Today’s Lesson plan from 30 under 30: 1) Inflate your revenue. 2) Invent your clients. 3) Hope nobody checks your math.

Joanna Smith-Griffin, founder of AllHere Education promised to solve chronic absenteeism with an AI-powered chatbot. This celebrated edtech venture, meant to be an educational savior, wasn’t even safety net.

Lucas Duplan’s Clinkle is an early cautionary tale. Let’s look at the implosion of the payments app that raised a record-shattering $25 million seed round, only to deliver "absolutely nothing of value" and spectacularly burn through its entire fund.

Nate Paul, the founder of World Class Capital Group, spun a web of nearly 300 LLCs that became a "graveyard of bankruptcies." Let’s look at the collapse of the real estate empire, that was "less balance sheet, more creative writing" for financials, leaving a trail of vanishing assets and millions of dollars in losses.

SBF's Billion-Dollar Side Show. We examine how the FTX founder used "Effective Altruism" as a moral disguise for an alleged $8 billion customer fraud, exploring the dangerous intersection of intellectual arrogance and corporate crime that led to an implosion "worse than Enron.

From Forbes' "30 Under 30" to a federal indictment, Charlie Javice's story. As the founder of Frank, a student financial aid platform, Jarvice sold a façade of "over 5 million students" to JPMorgan Chase for $175 million using "synthetic data manipulation," and the spectacular fallout that followed.

Why financial Investigative Storytelling Wins. The Project: Off the Table : How the DOJ Shut Down a Billion-Dollar Game a the prefect model to see 77 Spider Investigative Storytelling. Deep-dive research combined with financial expertise created a uniquely witty and interesting take on the people and systems involved in Black Friday, when the DOJ shut down online poker.

Just like online poker promised easy money for anyone with a computer and a bit of nerve, Play-to-Earn models seem to generate wealth out of thin air and are a central part of Game Finance.

Creative Media and Community Trust Corporation, and Hudson Pacific Properties go their own way, and Franklin Street sticks to its knitting.

Estee Lauder doing less, The Real Real can’t do anything and everyone is sad about Chinese not spending., The Critique

Finally, DoubleTree on the St Johns River in Jacksonville is getting a renovation and a rebrand.

If ( and when) Big Lots shutters it’s stores, who will fill in the space?

Beneath the Surface: Case studies of underperforming banks. Vast Bank, a small community bank, decided to spice things up by diving into crypto.

The History (So-far) of Varo Bank: A Rollercoaster of Innovation and Challenges

Billionaire Barry Sternlicht is worried.

Is he worried that the WSJ is reporting his $10B Real Estate fund is “Bleeding Cash and Running Out of Options”? Oddly, no.

Banks resemble tankers more than yachts, as they cannot swiftly change course in response to macroeconomic shifts.

Ah, it’s that exciting time again—banks setting aside time to chat with analysts from other banks. So step right up and watch as the aforementioned analysts (AKA: Warriors for WFH) grill Banking's C-suite on the lack of RTO and its effects on their CRE balance sheet.

In several articles, one person voices the (seemingly) common belief that regulations are more of a hindrance than a help.

….an aggressive bias for action often overshadows the art of contemplation and planning