Small teams, Sharp edges
Small teams, Sharp edges When a problem looks big, the instinct is to make the team bigger. More meetings. More stakeholders. More alignment decks. But every additional person doesn’t just add capacity. They add coordination cost, noise, politics and more delays. Most hard problems need more clarity, not people. Small teams move faster because they […]
Why Europe doesn’t have a Tesla
When the cost of failure is too high, disruption becomes irrational The core argument is straightforward but uncomfortable. Europe’s problem is not talent, capital, or even ambition… it is optionality. When the cost of failure is measured in 31 to 62 months of salary per employee in major economies, compared to seven in the […]
The Sorting Advantage
Most of what we call “work” is sorting. Sorting signal from noise. The customers who fit from the ones who don’t. The “good enough” from the “worth it”. The mistake is lazy sorting: choosing proxies because they’re easy to count, not because they’re true. Metrics that look scientific but measure the wrong thing. Rankings […]
How AI Agents are breaking the SaaS seat model
Enterprise software has been priced for a world where humans were the bottleneck. Seats worked because headcount was a reliable proxy for work: hire more support reps, buy more Zendesk licenses; expand sales, add Salesforce users; scale finance, add ERP access. The model was simple, predictable, and incredibly profitable. AI agents change the underlying […]
Withdrawal is not a Strategy
Problems don’t solve themselves Most problems don’t get smaller when you ignore them, but they grow teeth. Avoiding a tough decision doesn’t preserve optionality, it just inflates the cost of inaction. You delay the email, the restructure, the confrontation and the problem quietly compounds interest in the background. By the time you return, it’s no […]
[Book review] The Age of Extraction (by Tim Wu)
Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction is a sharp, prosecutorial tour of how big tech’s most successful platforms evolved from “useful products” into toll collectors. Wu’s core move is to frame modern platform power as a familiar economic pattern: once a firm controls a key chokepoint (distribution, discovery, identity, payments, app stores, ad markets), it […]
A concise Masterplan for 🇪🇺 Europe’s rebirth
Europe loses because rules are downstream of economic gravity. When your share of global output slides for decades (and the chart is basically a ski slope into the projection zone), you stop being the default market everyone optimizes for, and your “Brussels effect” turns from leverage into paperwork. Reversing that trend is not a […]
Solve for adaptability
Most strategic problems aren’t static, because they always mutate. By the time your perfectly modeled solution is ready, the problem has already shape-shifted. What looked like a supply chain issue becomes a market timing issue. What felt like a pricing problem turns into a product mismatch. So what do most teams do? They double […]
The “Attention economy’s” trillion-dollar question: Why OpenAI must embrace advertising
For all the justified excitement about ChatGPT’s unprecedented growth trajectory, with 800 million weekly active users represents one of the fastest consumer adoption curves in technology history, OpenAI faces a problem that should be familiar to anyone who has studied the evolution of Internet business models. That is, they have aggregated demand without monetizing […]
👻 on Kpop Demon Hunters & the Asian pop culture
What is happening with Asia’s pop culture machine, especially in South Korea, is more than a cultural export. I’d say it’s more about owning the intellectual property stack from the first viral hit all the way to the global toy aisle. Whether it is Pinkfong’s Baby Shark empire going public on the strength of […]