Company Breakdowns

A concise reading list covering Stripe, Saronic, OpenAI, and Databricks.

What Databricks actually does, and whether a $190 billion price tag makes sense.

Seven writers compare enduring investments and the reasoning behind holding them.

An argument for distinguishing corporate misconduct from the incentives behind innovation.

What Google’s investments reveal about private businesses-and what they do not prove.

ChatGPT’s reach, the economics of AI, and the challenge of turning adoption into durable profits.

A response to the claim that Substack is collapsing, focused on aggregate evidence.

How David Beckham and Lionel Messi turned a $25 million expansion team into a $1.5 billion franchise.

Autonomous vessels, a costly shipbuilding expansion, and the challenge of scaling defense contracts.

Who benefits from an IPO, how allocations work, and why incentives matter.

The payments infrastructure behind online commerce-and the next bet on stablecoins.

Lessons from the publication’s first 1,000 subscribers: niche, consistency, and relationships.

June’s research on AI drug discovery, ByteDance, and Substack in one reading list.

Creator ownership, subscription economics, and the tension between growth and retention.

A vast consumer platform business whose valuation cannot be separated from geopolitics.

From protein prediction to drug discovery: the promise and the clinical proof still needed.

A compact review of Anthropic, SpaceX, Anduril, and Polymarket.

Prediction markets’ growing reach, thin take rates, and unresolved ethical and regulatory questions.

Defense hardware and software growing quickly-with manufacturing costs and execution risks to match.

Starlink, launch, and AI ambitions-and the expectations built into an enormous valuation.

Claude’s enterprise momentum, compute economics, and the race to build a lasting AI business.