Brandless Closes, The DTC Facebook Challenge, DTC Versus Softbank

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

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.