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The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something that is quite easy to understand. The trick is getting first to a strong market position and then exploiting the advantages that follow. What you want is a natural franchise. A company can have a perfectly marvelous product and still be in a lousy business.

— Peter Lynch, One Up on Wall Street (1989)
6d ago

Investors often make the mistake of confusing a exciting industry with a profitable one. The trick is not to find industries that are growing fast, but to find companies that can keep competitors from eating their lunch.

1w ago

The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation that other investors are structurally unable to match. Most investors are forced by their mandates, their clients, or their own psychology to think in quarters. If you can genuinely think in decades, you are not playing the same game they are.

2w ago
readtrung.com
Kirkland Signature: Jim Sinegal and the Making of Costco's $90B Private-Label Empire

Consumers, conditioned by heavy promotion and by habit, did not bolt even as prices of some of their favorite soaps and cereals increased by 5% or 8% a year. And so profits increased much faster than that. Heinz's earnings climbed by an average of 13% a year during the past decade, Clorox's by 15%. Their shareholders and owners reaped a treasure.

2w ago
ai-supremacy.com
Claude Fable Guide for Stock Analysis

The real version is more useful to you as an investor: the single most capable model Anthropic has ever released to the public was considered serious enough that a government reached for emergency export controls — and it's now sitting in the same app you already use.

3w ago

The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago. That is no accident.

1mo ago
stratechery.com
Anthropic’s Safety Superpower

A world where models are interchangeable is one where models are commodities, while most of the value flows elsewhere. Right now that's compute, but in the fullness of time, whenever we have enough compute, the most valuable place to be in the value chain will be the place that has always been the most valuable: owning the user touchpoint.

1mo ago

The biggest moat a business can have is not technology, not patents, not brand — it's the accumulated trust of customers who would feel genuine loss if you disappeared. Trust is the only asset that appreciates purely through use and deteriorates purely through neglect.

1mo ago

The greatest competitive advantage in business is a long time horizon. Almost all of the gains in any market come from people willing to wait longer than everyone else is willing to wait, and almost nobody is structurally set up to do that.

1mo ago
notboring.co
America Spins on Westmag

In the Electric Era, maintaining design leadership without manufacturing leadership is not a coherent strategic position, and one that gets less coherent the better you believe AI will get.

2mo ago

The best business is one where you can raise prices without losing customers. The second-best business is one where you can raise prices and gain customers.

2mo ago

The best business to be in is one where you can raise prices without losing customers, and yet few businesses qualify. Most businesses are competitive enough that if they raise prices, they lose significant volume.

2mo ago
ai-supremacy.com
OpenAI's Momentum is Spiraling Down ▼

While Google and Anthropic have executed well in their Generative AI efforts, OpenAI has fumbled their priorities while losing considerable marketshare over the last year.

2mo ago

The difference between a good business and a bad business is that a good business throws off cash and requires little capital to grow, while a bad business requires lots of capital and doesn't throw off much cash.

2mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
Meet The DJing a16z Alum Who Raised $30M For New VC Firm Worldbuild

There is so much noise in venture today, that actually leading with original thoughts can have a competitive advantage. We want other, larger platforms to view Worldbuild as a tastemaker for where they should be spending time six months, or 12 months from today.

2mo ago

The best investment is in yourself. But once you've bought yourself, you need to think about what produces the best return on that investment. And the answer is usually a business where you have some advantage—whether it's a better mousetrap, or better access, or better understanding of the customer.

2mo ago
stratechery.com
Amazon’s Durability

Amazon, more than any other company, actually operates with decade-long timeframes, consistently making real-world investments at massive scale that (1) convert their marginal costs into capital costs and (2) gain leverage on those capital costs by selling them to other businesses.

2mo ago
stratechery.com
2026.18: Long-term, Peripheral & Myopic Visions

Amazon — whether through vision or good fortune — was positioning itself well for a world defined by inference (given that their inference chip is called "Trainium", I'm going with a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B).

3mo ago
ai-supremacy.com
The Landowners of AI

What's becoming more clear is that hyperscalers are the true landowners of AI. They are the custodians and the ones that benefit directly from the demand for compute in more Cloud computing and digital Advertising revenue.

3mo ago
stratechery.com
An Interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and AWS CEO Matt Garman About Bedrock Managed Agents

Azure had a real competitive advantage thanks to being the only hyperscaler able to offer OpenAI models, but this also hindered OpenAI, particularly once it became clear that many enterprises cared first and foremost about accessing models on their current cloud of choice; I've been noting for a while that this was a real competitive advantage for Anthropic.

3mo ago
ai-supremacy.com
Why Cursor is the Enterprise AI Darkhorse of Generative AI

Unlike OpenAI, where Cursor really shines is in product innovation. You can feel the difference in talent. Cursor has recently transitioned from being an AI-enhanced code editor to what they describe as an "Agent-First Interface."

3mo ago

The best way to think about the future is not by projecting the past, but by understanding what is actually changing in the world and which businesses benefit from that change versus which ones get hurt by it.

3mo ago
stratechery.com
2026.16: Servers, Satellites, and Stars

The key to understanding and analyzing tech has been appreciating the implications of zero marginal costs, which govern the economics of everything from chips to software to services. AI services generally fall under the same rubric — fixed costs in terms of data centers and chips matter more than marginal costs (mostly electricity) — but the worsening shortage in compute means it is opportunity costs that matter more than ever.

3mo ago

The best investment is in yourself, but the second-best is often in businesses where you can understand what they do and where they're going better than the market does.

3mo ago

The difference between a business that compounds and one that doesn't is often not the talent of the founder, but the defensibility of the moat—and most founders underestimate how much time it takes to build one.

3mo ago

The best thing a company can do is compound capital efficiently over decades. But the second-best thing is to be so boring that people forget to worry about you.

3mo ago
stratechery.com
2026.15: Myth and Mythos

However, a point I make on Sharp Tech is that Anthropic's exponential growth includes the part of the curve everyone misses: the company has been on this once-barely-visible trajectory for nearly two years now. Now the company has what is undoubtedly the most powerful model in the world, so powerful, in fact, that Anthropic says it can't release it publicly. There's reason for cynicism, given Anthropic's history, but the part of the "Boy Cries Wolf" myth everyone forgets is that the wolf did come in the end.

3mo ago

The difference between a mediocre business and a great business is that the great business finds a way to do the same thing at 1/10th the cost. Most people focus on revenue growth; they should focus on unit economics.

3mo ago
readtrung.com
The Disneyland Dilemma

Parks & Cruises is putting up these numbers while being only a ~1/3 of Disney's $94B revenue. The division is floating Disney's entire transition from dying cable TV assets to streaming….which has been a bumpy ride.

4mo ago
notboring.co
Bad Analogies

There are a million little details that made Bezos' plan work, all of which, and the connections between them, were taken into consideration. Get to scale category-by-category, starting with the ones best suited to the internet, build an unmatched distribution and logistics network, drive down prices and delivery times, get more scale, grow the distribution network, drive down prices, make the "divinely discontent" customers discontent with anything slower or more expensive than what they'd come to expect with Amazon, get them hooked on Prime, paying a subscription and ordering more, keep pressing the advantage, grow FCF per share.

4mo ago
stratechery.com
Apple’s 50 Years of Integration

For decades after the fact, conventional wisdom was that Microsoft's modular approach — the one that let me build my own computers — was unquestionably superior to Apple's integration of hardware and software. In fact, it was Apple's integration that kept the company afloat.

4mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Dead Cinderella Edition

The truth is, the structure that made most Cinderellas possible was one that trapped unpaid athletes at their schools. Those teams were usually stocked with older players, who had a cohesive system and playing style.

4mo ago
notboring.co
Weekly Dose of Optimism #186

What's hard is making it cheap enough to compete with drilling a hole in the ground. Terraform's bet is that plummeting solar costs will get them there, and their qualified electrolyzer stack (under $100/kW) and full-scale reactor suggest they're heading in the right direction.

4mo ago
ai-supremacy.com
The Geopolitical Chokepoints of Artificial Intelligence

For much of the past decade, the rise of artificial intelligence appeared to be governed by inputs that diffuse quickly. Advances in architectures, algorithms, training techniques, and data practices spread rapidly through academic papers, open-source code, and global talent markets. Because these inputs were highly replicable and only weakly tied to geography, it was natural to assume that AI capability would spread broadly across countries and firms. That assumption no longer matches reality.

4mo ago
wired.com
Arm Is Now Making Its Own Chips

The chip design firm says Meta, OpenAI, Cerebras, and Cloudflare are among the first customers of its new artificial intelligence hardware.

4mo ago
ai-supremacy.com
Using NotebookLM with Gemini

Google is the one that's made the most progress in terms of building a full-stack AI ecosystem.

4mo ago
stratechery.com
2026.11: Winners, Losers, and the Unknown

However, the most recent evidence — particularly Copilot Cowork — is that the companies who are best able to harness (pun intended) model capabilities are the model makers themselves.

4mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Exit Permit Edition

What makes Kuwait's move so striking is that the rest of the Gulf has spent the last five years moving decisively in the opposite direction — and for reasons that have nothing to do with conscience. Qatar, under the sustained commercial pressure of World Cup scrutiny, eliminated exit permit requirements for most workers in 2020. The UAE has significantly loosened job-change restrictions, and Bahrain has done the same. These were pragmatic, strategic pivots by governments that understood something important: if you want to attract the global professional class — the fund managers, the architects, the regional directors choosing between Dubai and Singapore — you cannot run a labor system that treats people as controlled assets.

4mo ago
notboring.co
Weekly Dose of Optimism #184

If the technology you're building with is so much better, why in the world are you just selling it to someone else as a component? Why not just make a better end product?

4mo ago

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