Category: Thinks

WSJ: “In the hypercompetitive world of fast food, Matthews is Taco Bell’s chief food innovation officer and the master of a strategy so tricky to pull off that it has snarled up operations at rivals. She churns out, year after year, new items like cheese shells as limited time offers, or LTOs. Chains need LTOs to keep their drive-through menu boards and apps popping with new items to keep customers coming back. The holy grail is a viral sensation online, and millions of dollars in sales.”

NYTimes: “…The world order, built and led by the United States, is under threat from China, which aims to usurp America’s rightful place atop it. There’s a phrase that encapsulates the theory: the Thucydides trap, referring to the violent clash that comes when a rising power challenges the ruling hegemon. In Thucydides’ time, it was Athens that successfully challenged the pre-eminence of Sparta. But it is a pattern that has played out repeatedly through history, with the ambition and aggression of the challenger almost always ending in bloodshed.”

FT: “[Tim] Cook’s tenure, which began four years after the launch of the iPhone, has been bounded by the smartphone era. Even though worldwide sales of smartphones peaked almost a decade ago, nothing new has come along to disturb the device’s centrality in consumer technology. Cook has played his hand well, building and reinforcing an empire around the iPhone with services and new gadgets such as AirPods and the Watch. But impregnability isn’t assured. His successor will need to show that they can both co-opt AI to reinforce what Cook built while also harnessing its disruptive potential to ride the next consumer tech wave.”

Gordon Wood: “The United States isn’t a nation like other nations, and it never has been. There is no American ethnicity to back up the state, and there was no such distinctive ethnicity even in 1776, when the U.S. was created. Many European countries—Germany, for example—were nations before they became states. Most European states were created out of a prior sense of a common ethnicity or language. Some of them, like the Czech Republic, were created in the 20th century and are newer than the 249-year-old U.S. Yet all are undergirded by peoples that had a pre-existing sense of their own distinctiveness, their own nationhood. In the U.S. the process was reversed. Americans created a state before they were a nation, and much of American history has been an effort to define that nationhood.”

IMD: ““LLMs are programmed to project authority while preying on the insecurities of users,” says [Amar] Bhidé. “Their responses are at once utterly confident and aim to affirm users’ opinions or desires.” If a CEO asked an LLM a series of questions about business strategy, the replies would more than likely align with the CEO’s existing views, assuring them that their thinking is sound and that they are on the right course. “They play courtier, not devil’s advocate,” continues Bhidé. “LLMs seem to have been designed to flatter the user, thereby encouraging their continued use. ’Oh, what a brilliant idea!’ they will effectively say, convincing the user that they are really smart.”” [via Arnold Kling]

BCG Newsletter: “The way companies typically treat a capital investment is very different from how they treat a human investment. Agentic AI has characteristics of both. Like capital, agentic AI systems require substantial investment upfront in development, integration, and infrastructure. Like a human workforce, they also require ongoing variable costs for evaluation, tuning, domain adaptation, usage-driven inference, and governance. This blend of capex and opex makes agentic AI an economic hybrid, fundamentally reshaping enterprise investment models.”

Fei-Fei Li: “Marble is a frontier model. What’s really remarkable is it generates a 3D world at a simple prompt. That prompt could be, Give me a modern-looking kitchen. Or, Here’s a picture of a modern-looking kitchen. Make it a 3D world. The ability to create a 3D world is fundamental to humans. I hope one day it’s fundamental to AI. If you are a designer or architect, you can use this 3D world to ideate, to design. If you are a game developer, you can use it to obtain these 3D worlds, so that you can design games. If you want to do robotic simulation, these worlds will become very useful as training data for robots or evaluation data. If you want to create immersive, educational experiences in AR [or] VR, this model would help you to do that.”

Bloomberg: “Since the Covid-19 pandemic, a new generation of traders has flooded markets through apps that blend brokerage, betting and social media antics. They’re using tools built for speed, stakes and engagement: stock options with zero days to expire (0DTE) that can deliver thousand-percent swings in minutes; leveraged exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that triple the pain or pleasure of a daily move; event contracts that let users wager on the consumer price index, earnings calls or NFL games; memecoins and tokenized stocks. More than half of the S&P 500’s daily options volume now comes from 0DTEs, instruments that barely existed on any scale five years ago. Assets in leveraged ETFs have soared sixfold since the onset of the pandemic, to $240 billion. Sports event contracts, essentially a form of gambling, clocked $507 million in trades on Kalshi, one of the biggest prediction markets, during just the NFL’s opening week this season. Day in and day out, Wall Street, which likes to talk about managing risk, has been manufacturing new ways to take it. More assets to trade. More chances to win. More dopamine.”

SaaStr: “The real question isn’t whether SaaS is dying. The real question is: Are you killing it? Are you the vendor that customers recommend, or the one they warn their friends about? Are you building a business, or extracting from one? Are you creating value, or just capturing it? The answer will determine whether you’re here in 2030.”

NYTimes: “For centuries, engineers have turned to nature for inspiration. Leonardo da Vinci dreamed of gliding machines that would mimic birds. Today, the close study of animals and plants is leading to inventions such as soft batteries and water-walking robots. Cassandra Donatelli, a biologist at the University of Washington, Tacoma and an author of a recent review of the burgeoning field of “bioinspiration,” credits the trend to sophisticated new tools as well as a new spirit of collaboration.”

Thomas Friedman: “For the past few years, I have had to ask myself a question I never asked before in my life: What should we call the era we’re living in today?…I was musing about all this one day with Craig Mundie, the former head of research and strategy at Microsoft. I told him that in nearly every domain I was writing about lately, the old binary left-right systems were giving way to multiple interconnected ones, and, in the process, shattering the coherence of both the Cold War and post-Cold War paradigms. At one point Mundie said to me, “I know what you should call this new era: the Polycene.” It was a neologism — a word he just made up on the spot and not in the dictionary. Admittedly wonky, it is derived from the Greek “poly,” meaning “many.” But it immediately struck me as the right name for this new epoch, where — thanks to smartphones, computers and ubiquitous connectivity — every person and every machine increasingly has a voice to be heard and a lever to impact one another, and the planet, at a previously unimaginable speed and scale. So, welcome to the Polycene. It’s been an interesting ride getting here.”

WSJ: “Want to lower your risk of death? Get your steps in sessions of 15 minutes or more rather than in shorter bursts…A longer daily walk seems to beat a lot of incidental steps—but there is no need to trek for hours on end. Participants who walked mainly in bouts of at least 15 minutes had an 83% lower risk of dying than those whose walks occurred in bursts of less than 5 minutes. The risk of cardiovascular disease, such as heart attack or stroke, was 68% lower for the longer-session walkers compared with the shortest-burst walkers.”

Mumbai Mirror: “The reason India’s micro-drama marketplace has suddenly become crowded is simple: consumers were already deeply engaged with short-form video formats popularised in China, Korea, and the West. Apps such as DramaBox, ReelShort, ShortMax, NetShort, and FlickReels offered a surplus of binge-worthy content. Micro-dramas like A Familiar Stranger about a Prime Minister’s daughter who swaps faces with a painter to escape an unwanted marriage and The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband about a woman who marries a disgraced man to help her mother, have become global hits. The format has grown so rapidly that Fox Entertainment and Walt Disney are now investing in it. It was only a matter of time before Indian players latched on to the concept. The economics of micro-drama production—faster cycles, smaller crews, and more targeted scripts—made it a lucrative opportunity. The average cost of producing a micro-drama ranges between Rs15,000 and Rs 25,000 per minute, translating to roughly Rs 10–15 lakh for an hour-long series. This represents a 70–90 per cent reduction compared to mainstream television or OTT production costs. Even a high-budget production featuring a bigger-star would average Rs 75,000 per minute, which still amounts to Rs 45 lakh for the first season of a series.”

Andy Kessler: “Yes, we need change. Society always does. Progress never sleeps. But we need change driven by the next wave, which has its fits and starts. And those who were left behind: Luddites. Buggy-whip manufacturers. Local department stores. Phone operators and bank tellers. And now artificial-intelligence-threatened graphic designers, coders, teachers, lawyers and doctors. Some confuse this for anarchy. It isn’t. Instead of entropy (physicists’ definition of disorder) you get productivity and enthalpy (more energy) in the form of societal wealth and progress…Let entrepreneurs and capital markets thrive, build order and create opportunities for everyone from the lowest to highest rungs of the economic ladder, and move society toward a higher purpose. Health, wealth, happiness. Work hard, play hard instead of asking for free stuff. It’s better than “No future for you.””

WSJ: “The smartest travelers can’t imagine flying without Flighty. The elegantly designed app pulls all kinds of data to forecast exactly how much time you’re going to spend on the ground or trapped inside a metal tube. It predicts flight delays—and explains why flights are delayed. For updates and cancellation alerts, Flighty is so fast that it often beats the airlines. The result is that people who try it become obsessed with it. Flighty was built by aviation geeks for aviation geeks, but designed to be intuitive enough that anyone can use it. Like millions of users, I have come to rely on this product for real-time information when I’m traveling. And when flights are a mess, Flighty becomes essential.”

Business Standard: “Twins can be built for all sorts of objects and tasks, and for components of systems, as well as entire systems. For example, engineers may build a digital twin of the blades of a turbine in a jet engine, or they may build a digital twin of the entire engine, or a twin of an entire plane. The automotive industry has enthusiastically embraced the concept. Architects and civil engineers now twin buildings, and twin many projects allowing them to easily experiment with different materials, designs, and technologies. When it comes to education, digital twins could be a massive force multiplier with applications ranging from kindergarten to post-doc. City authorities “twin” metro systems being planned and also existing metros during operations. This can smooth and optimise entire processes, and flag possible flaws in designs. Oil companies routinely set up twins of oil rigs, pipelines, and refineries, and continuously update the twins with real-time data. Many other industries use them as well.”

Satya Nadella: “I start with the excitement that I also feel for the idea that maybe after the Industrial Revolution this [AI] is the biggest thing. I start with that premise. But at the same time, I’m a little grounded in the fact that this is still early innings. We’ve built some very useful things, we’re seeing some great properties, these scaling laws seem to be working. I’m optimistic that they’ll continue to work. Some of it does require real science breakthroughs, but it’s also a lot of engineering and what have you. That said, I also sort of take the view that even what has been happening in the last 70 years of computing has also been a march that has helped us move. I like one of the things that Raj Reddy has as a metaphor for what AI is. He’s a Turing Award winner at CMU. He had this, even pre-AGI. He had this metaphor for AI, it should either be a guardian angel or a cognitive amplifier. I love that. It’s a simple way to think about what this is. Ultimately, what is its human utility? It is going to be a cognitive amplifier and a guardian angel. If I view it that way, I view it as a tool.”

FT: “What if the AI race isn’t about chips at all? Availability of electricity to keep models running is becoming the critical factor in technology’s development…The race to master AI is new but it is part of a centuries-old story. Throughout history, every technological superpower has risen on the back of cheap energy. Cheap, abundant coal powered Britain’s Industrial Revolution. In the US, oil and hydroelectric power fuelled its dominance in manufacturing and military technology during the 20th century. The battle to control AI is often framed as a contest for chips and the controls that govern them. But power will belong to those who can keep the AI models running.”

WSJ: “After decades of obscurity, a bookish style of lettering is everywhere. Some typeface connoisseurs say it’s gone too far…Serif—a family of typeface known for small lines and decorative “wings”—has gone mainstream. Again.”

SaaStr: “Let’s be brutally honest about what “AI Native” means in 2025. It’s not about slapping a chatbot on your product and calling it AI-enhanced. It’s about fundamentally rethinking how your software does work instead of just facilitating work. Grant Lee from Gamma said it best in his announcement: “Gamma, and our 70 million users, are proof that an AI-native company can disrupt a category everyone assumed was won.” Think about that for a second. PowerPoint was invented before the first website. Before the Game Boy. Before the Berlin Wall fell. And yet here’s Gamma, founded in 2020, reaching $100M ARR profitably with just 50 people. That’s $2M ARR per employee. They’re creating 30 million gammas every single month. They’re releasing their API to the general public so you can plug Gamma into wherever work happens. They’re building a full visual storytelling platform that goes far beyond what the incumbents ever imagined. That’s not iteration. That’s category reinvention.”

Bloomberg: “On average, Mumbai residents eat out at restaurants about 3.6 times a month and spend about $10 per person each visit, according to a 2024 report by the National Restaurant Association of India.”

NYTimes: “What’s the secret formula that has made the United States the dominant superpower in the world today?…A commitment to education at every level, resulting in global leadership in science and technology…An inclination toward free markets and free trade, supported by the rule of law…Immigration and the absorption of some of the brightest minds from around the world.”

Accel 2025 Globalscape Report. “Over the past year, AI’s transformational shift has remained unstoppable: public and private markets have hit all-time highs despite geopolitical turbulence and macro uncertainty, Nvidia became the world’s first $5 trillion company, the “Super Six” added $4.9 trillion of market cap, and venture funding across the U.S., Europe and Israel increased 84% year-over-year to an expected $184 billion. While a large part of this funding has been fueled by U.S. model companies, we’re also seeing a leveling of the AI playing field at the application layer, with Europe and Israel’s AI talent pool continuing to shine. Powering this AI industrial revolution requires new infrastructure and the race for compute is now well underway.”

SaaStr: “I get why CEOs want to believe in sales magicians. It’s the same reason people buy lottery tickets. We want to believe there’s a shortcut. One perfect hire who changes everything. But I’ve never seen it work that way. Not at my portfolio companies. Not at any of the SaaS companies I’ve studied. Not even at Salesforce or Slack or any of the category creators. What I have seen work, over and over again: Founders who stay in sales longer than they want to; Companies that build real inbound demand before scaling sales; CEOs who take responsibility for making sale; Teams that hire for execution and coachability instead of “experience” and “gravitas”. Your job as CEO isn’t to find the magic. Your job is to bring in the orders and make it so your merely competent salespeople can hit quota consistently. Do that, and you won’t need magicians.”

NYTimes: “Neural data can offer unparalleled insight into the workings of the human mind. B.C.I.s are already frighteningly powerful: Using artificial intelligence, scientists have used B.C.I.s to decode “imagined speech,” constructing words and sentences from neural data; to recreate mental images (a process known as brain-to-image decoding); and to trace emotions and energy levels. B.C.I.s have allowed people with locked-in syndrome, who cannot move or speak, to communicate with their families and caregivers and even play video games…Advances in optogenetics, a scientific technique that uses light to stimulate or suppress individual, genetically modified neurons, could allow scientists to “write” the brain as well, potentially altering human understanding and behavior. Optogenetic implants are already able to partially restore vision to patients with genetic eye disorders; lab experiments have shown that the same technique can be used to implant false memories in mammal brains, as well as to silence existing recollections and to recover lost ones.”

Arnold Kling: “Think of democracy as a principal-agent problem in which the voting public is the principal and the government is the agent. Standard public choice theory focuses on the faults of the agent. Hanson says to look instead at the faults of the principal. As Mencken said, the people are getting what they want, good and hard.”

FT: “If data is the oil of the 21st century, then “brain” data is the crude oil.”

IEA: “Today’s socialists are bursting with self-confidence, more precisely, with that easy self-confidence that comes from knowing that your opinions are fashionable, and that the cultural momentum is on your side. If ‘history’ is a battle of ideas between people who believe in completely different ways of organising a society, then history is well and truly back. Those of us on the other side of that battle better act like it.”

MaxSource: “The failure of the attention-based model is simultaneously fostering the growth of the Intentional Economy. This nascent structure is defined by a direct, transparent value exchange between the creator/provider and the consumer, built upon active user choice, quality, and utility…The bankruptcy of the Attention Economy is not a collapse of opportunity, but a revaluation of capital. It forces a necessary transition from quantity-based survival to quality-based thriving, benefiting creators who produce meaningful work and, most importantly, users seeking genuine value.”

FT: “Say what you like about the tenets of populism, it certainly seems to be, well, popular. But what are the tenets of populism? It’s easy enough to say what a centre-left party is likely to stand for, or a libertarian. But a populist? Maybe it is a mistake to describe populism as an ideology at all. The Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath recently published an essay making an intriguing argument: maybe populism isn’t a set of beliefs, or even a set of tactics, but an appeal to a way of thinking. Specifically, populists stand for common sense and in opposition to the pretentious theories of the elites. “People are not rebelling against economic elites,” writes Heath. Instead, this is “a rebellion against [cognitive] executive function”. In this view, populism is a movement that appeals to people who trust their gut, rather than those who rely on some too-clever-by-half argument.”

WSJ: “Large corporations have teams mapping out AI strategies and deploying the new technologies. Small businesses are figuring it out for themselves. An August report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that 58% of some 3,800 small businesses surveyed said they use generative AI. That is up from 40% in 2024 and more than double what it was two years prior. Restaurants are using AI to schedule worker shifts. Event planners use it to make seating arrangements and provide quotes. Interior designers are using image-generation tools to visualize color changes or room layouts.”

BCG Newsletter: “Generative AI is an increasingly important shopping partner. Nearly half of all consumers (48%, up 9 percentage points since 2024) say they’ve already used or plan to use GenAI to research products, compare prices, or identify deals, and adoption is surging across almost every generation and geography. GenAI is turning millions of consumers into expert shoppers, allowing them to make faster, more confident choices.”

Bessemer: “What’s the secret to the operating model that runs one of venture capital’s most tenured institutions? Paradox. Bessemer is highly decentralized, driven by independent thinkers, and yet, remains a  close knit partnership that holds intellectual honesty and collaboration as core values in its code of conduct. Because the firm doesn’t have a single owner at the helm, partners can make decisions autonomously while still benefiting from the collective wisdom of peers and mentors, as well as insights from past generations of Bessemer investors. “We work in a highly disaggregated, empowered manner where any partner who puts in the time, effort, and capital can make investments in what they believe will become the next great technological invention, business, or trend,” explains Jeremy Levine, a partner.”

WSJ: “Startups and tech giants alike are rushing to launch wearable technology—from bracelets to necklaces to glasses and more—that provide users with access to personalized AI assistants. One of the latest entries in this space is a smart ring from Sandbar, a company founded by Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong, who worked together on neural interfaces at CTRL-Labs, a startup acquired by Meta in 2019. Called the Stream Ring and designed to be worn on the index finger, the gadget lets users capture any thoughts or ideas that come into their heads, without having to pull out their phones. Wearers can whisper into the ring, and their words are then organized and made accessible via an app.”

Ashish Agrawal: “As US startups stay private longer, India’s open, vibrant capital markets are letting younger companies list sooner – and inviting retail investors to join the compounding early…Here, we are fortunate to have vibrant and inclusive capital markets. A $10 billion company can go public, but so can one valued at $500 million or $1 billion. This depth offers investors the chance to participate earlier in a company’s journey, compounding alongside them as they grow. What makes this even more exciting is how quickly companies in India are scaling. With rising consumer and enterprise spending, near-universal smartphone penetration, frictionless payments and logistics, and stronger management capabilities, companies now reach $100 million in revenues in 5-6 years — something that used to take a decade or longer. This allows younger, faster-growing businesses to enter the public markets, and makes them accessible to everyday investors much sooner.” 

NYTimes: “A.I. is no less a form of intelligence than digital photography is a form of photography. And now A.I. is on its way to doing something even more remarkable: becoming conscious. This will happen in the same way it became intelligent. As we interact with increasingly sophisticated A.I., we will develop a better and more inclusive conception of consciousness. You might object that this is a verbal trick, that I’m arguing that A.I. will become conscious because we’ll start using the word “conscious” to include it. But there is no trick. There is always a feedback loop between our theories and the world, so that our concepts are shaped by what we discover.”

SaaStr: “The single biggest mistake you’ll make as a founder isn’t picking the wrong market, missing a product deadline, or even almost running out of cash (as brutal as it it). It’s tolerating mediocrity on your team.  Especially your senior team. And I’m not talking about folks who are learning or growing into a role. I’m talking about the truly mediocre — the people who will never quite get there, who require constant management, who need to be dragged across every finish line.”

Fast Company: “Big spending on artificial intelligence puts pressure on jobs, as gloomy narratives about the future of work are ironically making new graduates less employable.”

WSJ: “Despite all the costs entailed in the transition, industrial technology and the market system accomplished what no benevolent king’s redistribution, no loving bishop’s charity, no mercantilist’s protectionism and no powerful guild ever did. It delivered a massive increase in productive capacity that continues to enrich our world. If we base our policies to cushion the AI transition on proven results rather than good intentions and let the market system develop and absorb AI technology, we can achieve a second economic miracle, which will enrich America and the world.”

Alexandra Samuel: “It was so much easier to have a conversation with a chatbot than a human being. But the more I talked to AI, the less I talked to everybody else…Now I am a lot more vigilant about the risks that come with AI—not because of its limitations, but because of its strengths. AI will only become more engaging, more powerful and more humanlike in the years to come. But as engaging and humanlike it will become, I have to remember to remind myself: Being humanlike isn’t the same as being human.”

The Hindu: “[Maya is] a new sci-fi universe called Maya, developed by Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon. The universe is set on the planet Neh, featuring seven species in constant tension, ruled by a near-omniscient class of beings. The article highlights the unique approach of Maya, which aims to be a cultural monument rather than a cash grab…Maya is…a universe with seven species in constant tension, ruled by a near-omniscient class of “divine” beings that draw their power from the control of a planetary network of trees that can read their minds, simulate futures, and give the ruling class a panoramic view of the world. For most beings on this planet, not tethering to the tree for extended periods is akin to borderline treason.”

NYTimes: “Artificial intelligence is sweeping through newsrooms, transforming the way journalists around the world gather and disseminate information. Traditional news organizations increasingly use tools from companies like OpenAI and Google to streamline work that used to take hours: sifting through reams of information, tracking down sources and suggesting headlines. In some cases, including at Fortune and Business Insider, publications have explored using A.I. to write full articles, notifying readers they intend to use it for drafts. Almost all of the news organizations have some guardrails in place to prevent errors, such as requiring a human to review anything that A.I. writes before it is published…And many journalists have also been left to wonder: Will A.I. replace journalism jobs in an already fast-shrinking market — or, rather, which jobs?”

Forbes: “Global tech giants including Amazon, Google and Microsoft are pouring an estimated $240 billion in the next five years to expand their hyperscale footprint in the Asia-Pacific. This massive outlay, together with investments by regional players, is expected to more than double data center capacity across the region to more than 29 gigawatts (GW) by 2030 from 12GW in 2024, according to Cushman & Wakefield. By the end of the decade, the region could well be the world’s second-largest data center market, next only to the 32GW capacity that will be created in the Americas, it added.”