Low Margins Mask Cash Flow Risks During Growth
The dangerous thing about low contribution margin is this: Growth can still look successful for a long time. (Home Decor Brand) $6M/month… strong sales, strong demand, constant pressure on cash flow. Because scaling weak margins only magnifies the problem.
AI Economy Soars: Billions in Funding, Trillions in TAM
In ONE week: Anthropic raised $30B at a $900B valuation — overtaking OpenAI. OpenAI filed its S-1. SpaceX filed for a $75B IPO, and a $28T TAM. NextEra agreed to a $67B utility megamerger to power AI. The exponential economy...
SEO Wins Fade; Brand Trust Endures
For a long time great SEO could beat bigger brands, in this example a company in the coloring pages space beat Crayola. Nick Leroy laid out a great example of how that is changing, algorithms change, our memories of...
Navarro Urges Fed Patience, Warns Against Rate Hikes
Navarro counsels against rate hikes (illustrating how the dovish position has changed): “Now we hear the rate hike drums beating louder from Wall Street trading desks to the regional Fed banks and into the bowels of the Eccles building. The right Fed...
Proven 5‑Step Email Funnel Generates $200K Substack Sales
How to launch a $200K product to your Substack newsletter: 1. Tease it for 1-2 weeks 2. Open cart & send a breakdown email 3. 3-5 education emails 4. 3-4 urgency emails with case studies 5. Final chance emails Rinse and repeat.
Gaming Network Shifts to Click‑pay, Writers Risk $0
One of the largest networks of gaming sites around is trying to pay writers by the click instead of a flat rate per story. They could get as little as $5 a story or even nothing at all.
Founders Lose 22% Equity Due to Multiple SAFE Caps
A founder raised 3 SAFEs at different valuation caps. $4M cap. $6M cap. $10M cap. When they got to Series A, they expected to own about 60% of their company. The actual number? 38%. They'd given away 22% more of their company than they...
True Founder Freedom Comes From Cash, Not Fundraising
A tech company that needs to raise money never actually controls its own destiny. Last year, I decided we were never going to raise money again and pivoted our SONAR business towards throwing off cash. Remarkably, our growth has also picked...
Avoid These 5 Mistakes Blocking $1M/Month Growth
5 costly mistakes I’ve made in the last year trying to scale my business (that have kept me from hitting $1,000,000/month):
Cleveland Fed Predicts May CPI Rise to 4.2%
April y/y CPI was 3.8% The Cleveland Fed’s inflation nowcast has May y/y CPI jumping to 4.2%.
ROIC Misleads M&A Value: Costs Immediate, Benefits Delayed
Michael Mauboussin on why ROIC is a poor measure when it comes to M&A "ROIC is an inappropriate way to assess M&A because the cost (invested capital) is reflected immediately and the benefit (NOPAT) comes over time. Most deals, even those...
Feed AI Your Raw Ideas for Unique Content
When you ask AI "write me a post about X", the model doesn't think about your audience or what you want to say. It just picks the most likely next word from millions of examples it was trained on. You end up...
US Economy Bounces Back, Bolstering Dollar Strength
Week Ahead: US Economic Resilience Supports the Dollar: The resilience of the US economy is remarkable. The economy bounced back from near stagnation in Q4 25 (0.5% annualized pace) to 2% in Q1 26 and, and perhaps to 4.3% this...
Monetary Policy Cuts Household Consumption, Survey Finds
A survey of more than 25,000 US households, combining hypothetical questions with randomised information experiments, shows that monetary policy has a contractionary impact on consumption https://t.co/khL65p5LnQ
Firms Slash Investment When Macro Tail Risk Rises
Survey evidence from a large panel of German firms to show that higher perceived macroeconomic tail risk leads firms to cut investment substantially. https://t.co/5S4oy83ASu
Wall Street Bets on Hormuz Reopening Despite Risk
COLUMN: Wall Street is full of hope, leaning on a tweaked version of Stein’s Law: “The Strait of Hormuz cannot be closed forever because it will cause too much economic damage. Therefore, it will reopen.” But what if it didn’t...
Bankrupt Chinese Developers Turn to Risky Semiconductor Gambit
SCMP: "Embattled Chinese developers have turned to a new strategy to resuscitate their ailing businesses: diversifying into semiconductor production." This is classic financial distress behavior: it is often rational for bankrupt businesses with continued access to financing to shift to highly...
Trump Tariffs and War Plunge Consumer Sentiment to Record Low
The University of Michigan's consumer-sentiment index dropped to a NEW ALL-TIME LOW. TRUMP'S TARIFFS & WAR MADNESS = CRUSHES AMERICAN SENTIMENT. https://t.co/jgRxLOfRVc
YouTube Unveils Search AI, Premium
Another big week of launches at @youtube. Our teams shipped: 🔎 Ask YouTube, a new conversational, interactive search experience that lets you go deeper with your searches 🤝 Our Premium Lite individual plan bundled with @Google’s AI Pro plan 💎...
Join My Open Office Hours for Startup Advice
Looking for startup advice? Feel free to join my next open office hours - https://t.co/tcXNekrm0n
ChatGPT Ad Manager Updated, New CTA Tests Launched
ICYMI: ChatGPT Ad Manager gets some updates, plus ChatGPT Ads is testing new CTAs https://t.co/JSWkS98OLC https://t.co/fKJJVHfNZz
Fed Shows Reluctance to Cut, Open to Rate Hikes
GS: Waller’s comments today and the minutes to the FOMC’s April meeting released on Wednesday suggest that the Committee has become more reluctant to cut... ...and more open to the possibility of rate hikes in recent weeks. https://t.co/8fABqSMYVP
Layered Moats Turn Boring Niches Into Billion‑Dollar Exits
Novaria Group and its $2.2B exit playbook: Make 27 acquisitions and build a roll-up platform around high-mix, low-volume, low-relevant-cost products... Add a “layer cake of protections” around process IP, explicit IP, daily discipline, and unit economics. A true moat in an aerospace and...
Waller Delivers Most Hawkish Fed Speech in Two Years
Per Fedlock, Christopher Waller's speech today was his most hawkish in over two years https://t.co/636ZmVuTmI
Selective Onboarding and Ultra‑low Pricing Fuel AI Startup’s $165M Growth
Sierra went from $0 to $165M in 26 months 🤯 The playbook behind the AI agent half of Fortune 500 is using👇 Bret Taylor left Salesforce as co-CEO the same week ChatGPT launched. He wanted to build startups again. A...
Activists Push SEER Liquidation Using Company Cash, Board Resists
$SEER proxy war is officially on. Friendly resolution is off the table. Radoff group nominating 3 directors for the 2026 AGM. Latest $2.40/share cash plus CVR offer rejected again. Board claims it undervalues the company relative to its own cash pile. Management...
Tripling Engineering Productivity with AI in 16 Months
Here's a must read for founders/CEOs/engineering leaders 👇 Darragh + team answered 70+ questions about how we've tripled productivity in our product/engineering org over the past 16 months using AI.
Warsh Praises Greenspan, Sidesteps Recent Fed Chairs
Warsh, in his first speech as Fed Chair, references Alan Greenspan's contributions -- not those of his successors. Not coincidentally, I would think, Warsh has been critical of Bernanke's, Yellen's and Powell's policies. He only says he's known 5 of...
Fed Chair Warsh Sworn In by Justice Thomas
Kevin Warsh is sworn in as Fed chair by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. As a Stanford undergrad, Warsh worked as an intern on Thomas's 1991 confirmation to the court. https://t.co/TXX94HfjZz
Toronto Tempo Targets National Identity, Not Just Local Fanbase
NEW: Worked on a deep dive on the making of the WNBA's Toronto Tempo (@torontotempo), which is striving business-wise to be Canada's team and not just Toronto's team. https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Articles/2026/05/22/dream-team-the-toronto-tempo-embody-larry-tanenbaums-vision-and-represent-all-of-canada-and-its-wnba-hopes/
Expect a 50‑100bps Fed Hiking Cycle, Not a Single Hike
Rather than odds of one solo rate hike over the next 9-12 months, a better way of thinking about it is the market’s odds of a 50-100bps hiking cycle. The Fed won’t hike just once.
Founder Rejects $810M, Bets on AI Beyond NVIDIA
Meta offered $810 million for a Korean AI chip startup. The founder turned it down. He believes the next phase of AI won't be won by NVIDIA. And he might be right. Here is the full story:
Greenspan: Tech Productivity Shifted From Rate Pause to Hike
as I said a while back, that's how the Greenspan comparison should have been framed. For Greenspan, tech productivity was initially a reason not to hike (against the hawkishness of his FOMC colleagues), not a reason to cut aggressively... and...
Feedback Loop Turns Culture Fix Into Ongoing Results
The Feedback Loop That Makes “Fix the Culture, Fix the Outcomes” a System https://t.co/n9shXBO7xO A feedback loop replaces project mindset w/continuous operating model: Observe outcomes → Diagnose their culture roots → Intervene/change what matters → Prove it worked. Repeat. https://t.co/XucQ7Q1lAz
Authority Weighs Words; True Generosity Is Presence
The more authority we carry, the heavier our words land. And sometimes the most generous thing we can offer is to put that weight down and just be present. Here's why that's so difficult to do (and what can make...
5% Yield Spike Could Trim S&P Valuation 15%
Per the Fed Model, when stocks and bonds are correlated and offer similar yields, when bonds reprice, so will equities. That’s the transmission link between rates and equities. If yields rise to 5%, how much would equities need to derate? Per...
Stafford Becomes NFL's First $500 Million Player
HALF-A-BILLION 🏈💴 Stafford’s $55M Extension Makes Him NFL’s First $500M Player https://t.co/PHOppSqsnB via @sportico @kbadenhausen
Change‑of‑control Clause Stalls Estée‑Lauder‑Puig Merger
Per Axios Pro's @Ryanbarwick on Estee Lauder/Puig deal breakdown: "A big hurdle was a contract issue with Charlotte Tilbury ...She had a change of control clause in her contract with Puig that allowed her to renegotiate terms of her deal. Estée...
Incentives, Not Policies, Drive Process Bypass
Someone figured out that if they cc the right person on a request, it jumps to the front of the queue. Within weeks, everyone in the organization knows the shortcut. I see this in a lot of in-house teams. The intake...
HVAC Roll-Up Thrives by Prioritizing Technicians Over Finance
Andrea Allegrini is one of the operators behind Lindbergh, an HVAC roll-up that has completed 14 acquisitions. What started as a niche logistics and waste-management business has evolved into a fast-growing acquisition platform doing $32 million in revenue, with 35-36% yearly...
Waller Signals Hawkish Tone, Warns on Inflation Risks
This is a hawkish speech from Waller. While he doesn’t think hikes are needed in the near-term, he comes across as quite troubled by recent inflation developments. I’ll thread a few highlights: https://t.co/p8k7nMSJ1e
Fed's Waller Signals Future Rate Hikes If Inflation Persists
Waller: "I can no longer rule out rate hikes further down the road if inflation does not abate soon" He becomes the latest Fed official to endorse removing the easing bias from the statement and making clear that a rate hike...
Mike Richards, Ex‑Jeopardy Producer, Now Daily Wire CEO
There's news in this interview with Mike Richards, the former Jeopardy producer (and host) who is the new CEO of Ben Shapiro's The Daily Wire: https://t.co/tSicGC1Mw2
Erdogan's Power Grab Drives Turkey's Decade‑long High Rates
The price Turkey pays for Erdogan's relentless push to stay in power is sky-high interest rates that have taken the country back to the early 2000s. Interest rates these days are far above Turkey's EM peers and we're closing in...
Clarity Beats Ambiguity: Modern Leaders Choose Transparency
Millennial managers said “we’re not doing the confusion thing” and some orgs are still recovering from the audacity 😭 I grew up watching leadership use vagueness as a power move and ambiguity to keep people guessing, grateful, and quiet Then we got...
Ensuring AI Search Knows Accurate Brand Facts with WAIKAY
Love the work @Dixon_Jones is doing by approaching AI search optimization with ensuring the models know factually accurate information about your brand BTW - his tool WAIKAY is one of my favorites for AI search so far @athenseo https://t.co/97KUID4LVb
Fox Sports Tracks Viewers' Sweat During Games
Fox Sports is measuring viewer sweat. Yes, really. Read all about it here: https://t.co/MabNES6Frv https://t.co/zuWvL9oHXe
RBI's March Dollar Sales Fell Short, Boosted by Forwards
After buying dollars in Jan and Feb, RBI sold dollars into the mad moves in March, about $9.7 billion. This was of course too less, but there's a bunch of forward sales too https://t.co/MARSGdhUbP
Social Apps Add TikTok‑Style Discovery and Creator Tools
Newsletter is out: 📲A breakdown of why video streaming platforms are adding TikTok-like discovery feeds to their mobile apps 📸Instagram launches Instants, a BeReal-meets-Snapchat feature and standalone app ✈️TikTok officially annouces TikTok Go to help travelers book accommodations and hotels 📺LinkedIn is expanding its...
Hawkish Fed Chair May Calm Yields Amid Bond Vigilantes
Bond vigilantes are pushing back hard as markets brace for higher rates longer. The paradox: a hawkish Fed chair could actually help by bringing down long-term Treasury yields. 🟢 Open https://t.co/JYetOpImhO