered pizzas and earned £4 per hour, then I started a nightclub promotion business and made £3000 in a night. I didn't ask my employer for more money, I moved to where more money was being offered.
If it were possible for employers to dictate wages, every airline could save money by telling pilots that they are now on minimum wage. Or I could start a new consulting firm to compete with Accenture and make more money by paying my consultants way less than they’d make elsewhere. Obviously this wouldn’t work.
2. Rich people pay taxes like everyone else but they earn money in different ways. Typically they set up companies as a vehicle to attract capital, talent and other resources. This company can pay people wages, dividends or it can be sold and there are different rates associated with each activity. Some businesses get so big that they have customers all over the world and those businesses typically need to set up international structures to do business and pay taxes in the other places they do business. The UK has tax treaties with these countries. In most cases it makes sense for a business to accumulate its cash in lower tax countries. When a country like the UK tries to tax a large global business on its global earnings it doesn't reflect the nature of that business and if push comes to shove, businesses would simply have to avoid doing business with a country that didn't respect global trading norms. It is perfectly legal, moral and accepted trading practices for businesses to expand globally through international structures that allow for this. A successful global business like Dyson might be valued at billions but those billions reflect its value in the world as an ongoing trading entity not the value of James Dyson as an individual citizen.
The NUMBER ONE way rich people ultimately avoid paying UK tax is to leave the UK - which anyone is legally aloud to do. Guy Hands is a billionaire who left the UK to avoid tax. So did Lewis Hamilton. So did James Dyson. So did Philip Green. So did Jim Ratcliffe. So did countless musicians and entertainers. When these people leave to avoid high-taxes the UK gets ZERO. Overtaxing people COSTS the UK money. If it were possible for these people to avoid taxes and stay in the country they would.
The non-dom issue is also just political. Many countries do not tax citizens on their overseas earnings. The total theoretical taxes the UK is missing out on is £3.2B from non-doms. This is less than a day of government spending.
3. The richest 350 people in the UK are on a list called the Times Rich List. Collectively these people are worth £795Billion (and much of this wealth is actually overseas). The UK Government spending is £1.15Trillion - equivalent to 45% of the GDP of the country (ridiculously high). If we could somehow tax the ENTIRE fortunes from the UKs richest families it would run the government for less than 9 Months.
In reality, taxing everything off the richest people would not work. What would be the value of Dyson if it were suddenly owned by the UK government? How would you take Richard Branson's international businesses off him? How would India react when you try to enter their borders to take over some of their biggest companies (owned by British Indian Families). Why would Ed Sheeran continue to perform if he knew his wealth was going to be taken from him?
If you try to take it away slowly (say a 1% wealth tax) then you simply create a deterrent for anyone to build wealth in the UK and you create an incentive for people with wealth to leave. Ultimately you do more harm than good.
Here’s the harsh truth. The UK economy is now 45% government spending. That isn’t a real economy - it’s a fake, unsustainable economy. When regulators put cuffs on the UK banking industry in 2008 we reduced the effectiveness of a mayor British industry (maybe rightly). When we left the EU we detached from being the leading voice of one of the largest economic regions on earth. Both of these events shrunk the real economy and now the government spending of £17k per person represents nearly half of the economy - this isn’t sustainable. The longer we hide from the truth the more the UK will spiral down.
Ru Wikmann 🐝 retweeted
The lesson behind this is one of the most important things for a startup founder to understand
