July 5th MoviePass and the Math That Never Worked For one summer in 2017, the best deal in America was a small red card. Pay $9.95 a month, walk into almost any theater in the country, and watch a movie a day. In cities like New York, a single ticket already costs more than that. So the card paid for itself on the first visit and kept printing value after. People noticed. MoviePass jumped from a quiet niche product to a cultural moment, racking up over 3 million subscribers and rattling every...
4 days ago • 4 min read
July 2nd The FTX Implosion A crypto exchange valued at $32 billion. Sequoia, SoftBank, and BlackRock were on the cap table. A Super Bowl ad. A basketball arena with the company name bolted to the roof. Tom Brady and Steph Curry telling you it was the safe, easy way to buy crypto. All of that gone. In roughly six days. That is what happened to FTX in November 2022. And the more you look at how it fell apart, the more it rhymes with another famous flameout: Theranos. One sold blood tests that...
7 days ago • 3 min read
June 28th Twitter Became X and It Cost In July 2023, a sign-removal crew showed up at a San Francisco office building and took down a blue bird that millions of people recognized on sight. By morning, Twitter was X. No long goodbye. No transition campaign. The most famous logo in social media got swapped for a single letter. For most companies, a rebrand is a marketing project. For Elon Musk, it was a demolition. And the question worth sitting with: what does it actually cost to delete a...
11 days ago • 4 min read
June 25th Netflix Killing Blockbuster Was Not an Accident In 2000, two guys flew to Dallas with a pitch. Their tiny DVD-by-mail startup was bleeding cash, and they offered to sell the whole thing to Blockbuster for $50 million. Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph would run it as Blockbuster's online arm. Blockbuster's executives reportedly struggled not to laugh. Why would a $6 billion giant with 9,000 stores buy a money-losing website? That meeting usually gets described as the dumbest "no" in...
14 days ago • 3 min read
June 21th How Canva Beat Adobe The startup that Adobe laughed at is now worth $100 billion. In 2007, a 19-year-old student in Perth, Australia, was tutoring design students on the side. Her name was Melanie Perkins, and she kept watching the same thing happen: talented, curious people spending entire semesters just figuring out where the buttons were in Adobe Photoshop. That frustrated her. She thought there had to be a better way. So she and her then-boyfriend Cliff Obrecht did what most...
18 days ago • 4 min read
June 18th The Rise and Fall of Theranos A 19-year-old Stanford dropout walking into rooms with Henry Kissinger, two former US Secretaries of State, and Oracle's Larry Ellison. She is pitching a machine that can run hundreds of medical tests from a single drop of blood, cheaper than any lab in America. No needles. Results in hours. She calls it Edison. They all say yes. By 2014, her company, Theranos, is worth $9 billion. She is on the cover of Forbes as the youngest self-made female...
21 days ago • 4 min read
June 14th How Duolingo Gamified Learning and Won There is a green owl living rent-free in the heads of half a billion people. He does not ask nicely. He tracks your schedule, knows when you skipped yesterday, and will absolutely guilt-trip you at 9pm if you have not opened the app. He has become a meme, a cultural icon, and, somehow, a business worth over $6 billion. That owl is Duo. And the company behind him, Duolingo, built something most founders spend their entire careers chasing: a...
25 days ago • 5 min read
June 11th The Airbnb Rebound In early 2020, Airbnb was gearing up for one of the most anticipated IPOs in Silicon Valley history. Revenue had grown from $919 million in 2015 to $4.8 billion in 2019. The company was valued at $31 billion. Brian Chesky had spent years building toward this moment. Then COVID-19 hit. And in eight weeks, bookings dropped 80%. At one point, Airbnb's gross bookings went negative. The company was paying out more in refunds to panicked travelers than it was collecting...
28 days ago • 3 min read
June 7th Blackberry's Slow Death At its peak, BlackBerry was a status symbol. Just like Apple today. CEOs wore it on their belts. Wall Street ran on it. Barack Obama fought the Secret Service to keep his after entering the White House. At one point, BlackBerry controlled over 50% of the US smartphone market. Naomi Campbell once threw one at a housekeeper. That is the kind of cultural weight we are talking about. And then, within a few years, it was gone. Into thin air like it never existed....
about 1 month ago • 3 min read