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Time and again I am asked why no one has successfully replicated Trader Joe’s. The answer is that no one has been willing to pay the wages and benefits, and thereby attract—and keep—the quality of people who work at Trader Joe’s. My standard was simple: the average full-time employee in the stores would make the median family income for California.... See more

A successful network effect requires both a product and its network, and that was true in the age of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, and true today. For Uber, the “product” is the app that people run on their phones, and the “network” refers to all the active users at any given time who are connecting with Uber to drive or ride.

What is a problem that I think only applies to other countries/industries/careers that will eventually hit me?

Whether or not Shop is an online marketplace is a moot point. It’s worth pointing out that, unlike with other online marketplaces, brands using Shop won’t get short shrift: apart from Shopify’s payment transaction fee (which is between 2.4 and 2.9%), Shop won’t charge brands commission to rent space on the platform. By comparison, Amazon charges 75... See more

Western social apps also rely much more heavily on advertising revenue. The lifeblood of their income statement is traffic to the feed. This means feed relevance is paramount. Anywhere one's social graph drifts from one's interests, boring content invades the feed. The signal to noise ratio shifts the wrong direction. Instead of pruning and tuning ... See more

Without a specific idea of the good to build towards, the financial interests of large tokenholders have become over-represented in protocol governance. In our view, this constitutes a centralization risk.

The four fastest-growing companies (by year-over-year relative growth)