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....
4 days ago • 3 min read
June 4th How Notion Grew Without Ads Most founders are told to niche down. Pick one problem, solve it well, and own that corner of the market. Notion ignored that completely. When Ivan Zhao and Simon Last launched Notion in 2016, Evernote owned notes. Google Docs owned collaboration. Trello owned project management. Every obvious lane was already taken. So instead of competing inside one, they built across all of them. "All-in-one workspace" was the bet. And it paid off. Today, Notion is...
7 days ago • 3 min read
May 31th The WeWork Collapse Your friend opens a coffee shop. Great vibe, fantastic location, loyal regulars. Then one day, he tells you that he actually owns a tech company. He slaps a few iPads on the counter, builds an app for ordering, and pitches himself alongside Spotify and Airbnb. His valuation triples overnight. Sounds pretty absurd, doesn’t it? That is almost exactly what WeWork did. And for years, some of the smartest money in the world went along with it. The Origin Story: A...
11 days ago • 4 min read
May 28th Fractile startup raised $220M to beat Nvidia. You hired the smartest person in the world to help your business. They know everything. They can solve any problem. But every time you ask them a question, they take three weeks to answer. That is not really useful, is it? That is, in a very real sense, the problem AI is running into right now. The models are getting brilliant. But the hardware running those models is struggling to keep up. And a London-based startup called Fractile just...
14 days ago • 4 min read
May 24th How Quibi Burned $1.75B and Still Failed Real Bad You raise $1.75 billion before launching a single product. You have Jennifer Lopez, Kevin Hart, and Idris Elba attached to your content. Your co-founders have run Disney, DreamWorks, HP, and eBay. Every major investor in Hollywood and Silicon Valley has written you a check. What could really go wrong? Yet, eight months after launch, you shut down. Don’t blow this off as “bad luck” because it’s not. This is a lesson about something...
18 days ago • 3 min read
May 21th How did OpenAI Go From a Non-profit to Become an $852B Tech Giant? Let’s look at Apple's App Store for a second. Apple didn't try to build every app itself. It created the infrastructure, opened it up to developers, and let millions of people build on top of it. Apple took a cut. Developers got distribution. Everyone won. OpenAI just ran the same playbook. Except with AI. And if you understand how this works, you'll see a business strategy worth studying closely, no matter what kind...
21 days ago • 4 min read