From bad shows to a new EP, Lucas Duplan’s career is a story of finding treasure in someone else’s trash and turning it into an unforgettable show.
Picture this: a dive bar on Sunset, a father fixing the jukebox, and his son swinging his feet on a barstool as patrons order drinks.
That boy on a barstool became Lucas Duplan, the Los Angeles-based DJ and music producer building momentum in the music industry. He takes the traditional DJ set and turns it into an experience audiences cannot replicate.
From Power Outages to Neon Lights
Lucas Duplan grew up in Echo Park, and his father fixed the jukebox at dive bars. His childhood was soundtracked by strangers selecting songs on those jukeboxes.
Duplan’s dad would bring home the 45s that got skipped the most from his jukebox job. These records were songs nobody chose, and Duplan became obsessed with why.
That question, why, is central to his production style. He approaches each show with questions about why crowds choose the track that they do. “DJing is just that question asked live, three hundred times a night,” Duplan says.
Duplan began producing at just sixteen. He had a cracked copy of Ableton and played his first paid set at a backyard quinceañera. At the celebration, the power cut out. Twice.
But that isn’t Duplan’s biggest error at a show. In 2023, he says he “bombed” a showcase. He describes it as “wrong room, wrong reading of the crowd, cleared the floor in eight minutes.” After this, Duplan emailed the promoter of the show “a full post-mortem” of what happened.
He asked the promoter for the worst set he had, knowing that LA doesn’t hand out second sets. The Tuesday slot he was offered was one nobody wanted, but he turned that dead slot into an in-demand show that audiences now know him for.
That’s the real story of Lucas Duplan, DJ: a producer who takes rooms nobody believes in and flips them into “The Room” people want to be in. Duplan says, “In this industry, the obstacle is never talent; it’s whether you can survive being bad in public once.”
The Lucas Duplan Music
Lucas Duplan has taken these experiences and channeled them into his own music. His debut single is an homage to those records his dad got from the jukeboxes, called “Skipped 45,” the original inspiration behind his career.
Duplan is also releasing his first EP called Room Tone. He aims for Room Tone to become a series of releases, with each installment produced in a different iconic LA room, capturing the essence of each space.
It is his quest for uniqueness in unwanted records and special DJ sets fulfilled, though the series may not be complete for at least another three years, given Duplan’s current imagination.
A Unique Set for One Night Only
Lucas Duplan’s live set is a one-of-a-kind experience attendees cannot find anywhere else. One edit on each of his setlists exists nowhere else; it is built for that room, that night, and then deleted afterward.
Duplan says, “Most DJs curate; I manufacture on-site.” His sets use his producing skills to create something new for the crowd in front of him, rather than selecting pre-existing records.
Duplan’s live style has been developed from the beginning of his career. At his first wedding gig, he couldn’t source the couple’s song. It was a vinyl-only pressing that couldn’t be found anywhere.
Duplan did something significant. He rebuilt the track from stems by ear in one night. He played his version at the reception, and the groom cried. Nobody at the wedding knew the track was not the original until the toast.
What’s Next?
Lucas Duplan currently dreams of having a residency that he owns all on his own and maintaining a limited luxury wedding/private-event schedule.
What is certain is that Duplan plans to continue to make the music he cares about and has cared about since childhood during exclusive DJ sets and music he produces.
Once, Lucas Duplan kept the records nobody played; now, he makes the tracks people wish they could hear just one more time.
Why the cost of a single voice reply might decide which features survive
Somewhere between the moment a user opens a free app and the moment they close it, a quiet transaction happens that has nothing to do with subscriptions or ads. Every message sent, every voice reply generated, every choice a player makes inside an AI-driven story costs something to produce, and most of the people generating that cost will never pay a cent for it.
That’s the uncomfortable arithmetic behind consumer AI products. Unlike enterprise software, where a handful of paying seats can cover infrastructure many times over, consumer applications run on long sessions, global audiences, and thin or nonexistent per-user margins. Every additional interaction draws on speech models, language models, and compute. The bill comes due whether or not the user ever converts to a paying customer.
Four common approaches
Faced with that math, teams tend to land on one of four choices, and each comes with its own tradeoffs. They ration features, limiting what free users can access. They restrict languages, serving only the markets that justify the cost. They burn margin, absorbing losses in hopes that scale eventually helps. Or they invest in building their own infrastructure, which can require significant time and resources.
Inworld, a research lab and inference provider focused on real-time AI, was built around the argument that this shouldn’t be the only menu of choices. Its stack, spanning first-party speech models, served language models, routing, and dedicated inference capacity, is designed to help lower per-unit infrastructure costs as usage grows. The company’s recent TTS-2 pricing reflects that logic directly: on-demand character pricing starts around $25 per million characters and steps down toward $12.50 at higher committed usage, a curve built around the idea that scale should be rewarded, not punished.
What the numbers show
Inworld cites customer deployments as examples of how infrastructure costs can vary at scale. Wishroll’s social simulation app, Status, reports roughly a 95% reduction in AI cost while serving more than 500,000 daily active users who spend, on average, over an hour and a half in the app each day. Language-learning app Talkpal and scripture app Bible Chat report similar savings on voice delivery, without cutting features.
Games push the problem further still. Latitude’s Voyage generates thousands of narrative choices per player turn, and ARX Media’s ISEKAI ZERO stretches that cost across long, recurring sessions where every returning user compounds context and voice expense.
Factors in evaluating AI infrastructure costs
None of these cases argue that any one provider is the cheapest option available. These examples highlight factors that can be considered when comparing infrastructure costs, including output quality, workload, cost per unit, and performance under sustained traffic. For an industry built on giving things away for free, that standard may matter more than any single model’s benchmark score.
Prices and availability are accurate as of the time of publication and are subject to change without notice. Please check the retailer’s website for the most up-to-date pricing information.
The #ALLIN Challenge, launched by Ashton Hall and Link.me, is a new creator challenge on the internet right now — 21 days, daily prizes, and two $10,000 checks waiting at the end.
Hall has a new challenge for creators, this time with a cash prize.
Ashton Hall, the morning-routine creator with more than 39 million followers, teamed up with creator platform Link.me on Thursday to launch the #ALLIN Challenge — a 21-day dare to tell the real story of what you risked to chase your dream. On the table:
$26,000 in cash across the challenge, including two $10,000 top prizes, plus a mystery box stuffed with an iPhone 17 Pro, a MacBook, AirPods and a DJI camera.
Rather than asking for choreography, Hall is inviting creators to share their origin stories.
Quit a job? Got laughed out of a room? Posted into the void for two years before anyone hit follow? That’s the content Hall wants — and for the next three weeks, creators will be posting it daily, tagged #ALLIN, across at least two platforms at a time.
“Nobody gets here by playing it safe. I went all in on myself before anyone was watching, and that is the story I want to hear from creators,” Hall said in the announcement.
It’s a shrewd flip of the influencer playbook. Celebrity challenges often attract a brief burst of attention. This one is built like Hall’s own routine: show up every day, keep the streak alive, and the benefits may build over time. Daily prizes keep the pot boiling — a $1,000 award for the best Link.me profile, a $5,000 winner drawn live on stream September 3, ten one-year Pro subscriptions, a creator gear pack, and even a one-on-one coaching call with Hall himself.
The engine under the hood is Post to All, Link.me’s one-click tool that blasts a single video across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, X, LinkedIn, and Threads at once. According to the company — now home to more than three million creator profiles — users can save an average of 30 hours a month and see higher view counts.
“We built Post to All because we needed it ourselves and it didn’t exist,” said Net Kohen, Link.me’s founder and CEO. “Ten years ago, we were the ones posting the same video five times to five apps and hoping one of them hit. Creators shouldn’t have to choose between making the work and distributing it.”
Hall, a former college football player who turned pre-dawn discipline into a global media brand, gets something out of this too — three weeks of creators sharing personal stories connected to Hall’s campaign. The approach appears deliberate.
Getting in costs nothing. Download Link.me, post your #ALLIN story tagging @linkme, @ashtonhall and three creators you’re calling out, and keep it going through September 16. Subscribers can also enter the judged contest, where Hall personally picks the winner of the
$10,000 grand prize and the mystery box.
Full details, prizes, and official rules are at link.me/allin. Submissions are now open.
This contest is not sponsored, endorsed, administered by, or associated with the publisher. All prizes, rules, and details are determined by the organizer and are subject to change. Please refer to the organizer’s official website for the most current information.
Skincare is a massive global business, and the industry is always looking for ways to answer a basic question: how well the products people buy actually work in real life. While much of health has moved toward hard data, the skin remains a category difficult to measure objectively.
Shakiba Kaveh, the brain behind Mitra Bio, has spent close to a decade trying to present an accessible solution. A researcher and Cambridge-trained scientist, she’s built a way to read skin biology without cutting into it, and now, she’s preparing to put that tool into consumers’ hands.
A scientist’s frustration
The founder and chief executive of Mitra Bio, Kaveh has treated the beauty industry as a scientist first. She earned a PhD in materials science at Cambridge before taking her first job at L’Oréal in Paris, on a research campus devoted entirely to skin and hair. The work put her among high-tech instruments and deep in the science of cosmetics at one of the industry’s biggest names.
Her assignment sounded simple but proved anything but: find a biomarker that could prove whether sunscreen actually worked.
That task exposed a problem that would follow her for years. Reading what happens inside skin, without cutting into it, was much harder than skincare’s marketing let on. The gap between what products claimed and what anyone could prove bothered her on a personal level, too. A lifelong user of skincare who says she has never wanted her skin to age, she wanted evidence behind what she bought and kept coming up empty. “My personal motivation was to make the marketing of skincare scientific,” she says.
She then spent a few years in management consulting, then joined the Entrepreneur First accelerator in 2020, where Mitra Bio began taking shape.
The sampling problem
Kaveh’s starting point is blunt: skincare is a large industry in which it’s difficult to prove whether products work. Efficacy, she argues, is often judged subjectively, by looking in the mirror, rather than through biological measurements.
“Skincare is a $200 billion market, but that’s not a guarantee that all final products are efficient or work as advertised,” she says. Kaveh contrasts that with the rest of the wellness landscape, where a growing share of U.S. adults now rely on wearables, blood tests, and microbiome kits to monitor their health. Skin, she argues, has been left without any comparable tools for objective tracking.
The reason, she says, comes down to a sampling problem. Reading skin biology has often required punch biopsies or photos and visual inspection, which, while often helpful, don’t always offer the necessary insight into what is actually happening beneath the surface.
She ran into that wall herself early in her career, where she was asked to develop a biomarker to prove whether sunscreen worked and found firsthand how hard non-invasive measurement is. Later interviews with other researchers turned up the same unsolved challenge everywhere: finding biomarkers and selecting ingredients that genuinely work.
Kaveh points out that companies spend millions a year dealing with these discrepancies. Her answer was to sample live human skin directly instead of testing ingredients on cells grown in a petri dish, a model that may be flawed from the start. She remains critical of an industry she sees as heavily dependent on marketing language, and argues that claims about whether skincare actually works are not always independently verified, saying, “We are living in a world of marketing jargon when it comes to wellness.”
This is what led to the creation of Mitra Bio.
Mitra Bio’s goal: reading skin without a needle
Image credit: purchased from Adobe-Stock, developed using Figma at Mitra Bio
Mitra Bio’s test lifts skin cells painlessly with an adhesive patch pressed to the skin. Those cells are sequenced to read their DNA and epigenetic information, returning a biological picture of skin aging, inflammation, and UV damage. “We’ve developed a non-invasive epigenetic skin test that removes your skin cells with an adhesive patch,” Kaveh explains.
At the core is what the company describes as an epigenetic clock built from skin keratinocytes. It’s a set of genes whose methylation patterns shift in step with a person’s skin age. From a sample alone, without knowing whose skin it came from, the test is designed to estimate skin age, degree of photodamage, and, according to the company, signals related to skin cancer.
The science behind it is published in npj Aging, and the company says aspects of the technology are patent-pending. Mitra Bio also says its platform is used by leading skincare and pharmaceutical companies. Many of them rely on it for clinical trials where taking a biopsy is impractical. For years, that kept Mitra Bio a business-to-business platform for dermatologists and researchers.
Now the company is taking it to consumers for the first time. The process is meant to be simple: a customer orders a kit, self-samples the forehead at home, mails it to a lab in the U.S., and gets results within four weeks. The report comes with recommendations across skincare, lifestyle, and interventions, and the company claims it can help people track whether their treatments are helping to lower their measured skin age.
A pre-launch beta is set for November 2026 in the U.S., opening to roughly 100 people from the waitlist, each of whom also gets a 20-minute session with a skin coach. Behind the product is a team of 15 scientists and engineers, backed by investors and dermatology advisers.
Expanding the product
Building on that product, Kaveh sees the test as the first step toward something bigger. She calls it a “skin longevity concierge,” a service that focuses on an outcome rather than a short-term promise. The model already exists in other corners of health, she points out, in companies addressing menopause or weight loss that stay with a customer until they get a result. Skincare, she argues, has nothing like it.
Her reasons run deeper than any single product. She wants to disrupt the industry and improve human health over the long term, and she frames the stakes plainly: half of all people will deal with a skin condition in their lifetime, whether it’s acne or skin cancer. To her, that is too big a number to leave to a subjective eye.
With non-invasive access to skin biology, Mitra Bio could sample millions of people and learn how different treatments actually affect the skin. Kaveh’s also honest that selling it is a different job from building it. She treats commercialization as a second “zero to one,” and she is putting a consumer team together the way she ran the lab, through trial, error, and constant market experimentation.
Shakiba Kaveh’s belief of proof over promises
For all its scientific grounding, Mitra Bio’s pitch comes down to something simple: replacing what people believe about their skin with what can actually be measured. Shakiba Kaveh has spent the better part of a decade turning that idea from a lab result into a product, and the upcoming beta will be the first real test of whether consumers want the answer as much as she does. If they do, a market long run on marketing may finally have a way to check its own claims.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not substitute for professional medical advice. If you are seeking medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, please consult a medical professional or healthcare provider.
Hollywood’s portrayal of disability and chronic illness has often relied on a familiar dichotomy: characters are either tragic figures to be pitied or hyper-resilient symbols of “suffering spectacle” meant to comfort able-bodied audiences.
Since its premiere at Slamdance Film Festival, the short film Unlimited, Forever and Ever No Matter What (2026) has meaningfully challenged these tropes.
Directed by Jayme Coveliers and produced by Kaustubh “Vick” Singh and Kamal Sehrawy, the film offers an unusually authentic and affecting portrayal of chronic pain, familial role reversal, and the exhausting psychology of denial.
Image credit: Kaustubh “Vick” Singh
The film follows Maggie, a middle-aged physical education teacher who, in her younger days, lived by a bold philosophy of physical fearlessness, conquering athletic feats like free-solo rock climbing. Now living with debilitating chronic pain following a severe car accident, Maggie fiercely resists adjusting her “still physically active” mindset.
The film recently made its New York premiere at the Greenpoint Film Festival in August.
What sets Coveliers’ film apart is its refusal to rely on cheap exposition or sentimentality. Instead of a tidy narrative about “overcoming” illness, the film explores the painful friction between the life one used to have and the reality of the present. Maggie’s stubborn determination (once her greatest asset) becomes a source of isolation, placing an immense strain on her relationship with her daughter, Jessie.
Through quiet cinematography by Jesse Schroeder, the film captures Maggie’s internal battle without relying on heavy dialogue. A standout, wordless sequence where Maggie simply contemplates ascending a set of stairs transforms an everyday architectural feature into an imposing mountain, brilliantly visualizing how physical spaces alter when living with a disability.
Image credit: Kaustubh “Vick” Singh
The emotional gravity of the film stems directly from a daring creative choice: Coveliers chose not to cast an actress to play Maggie. Instead, the character is played by his own mother, Lisa Coveliers, the real-life inspiration behind the story. “I wanted to feel how spaces transform when you live with a disability,” Coveliers shares. “Films are so often emotionally subjective and less so physically. With this film, I wanted to do both. How much of her pain can we feel without alienating an audience? It was a frustrating balancing act.”
Casting his mother required a complete reimagining of traditional production structures. Because decades of pain medication had dulled her short-term memory, memorizing a script was impossible.
To protect her well-being while capturing her “achingly present” lucidity, Coveliers built an entirely improvised filmmaking process: he used guided Improvisation; a close family friend was cast as the daughter, guiding the real-life mother through the emotional beats of each scene.
Speaking at a panel at the festival about filming non-fiction stories, Vick talked about the possibilities of the improvisational medium of documentary filmmaking. “While the film was a narrative one, Lisa (Coveliers’ mother) was playing a version of herself on screen, and thus her struggle and pain were very much real. This structural necessity unlocked the emotional core of the film and Lisa’s performance,” added Vick, the Producer.
Image credit: Kaustubh “Vick” Singh
Bringing such a delicate, non-traditional project to fruition required a production team dedicated to shifting the paradigm of independent filmmaking. Producer Kaustubh “Vick” Singh, working through Obluda Films, has built a reputation for championing narratives that illuminate underrepresented global communities. Based out of NYC, it is operated by Vick and his creative partner, Guang Ren.
By prioritizing the physical safety and cognitive accessibility of its lead performer over rigid Hollywood production standards, the creative team demonstrated that inclusive filmmaking involves not only who appears on screen, but also how the working environment behind the camera is structured.
Unlimited, Forever and Ever No Matter What offers no clean resolutions or perfect puzzles where everyone gets what they want. By embracing the messy, frustrating realities of chronic illness, Coveliers and Singh have offered something that extends beyond a conventional feel-good story: a raw, honest masterpiece of physical and emotional empathy. The film will continue its festival run throughout the country.
The company has strived to create a platform where documents can be managed anywhere, at any time, so long as there is an internet connection.
In today’s fast-paced and increasingly connected world, most professionals choose to utilize tools that not only blend simplicity but also browser-based functionality. However, an often crowded and saturated market of productivity tools created by established brands makes it harder for independent founders to break in.
For many, this might be discouraging. However, for founders of technologies such as Zendocs, the realization that tools should be accessible became a pillar of their business model. This is why they created Zendocs: to eliminate not just the need for downloads and installations, but to prioritize user experience, speed, and accessibility.
The Spark Behind Zendocs
The idea for Zendocs emerged when one of the founders was struggling with a typical problem: attempting to edit a PDF while traveling to work. As the founder struggled to find a way to perform what should be a simple task without their usual software, the idea behind Zendocs came to mind.
Designed to be a platform that can work anywhere, anytime, and directly in a browser, Zendocs aimed to solve a typical problem: to eliminate the difficulties around managing, editing, and converting digital documents, which persisted for many even with the widespread adoption of cloud technology.
As the team behind Zendocs came together, they began to understand that people craved intuitive tools that can better their businesses. However, in an era where major companies dominate in the technological sphere, the founders aimed to create something simpler.
Redefining the Traditional Tool
Before Zendocs, people often relied on tools that were bound to single computers or required software to be available on multiple devices. The founders aimed to redefine the way people worked on the go.
“Traditional tools were often slow, expensive, or required multiple software solutions,” a spokesperson for the company says. “Zendocs was inspired by a vision to create a fast, accessible, browser-based platform that allows anyone to manage documents efficiently without complicated downloads or installations.”
The platform’s creators combine expertise in document processing, cloud storage, and digital collaboration to simplify the way people interact with PDFs and other document formats.
The Future Possibilities of Browser-Based Technologies
In a digital era, users expect their tools to be available everywhere. With Zendocs, the founders aimed to simplify how people interact with documents no matter where they happened to be. However, the company credits early adopters for helping shape the platform and its capabilities.
“Continuous feedback from early users helped refine the platform, ensuring it met real-world needs,” a spokesperson shares.
In the future, Zendocs aims to become the go-to platform for browser-based documents across the world, all by integrating additional collaboration tools, AI-powered document features, and accessibility enhancements.
“The long-term vision is to make document workflows completely frictionless, helping individuals and businesses save time and improve productivity,” the company shares.
By valuing user experience, accessibility, and problem-solving, the founders of Zendocs have created a platform that solves real-world challenges in document management, all while providing tools that help people access and manage their documents anywhere they have an internet connection.
The employee recognized every face on the screen. The meeting was built to turn that recognition into proof. Image Credit: Vertus
By the time a finance worker in Hong Kong joined the video call, he’d already noticed something was wrong.
A message from someone claiming to be his company’s chief financial officer requested money for a confidential transaction. Secret transfer. Senior officer. Remote instruction. The employee’s first reaction was suspicion.
Then came the meeting invitation.
The chief financial officer appeared on screen. Other colleagues joined him. The employee recognized their faces and their voices. They looked like the people authorized to request this transfer. And any doubt that he may have had was met with a room full of confirmation.
But here’s the thing.
Every other person on the call was fake.
Their faces had been recreated from existing footage and their voices imitated. The meeting existed for one person and one person alone, the only participant whose face, job, and decisions were real.
Hong Kong police later laid out the arithmetic. The employee authorized 15 transfers into five local bank accounts. The total was HK$200 million, roughly US$25.6 million. And he discovered the fraud only after following up with headquarters.
Everyone looked real. The money was real. He was real. Only the meeting wasn’t.
He suspected the email
A simpler version of the story is that an employee was deceived by a fake video. But that leaves out an important detail: he was initially suspicious of the message he received. The fraud succeeded because the criminals did not try to dismiss that suspicion. Instead, they created a broader situation designed to make the request appear credible.
One familiar executive in a video call might still have left room for doubt, but a group call supplied social proof. After all, now several known and trusted colleagues also appeared to accept the request, transforming an unusual instruction into a shared corporate reality. He was no longer weighing one suspicious message against his judgment. He was weighing his judgment against an entire room.
The meeting helped make the deception more convincing. The fraudsters didn’t merely copy a single face. They used a bunch of familiar faces to create the appearance of context, hierarchy, and consensus. And that added to the pressure of making him feel like he was the only person on the call who didn’t understand what needed to be done.
The machine supplied the surfaces. The human mind connected them into meaning.
The Make-Believe Machine gets a conference room
A deepfake tool isn’t necessarily an LLM, but both belong to the same generative family. One produces plausible language, while another produces plausible faces or voices. In both cases, the result can be the same. They create convincing output without any regard for or real understanding of what it means when what they provide actually lands in the real world.
The fake chief financial officer didn’t need to grasp corporate authority, employee trust, or the consequence of moving millions. The deception only needed the deepfake to resemble a particular person convincingly enough for the person watching to feel at ease and take the initiative to fill in the blanks on their own.
That is part of what can make generative fraud effective. The deception doesn’t always depend on the machine constructing an entire reality. It may only have to reproduce enough of it, enough of the familiar signals for the person on the other side to accept the reality being presented to them.
Security training taught people to escalate from a suspicious message to richer proof. Get on a call. Turn on the camera. Bring in the team. But in Hong Kong, the call, the camera, and the team were the fraud.
A familiar face is no longer proof
Five months before that transfer, three United States security agencies warned organizations that deepfakes were becoming cheaper and easier to produce. Their guidance identified impersonated leaders and financial officers as a direct threat and recommended real-time verification, protected communications, training and rehearsed responses.
Those safeguards are increasingly important. Companies handling significant transactions may benefit from relying on more than apparent agreement on a video call. Even when pressed for time, independent approval channels, verified contact information, transaction controls, and a separate route back to the supposed decision-maker can be employed to give reality another chance to enter into the mix.
But detection alone can also miss the larger vulnerabilities. A serious decision not only has to ask whether the face is synthetic, it also has to ask whether the request fits policy, whether the amount and destination make sense, whether the channel is authorized, and whether the entire situation holds together.
And what Hong Kong showed was that several faces on one attacker-controlled call weren’t several confirmations. They were one source wearing several identities. All the votes for confidence had arrived through the same compromised door.
Understanding is not a detector
Human organizations handle difficult problems by bringing specialists into the same room. A security analyst notices manipulation. A finance officer reads the transaction. A compliance specialist checks approvals. The answer comes together as the perspectives challenge one another.
Disconnected controls don’t automatically create that room. One tool may approve the face, another may flag the amount, and a third may note that the account is new. But if nobody steps back and looks at all three pieces together, the company still probably doesn’t know what’s really happening.
Vertus is built around that principle. It isn’t an LLM with another detector attached. Vertus describes itself as a Cognitive Reasoning Superintelligence, and the neural topology it generates around a problem adapts different regions to different cognitive roles.
One region may examine the amount and account history. Another challenges the apparent evidence. Another tests context, relationships and intent. Vertus calls the interaction Cognitive Resonance. The perspectives reinforce or expose weaknesses in one another while the work develops.
In a transfer review, the visual identity may support the request while the financial pattern pushes the other way. Secrecy may conflict with policy. And several familiar faces on one unverified channel may look less like consensus once the system recognizes a single point of control.
No responsible architecture promises to stop every deepfake. Human authorization still matters. The difference is that a detector can ask whether the video is fake. And a reasoning system can ask whether the entire request makes sense. It looks at the video, the timing, the money, the rules, and anything that doesn’t add up.
The only real person in the room
The finance worker didn’t sit across from one counterfeit, deepfake executive. He sat inside a counterfeit reality straight out of the Matrix. And every familiar face and voice told him his first suspicion was the only thing out of place.
But here’s the thing, the criminals didn’t steal more than $25 million with one perfect fake. What they did was build a room where the fakes confirmed one another, then let the only real person finish the deception.
The generative industry has become increasingly good at copying the people inside the room. The next test for intelligent systems may be whether they can understand the room itself, the authority, pressure, intent, broken pattern, and consequence waiting beyond the screen.
The money moved after a convincing video call was accepted as reality.
In an age of increasingly convincing fakes, security may depend on intelligence that knows the difference.
Cost segregation is technical, unglamorous, and easy to misunderstand. That is precisely why Cost Segregation Guys saw room to build a national service brand around speed, education, and defensible engineering.
The short versionCost segregation changes when eligible depreciation is claimed. It does not create a new deduction or make a weak property deal stronger.Permanent 100% bonus depreciation can greatly increase the first-year effect for qualifying property acquired and placed in service after January 19, 2025.The larger entrepreneurial lesson is about trust: simplify the process, document the result, qualify clients honestly, and make professional advisers comfortable referring to business.
Most founders go looking for a new technology or a fashionable market. Nathan Resnick found an opportunity in something older and less glamorous: the gap between what a building looks like and how the tax code treats the assets inside it.
To an investor, an apartment building, warehouse or hotel may feel like one asset. For depreciation purposes, it can contain many. Lighting, millwork, floor finishes, specialty wiring, furniture, fencing, paving and landscaping do not necessarily share the same useful life as the structure around them. A cost segregation study identifies and documents those differences so eligible components can be assigned to shorter recovery periods.
That technical exercise became the foundation for Cost Segregation Guys, where Resnick is a partner. The important entrepreneurial question is not simply how large that number is. It is how a service built on tax classifications, engineering detail, and professional judgment can be made understandable – and scalable.
Resnick had already built in another complicated category. He founded Sourcify, a Y Combinator-backed sourcing platform, and later moved to a board and advisory role. Manufacturing and tax depreciation are very different businesses, but the founder’s instinct is similar: when customers face a costly decision inside a confusing system, a company that provides a clear process may be better positioned to build customer trust.
The real product is time
Depreciation is fundamentally a timing system. The IRS generally allows an owner to recover the cost of income-producing property over a prescribed period. Under the general depreciation system, residential rental buildings are typically recovered over 27.5 years and nonresidential real property over 39 years. The structure remains on that long schedule, but qualifying personal property and land improvements may fall into shorter 5-, 7- or 15-year classes.
A cost segregation study does not manufacture a tax benefit. It moves eligible deductions to the years in which the law says those deductions belong. That distinction matters. A dollar deducted sooner can preserve cash for renovations, reserves, debt service, or another acquisition. The nominal deduction may be the same over time, but the present value can be very different.
This is why the firm’s value proposition is better understood as selling time rather than selling tax magic. The customer is paying to convert an undifferentiated building basis into a documented schedule of components, useful lives, and tax classifications. The output is a report; the service may allow eligible property owners to realize certain tax benefits sooner.
A permanent rule changes the customer’s mindset
The timing opportunity grew more significant on July 4, 2025, when Public Law 119-21 was signed. The law made the 100% additional first-year depreciation deduction permanent for qualifying property acquired and placed in service after January 19, 2025. IRS guidance explains that qualifying property generally includes tangible property depreciated under MACRS with a recovery period of 20 years or less; it can include new property and certain used property.
The word “qualifying” means a great deal of work. A building does not become fully deductible because Congress restored 100% bonus depreciation. The potential benefit applies to eligible components identified within the property, subject to acquisition, placed-in-service, ownership, and other tax rules.
This can be especially relevant for short-term rental owners. A short-term rental property may contain qualifying components—such as certain furniture, appliances, flooring, landscaping, specialty electrical systems, and other personal-property or land-improvement assets—that can be separated from the building through a cost segregation study and assigned shorter recovery periods. Eligibility and the ability to use any resulting deductions will depend on the property’s facts, including how it is operated, the owner’s level of participation, and the applicable passive-activity and short-term rental rules.
Still, permanence changes the commercial conversation. During a phase-down, cost segregation could be marketed as a shrinking window. A permanent provision is more durable: investors can account for the strategy during acquisition underwriting, renovation planning, and annual tax forecasting. For a service company, that replaces some deadline-driven demand with a more predictable place in the property owner’s operating playbook.
Scaling judgment without turning it into a shortcut
The temptation in any technical service is to automate the most visible output and call that scale. But a fast estimate is not the same thing as a defensible study. The IRS publishes a Cost Segregation Audit Techniques Guide for examiners and notes that it is also useful to taxpayers and practitioners preparing studies. That alone signals the real standard: classifications must be traceable to facts, costs, and authority.
Cost Segregation Guys says its process combines engineering and tax expertise, virtual site visits, a structured intake, and audit-ready reporting. The scalable layer is the customer journey – proposal, document collection, status communication, and coordination with a client’s tax professional. The judgment layer still belongs to people who can analyze the property and support the conclusions.
This separation is a useful operating principle for founders in law, finance, compliance, medicine, and other expert-led fields. Standardize the handoffs, not the thinking. Use technology to remove waiting, duplicate data entry, and uncertainty. Keep the consequential decision tied to evidence and accountable professionals.
It also explains why support after delivery matters. In a low-stakes product, the sale ends when the customer receives the item. In a high-trust service, the customer’s anxiety may begin at delivery: Will my CPA understand this? What happens if the return is examined? Can the team explain the assumptions years later? A company that addresses those questions may provide ongoing support beyond delivering a report.
How a cost segregation study works
A credible cost segregation study is not a list of fixtures multiplied by a generic percentage. It is a property-specific reconciliation of tax law, physical facts and cost evidence. The exact workflow varies for a newly constructed building, an acquired property and a renovation, but a thorough engagement usually moves through the following stages.
1. Test feasibility before commissioning the full study.
The provider reviews the property type, acquisition or construction date, purchase price or project cost, land allocation, improvement history and current depreciation schedule. The aim is to estimate the portion of basis that might move to shorter lives and compare the likely timing benefit with the fee, ownership horizon and tax constraints. This preliminary estimate is a screening tool, not the final tax result.
2. Build the source-document file.
For an acquisition, useful records can include the closing statement, purchase agreement, appraisal, prior depreciation schedule, inspection reports, renovation invoices, floor plans and photographs. For new construction, the file may also include architectural and engineering drawings, contractor payment applications, change orders, job-cost ledgers and vendor invoices. Better contemporaneous records reduce the amount that must be estimated.
3. Verify what is actually at the property.
A physical or well-documented virtual review connects the paperwork to the building’s use and condition. The analyst identifies assets, distinguishes decorative or business-specific systems from structural systems, notes paving and site improvements, and records evidence with photographs or video. The IRS audit guide treats site inspection and photographic support as characteristics of a quality study.
4. Classify assets and assign costs.
Engineering analysis separates building systems from tangible personal property and land improvements, then applies the relevant statutes, regulations, and court authorities. Actual item costs are used when available; otherwise, recognized estimating methods may be used. The allocations should reconcile to the owner’s total depreciable basis rather than create costs that were never incurred.
5. Deliver a tax-ready audit trail.
A strong report explains the methodology, property facts, legal rationale, assumptions, cost sources, and reconciliation. It includes an asset schedule that the owner’s tax professional can translate into depreciation reporting. The underlying invoices, drawings, photographs, and calculations matter because the report may need to be understood years after it was prepared.
The best growth strategy may be saying no
Tax strategies become dangerous when marketing removes the conditions. Accelerated depreciation can generate a large paper loss, but whether an owner can use that loss now depends on passive-activity, at-risk, basis, and material-participation rules, among others.
Rental activities are generally passive. One potential exception involves taxpayers who qualify as real estate professionals and materially participate; the IRS tests include more than 750 hours in qualifying real-property trades or businesses and more than half of the taxpayer’s personal-service time. Another frequently discussed route involves short-term stays: under Publication 925, an activity with an average customer-use period of seven days or less is not treated as a rental activity for the passive-activity rules. That does not automatically make every resulting loss deductible against wages. Material participation and the taxpayer’s full facts still matter.
There is also an exit side to the equation. Accelerating deductions reduces tax basis, and a later sale can trigger depreciation-recapture consequences. Holding period, expected appreciation, financing, suspended losses, and the cost of the study all belong in the decision.
For the service provider, this complexity creates an unusual sales advantage: a credible “not yet” or “not for this property” can be more valuable than an aggressive close. This distinction may help build confidence among property owners and support professional referral relationships with CPAs. In a referral-heavy category, restraint is not the opposite of growth. It is an acquisition channel.
Making the invisible legible
The company says its reported $1 billion figure represents depreciation identified rather than tax refunds delivered. Actual tax impact varies by owner, property, timing and applicable rules. Viewed in context, the figure may illustrate the potential scale of depreciation timing considerations in real estate ownership.
The building does not change after a cost segregation study. The flooring, wiring and parking areas were there all along. What changes is the owner’s map of the property – and, potentially, the calendar on which deductions arrive.
That is the broader business Resnick and Cost Segregation Guys are building: a clearer interface for a dense system. Some specialized companies focus on making complex information clearer and more practical for customers evaluating their options.
The information provided in this article is for general informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended as legal, financial, medical, or professional advice. Readers should not rely solely on the content of this article and are encouraged to seek professional advice tailored to their specific circumstances. We disclaim any liability for any loss or damage arising directly or indirectly from the use of, or reliance on, the information presented.
The entrepreneur and real estate developer combines systems, technology, and cross-industry expertise to build companies designed for sustainable growth.
In most industries, complexity is seen as a problem that needs to be tackled. Instead, David Oiaknin believes the most lasting business opportunities live in complexity. As a real estate developer and an entrepreneur who has operated at the intersection of real estate, manufacturing, and technology, Oiaknin has spent his career doing something that few business builders attempt. He treats sectors that appear unrelated as parts of a single, interconnected chain. His idea is that modern construction depends on manufacturing efficiency, which in turn depends on technology and execution. Understanding those links is where real advantages can emerge.
The Problem With Short-Term Thinking
The real estate and construction industries are rarely short on funding or available projects. Yet what they consistently lack is infrastructure that’s meant to last. Companies scale quickly to meet growing demand, only to struggle when the market changes. Partnerships form around transactions rather than their shared systems. And the operational complexity that comes with growth, including financial planning, regulatory compliance, and supply chain coordination, often outpaces the capacity to manage it.
The result can be an industry full of companies that are busy, but not truly growing. Activity without structure rarely creates lasting value, and the gap between what gets built and what stays is significant.
Where Execution Becomes Strategy
David Oiaknin’s response to this gap is not another product; it’s a methodology. His approach focuses on building scalable organizations with repeatable systems, operational discipline, and growth models designed to perform across market cycles, not just favorable ones.
In the real estate industry, he focuses on ADU and modular construction, areas where construction technology may meaningfully reduce delivery timelines and per-unit costs when properly integrated into the build process. In advanced manufacturing, he applies operational optimization frameworks, typically found in high-output industrial environments, to construction-related businesses that have historically resisted systematization.
Across both, technology is not being deployed for its own sake. It is used to potentially enable better decisions, reduce waste, improve transparency, and create organizations that may be capable of consistent performance, even at scale.
The Disciplines That Set Him Apart
What makes Oiaknin’s profile unique is his mix of expertise in strategic business development, real estate and construction knowledge, manufacturing optimization, and technology integration. That convergence wasn’t accidental. His business growth strategy reflects the belief that the most valuable opportunities in real estate and construction lie outside conventional deal flows.
They are found in the seams between industries, where manufacturing inefficiency can limit construction output, where technological adoption lags behind operational needs, or where fragmented supply chains prevent otherwise strong businesses from scaling. By structuring companies to address those “in-betweens,” he strives to position them to generate value not just for initial investors, but for partners and customers over the years.
An Optimistic Future
Oiaknin’s focus spans far into the future. His vision is to expand technology-driven real estate platforms, advance off-site and modular construction methods, and build strategic partnerships with investors and operators who share a long-term goal.
His belief is that sustainable businesses are built through trust, operational excellence, and repeatable actions, not through the pursuit of scale alone. For those looking to learn more about companies designed to compound over time, David Oiaknin’s work is a model worth a look.
There is a notion circulating in the technology and manufacturing sectors that the rise of automation and artificial intelligence will lead to widespread job displacement.
While that may be true at some organizations, there is also evidence suggesting that automation may help support job growth and employee productivity. One need only look toward companies like John Stewart’s MiddleGround Capital, which has deployed automated technology across factory floors that aims to improve employee livelihood, enable better work, and justify higher wages and expanded capacity.
Automation may help support worker productivity by reducing dangerous or tedious tasks, helping address skills gaps and potentially creating new roles. These are all goals that MiddleGround Capital and like-minded organizations are striving to achieve.
Replacing Dangerous Work With Creative Jobs
Those outside of the manufacturing industry might believe that automation is a hindrance to factory floor workers. Artificial intelligence and automation may help enhance processes while reducing the need for some dangerous or tedious tasks.
For instance, John Stewart and MiddleGround Capital work with a portfolio company that manufactures high-performance and racing components for the automotive and powersports industries. The forging area had long been a production bottleneck, requiring heavy manual labor in a high-temperature environment. According to MiddleGround Capital, its automation team completed the first phase of a robotic forging-press tending installation that helped address a production bottleneck, reduced downtime by approximately 15%, eased ergonomic demands on workers, and generated an estimated $9.07 million in enterprise value creation.
As Stewart explains: “Operational efficiency in this market doesn’t really mean job reduction. It means increasing output… we use this to raise wages for workers and train them in how to run the automation.”
This type of shift may be occurring not only at companies such as MiddleGround Capital and its portfolio companies, but across parts of the manufacturing industry as well.
Upskilling Workers Via Automation and Creating New Jobs
Another myth in the automation sphere is that jobs are being scrapped entirely, when in reality, workers in manufacturing often develop new skills and transition into different positions. This can include technical skills such as troubleshooting and operating automated systems, as well as learning to set up and maintain new equipment.
Furthermore, new types of jobs may also emerge. There appears to be an increase in roles in the manufacturing sector, including automation technicians, robot programmers, and system designers. From a managerial perspective, there also appear to be more engineers with a deeper understanding of automation, as well as business owners who are experienced in running automated manufacturing companies. As recently as 2021, the World Economic Forum estimated that 58 million jobs globally would be created as a result of automation.
Upskilling the workforce can offer a variety of potential benefits. From a company perspective, it may support employee retention and operational efficiency by preparing employees to manage and operate automation systems. From an employee perspective, it may contribute to more fulfilling work, greater job satisfaction, and a broader range of career opportunities.
The Rise of Specific Automation Divisions
In addition to roles expanding across the factory floor, there also appears to be growth in the number of higher-level automation divisions being created. These roles require higher forms of education and specific training, which is a boon to both job creation and the education realm. Human involvement remains important for areas such as interpretation, compliance, and oversight. These roles can also help determine where and how automation may be most effectively implemented.
MiddleGround Capital itself serves as a prime example. The company’s automation division has expanded since its inception in 2022, helping to create new positions for workers who previously operated in separate capacities. The company reports that the automation division now consists of 11 highly skilled team members, all of whom remain focused on searching for ways to implement automation at the companies that MiddleGround works with.
The main objective for this division is to improve safety and enhance work for frontline factory workers. They approach companies to learn the subtle nuances that these workers deal with day in and day out, then develop automated solutions. And they always prioritize upskilling employees to new roles if their current role is being automated.
The Bottom Line
The development of automation and artificial intelligence is likely to continue, particularly in industries such as manufacturing and technology, where substantial investment has already been made globally.
Instead, greater peace of mind may come from recognizing that automation and AI are not necessarily replacing the job market, but can support workers and contribute to the creation of more meaningful roles across different levels of work.
Factory floor workers may find opportunities for less hazardous and potentially more fulfilling work, along with training that could support advancement into higher-level roles. Engineers and scientists may see growth in automation-related opportunities, while those in managerial positions may take on new responsibilities or divisions focused on overseeing automation implementation.
Investing involves risk and your investment may lose value. Past performance gives no indication of future results. These statements do not constitute and cannot replace investment advice.
