June 21th How Canva Beat Adobe The startup that Adobe laughed at is now worth $100 billion. In 2007, a 19-year-old student in Perth, Australia, was tutoring design students on the side. Her name was Melanie Perkins, and she kept watching the same thing happen: talented, curious people spending entire semesters just figuring out where the buttons were in Adobe Photoshop. That frustrated her. She thought there had to be a better way. So she and her then-boyfriend Cliff Obrecht did what most...
6 days ago • 4 min read
June 18th The Rise and Fall of Theranos A 19-year-old Stanford dropout walking into rooms with Henry Kissinger, two former US Secretaries of State, and Oracle's Larry Ellison. She is pitching a machine that can run hundreds of medical tests from a single drop of blood, cheaper than any lab in America. No needles. Results in hours. She calls it Edison. They all say yes. By 2014, her company, Theranos, is worth $9 billion. She is on the cover of Forbes as the youngest self-made female...
9 days ago • 4 min read
June 14th How Duolingo Gamified Learning and Won There is a green owl living rent-free in the heads of half a billion people. He does not ask nicely. He tracks your schedule, knows when you skipped yesterday, and will absolutely guilt-trip you at 9pm if you have not opened the app. He has become a meme, a cultural icon, and, somehow, a business worth over $6 billion. That owl is Duo. And the company behind him, Duolingo, built something most founders spend their entire careers chasing: a...
13 days ago • 5 min read
June 11th The Airbnb Rebound In early 2020, Airbnb was gearing up for one of the most anticipated IPOs in Silicon Valley history. Revenue had grown from $919 million in 2015 to $4.8 billion in 2019. The company was valued at $31 billion. Brian Chesky had spent years building toward this moment. Then COVID-19 hit. And in eight weeks, bookings dropped 80%. At one point, Airbnb's gross bookings went negative. The company was paying out more in refunds to panicked travelers than it was collecting...
16 days ago • 3 min read
June 7th Blackberry's Slow Death At its peak, BlackBerry was a status symbol. Just like Apple today. CEOs wore it on their belts. Wall Street ran on it. Barack Obama fought the Secret Service to keep his after entering the White House. At one point, BlackBerry controlled over 50% of the US smartphone market. Naomi Campbell once threw one at a housekeeper. That is the kind of cultural weight we are talking about. And then, within a few years, it was gone. Into thin air like it never existed....
20 days ago • 3 min read
June 4th How Notion Grew Without Ads Most founders are told to niche down. Pick one problem, solve it well, and own that corner of the market. Notion ignored that completely. When Ivan Zhao and Simon Last launched Notion in 2016, Evernote owned notes. Google Docs owned collaboration. Trello owned project management. Every obvious lane was already taken. So instead of competing inside one, they built across all of them. "All-in-one workspace" was the bet. And it paid off. Today, Notion is...
23 days ago • 3 min read
May 31th The WeWork Collapse Your friend opens a coffee shop. Great vibe, fantastic location, loyal regulars. Then one day, he tells you that he actually owns a tech company. He slaps a few iPads on the counter, builds an app for ordering, and pitches himself alongside Spotify and Airbnb. His valuation triples overnight. Sounds pretty absurd, doesn’t it? That is almost exactly what WeWork did. And for years, some of the smartest money in the world went along with it. The Origin Story: A...
27 days ago • 4 min read
May 28th Fractile startup raised $220M to beat Nvidia. You hired the smartest person in the world to help your business. They know everything. They can solve any problem. But every time you ask them a question, they take three weeks to answer. That is not really useful, is it? That is, in a very real sense, the problem AI is running into right now. The models are getting brilliant. But the hardware running those models is struggling to keep up. And a London-based startup called Fractile just...
30 days ago • 4 min read
May 24th How Quibi Burned $1.75B and Still Failed Real Bad You raise $1.75 billion before launching a single product. You have Jennifer Lopez, Kevin Hart, and Idris Elba attached to your content. Your co-founders have run Disney, DreamWorks, HP, and eBay. Every major investor in Hollywood and Silicon Valley has written you a check. What could really go wrong? Yet, eight months after launch, you shut down. Don’t blow this off as “bad luck” because it’s not. This is a lesson about something...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read