Brandless Closes, The DTC Facebook Challenge, DTC Versus Softbank

This raises broader questions about the tech ecosystem and its investment model. I’ve been making the case for a long time that the natural endpoint is likely very large platforms and Aggregators on one-side, and a flourishing ecosystem focused on niches on the other, but implicit in the latter is that venture capital is not simply unncessary, it i... See more

This is a point that I think is missed regularly: if you believe that the Internet offers an opportunity to challenge an incumbent, success comes not from replacing the incumbent directly but rather from transforming the entire value chain.

Again, DTC companies almost certainly have higher cost structures than a website, and do get some sort of returns from scale, but those returns are limited; this is where it seems Softbank specifically went wrong. Indeed, this is the broader takeaway from Softbank’s investments: what characterizes the Vision Fund’s mistakes in case after case is a ... See more

I think this drives at a more fundamental failing by Brandless in particular, that is likely true broadly: the company’s cost structure was completely unsuited for DTC. My strong suspicion — admittedly biased, given Stratechery’s business model — is that the biggest opportunities in DTC are in niches, and the best way to exploit those niches is by ... See more