Mint: “Gen Z is keeping fintechs on their toes…From product design shifting from long-term, rigid products to flexible, high-engagement tools matching younger users’ short attention spans and appetite for control, fintechs are rapidly rethinking their offerings.”
FT: “Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta will spend more than $400bn on data centres in 2026 — on top of more than $350bn this year. But as the money floods in, concerns are being raised about overcapacity, long-term profitability and energy demands. “Lots of people who are trying to build data centres will fail,” said one banker who helps arrange financing for AI infrastructure projects. “We are in that period where the capital markets are crazy enough to throw money at almost anything. I am curious to see the next phase and whether rationality prevails.”…JLL estimates $170bn of assets will require construction lending or permanent financing this year. Between now and 2029, however, global spending on data centres will hit almost $3tn, according to Morgan Stanley analysts. Of that, just $1.4tn is forecast to come from capital expenditure by Big Tech groups, leaving a mammoth $1.5tn of financing required from investors and developers.”
WSJ: “Since American children and college students weren’t being taught what happened under actual socialist regimes, it was only a matter of time before simplistic slogans attacking private property, billionaires and “profits before people,” would be successfully revived by a smooth-talking demagogue. In a 2002 paper and a 2003 speech for the Atlas Society, Alan Charles Kors, now an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania, foretold how and why this could happen. Mr. Kors lamented that socialism had yet to be held accountable for the scale of its crimes: “No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents and more orphans than socialism with power.” The failure to acknowledge and come to terms with this reality in the West, he believed, eventually would allow socialism to resuscitate itself, even with millions of skeletons hiding in plain view.”
Julia Austin: “When you’re building at breakneck speed, you can often lose sight of operations and organizational components that can slow you down. When you start to see that hockey stick of growth, you’re spending time either fixing a lot of things that are broken or that you wish you had attended to earlier. That can eventually lead to the demise of not just the start-up but a new initiative in a big organization. The other thing that can happen is organizational debt, which is a fast-paced need to hire, to bring people on board without a lot of thought about culture and about whether you have the right people for the right roles. That can be fine earlier on, when you’re scrappy and just moving forward. During the period of rapid growth, you need to bring in people who “have seen the movie before.” They know what to expect, what good looks like, what scale feels like, and know who can bring the company to the next level. The adage of “what got you here doesn’t necessarily get you there” applies to being prepared for that shift.”
strategy+business reviews “Futureproof”: “What do humans have going for them in their battle against technology? Three main abilities: to cope with changing circumstances, to meet the emotional needs of others, and to possess unusual talents.”
