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The best single question to ask about a business is: if the owner wanted to leave for a year, could it run without them? Most businesses are just elaborate jobs in disguise.

— Felix Dennis, How to Get Rich (2006)
7h ago
lennysnewsletter.com
Lenny’s Newsletter holiday gift guide 2026

The founder left tech to study chocolate-making traditions in France, started making his own chocolate in his garage 16 years ago, and became one of the best-known small-batch chocolate makers in the U.S. Unlike most chocolate, it's made from just two ingredients: cocoa beans and organic cane sugar.

1d ago

The difference between a good business and a great one is that a great business throws up one easy decision after another. A good business makes you think hard every day about whether the economics still make sense.

1d ago
readtheprofile.com
Who Is Michael O’Leary?

"The other airlines are asking how they can put up fares. We are asking how we could get rid of them," he said in a 2001 interview.

2d ago
noahpinion.blog
Anthropic’s moat is Claude

But in a world of perfect competition, companies should keep trying to undersell each other until their profit goes to zero — or at least, until it goes to a level where companies are just able to pay for their investments. Even if one company has a huge share of the market, the simple threat that new companies might be able to enter the market and compete with them should force them to keep their prices low in order to maintain their market share.

2d ago

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. But in business, the most dangerous habits are the ones that once made you successful — they calcify into dogma precisely because they worked.

4d ago
readtheprofile.com
Who Is Lip-Bu Tan?

He joined Intel's board in 2022, quit in 2024 after disagreeing with the board and then-CEO Pat Gelsinger over strategy, and came back as CEO in March 2025. Since then he has cut staff, cancelled factory projects in Europe, brought in the U.S. government and Nvidia as major shareholders, and bet Intel's future on its newest manufacturing process.

5d ago
upstartsmedia.com
The Accidental YC Founder Solving AI’s GPU Crisis

"A year or two ago, it was a $100 million initial valuation. Now, it's like a $1 billion initial valuation. It's gonna be $5 billion, and it's gonna be $15 billion, and it's gonna be $30 billion. At some point, it's gonna become unreasonable that you cannot actually do that."

6d ago
stratechery.com
An Interview with Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar About the AI Religious War

The problem is that innovation is a consequence of productivity, if you stop making the thing, you cede the stimulus required to do the innovation around the thing. The example I always give young computer scientists is, what do you think motivated Google to do the research behind "Attention Is All You Need"? If you talk to that team, they wanted the 3% improvement in Google Translate. You cannot think of something more prosaic leading to something more profound.

6d ago

You don't get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.

1w ago
readtheprofile.com
Meet Neil ‘Buddy’ Shah, the Most Powerful Man at Anthropic You've Never Heard Of

Most founders spend their careers fighting to retain control of their companies by creating dual-class shares, negotiating board seats, and structuring voting rights in a way that make sure no one can tell them what to do. Anthropic's founders, on the other hand, have given a group of outsiders the power to help decide who gets to oversee them.

1w ago
stratechery.com
2026.43: A New Era

One of my hangups in terms of advertising is that I take my ethics super seriously, and ultimately, if a company is helping pay the bills, it's hard to be truly objective about them. What I realized, however, is that it's hard for me to be objective about Stripe anyway. I wanted to be a professional blogger long before I started Stratechery; however, I thought I had missed my chance, particularly as it became clear that advertising was not a long term business model for a one-person site.

1w ago

Capitalism is a system for generating testable hypotheses about value. Most hypotheses fail. The error isn't in failing — it's in refusing to run the experiment cheaply enough that failure remains survivable.

1w ago
readtheprofile.com
Who Is Jeff Bezos?

Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.

1w ago
ai-supremacy.com
SpaceX merge with Tesla is on the Horizon

A combined entity is an incredible concentration risk, where Tesla continues to build inside of China. If SpaceX and Tesla combined it would be in the area of a corporation with a market cap of around $3.5 Trillion dollars. To put things in perspective that's about equal to the GDP of France.

1w ago

The best time to buy a house is always five years ago. The best time to start a company is always five years ago. The best time to invest is always five years ago. Waiting for certainty is just a sophisticated way of opting out.

1w ago
dwarkesh.com
What will computer chips look like in 2045?

What we've learned is that you don't want to do too much innovation in one node, because the more innovation that you do, the more complex it becomes. While you'll be able to get that to work, you need to hit a certain schedule, and that's the schedule that your customer ultimately wants.

1w ago
stratechery.com
Presented by Stripe

if I am honest with myself I have never been truly objective about Stripe specifically, for three reasons. First, Stripe is a foundational business for my business. The then-startup launched the Subscription API (what later became Stripe Billing) in late 2011; Stratechery was predicated on that feature existing.

1w ago
ai-supremacy.com
The Great AI Financing Push-Back

Anthropic brought in just $16.3 billion in revenue for the first half of 2026 (surpassing its full-year 2025 revenue of $4.6 billion). However, the company reported a massive net loss of $80.7 billion for the first half of 2026.

2w ago
lennysnewsletter.com
🎙️ How I AI: Meta Muse Wonder + How Brooke Lacey is scaling video with AI

Creators need to understand the craft before they can delegate it. Brooke could teach Claude to edit in her style because she already knew what a good cut sounded like, where a zoom should land, and why the timing mattered. AI amplifies that judgment, but it does not replace the experience required to develop it.

2w ago
upstartsmedia.com
Tolan Raises $30M For The AI Companion It Wants You To Trust

"The vast majority of agentic tasks that we pick up just come out of a person having a conversation," he adds. "Then it's on us to say, 'Okay, cool, we're hearing from you this is happening. Here's a little bit of it that we can pick up and run for you.' That's where we make magic for people."

2w ago
stratechery.com
Do You Trust Apple?

The fact of the matter is that with AI you can decompile almost all existing software — there is a revolution happening in gaming over the past few weeks, as game after game is decompiled to source and ported to any platform you wish — and you can write your own. That means my software that interacts with my agent in the way I want it to for everything; that's way more exciting than praying Apple delivers the right API and that 3rd-party developers don't suck.

2w ago
upstartsmedia.com
Data: How AI Assistants Are Spending Real Money

With 300 million users overall across bigger businesses like Airbnb, Anthropologie and Uber, agents remain a relatively small piece of Link's overall reach. But the trend line of increasing agentic usage is clear, says Hill. "The volume we're seeing now is becoming very material."

2w ago
upstartsmedia.com
His Climate Startup ‘Crash Landed.’ Now He’s Reinventing Doctor Visits With Daniel Ek.

"When you're on the up with a company, everyone is your best friend. Every angel investor and their uncle is like, 'Dude, I always knew that you were the most talented person ever. We're gonna support you, you know, 'til the end of time.' And then when things don't go well, it's like, block, block, block, block, block. Like, literally no one wants to return your call."

2w ago
lennysnewsletter.com
How to tell if a startup has a moat

Speed, distribution, brand, a great founding team, and lots of funding—these are all fuel. They get the car moving in the right direction. The four compounding advantages are what it looks like when the car starts rolling downhill on its own.

3w ago
fs.blog
Ryan Serhant: How to Get People to Say Yes

Ryan explains his time management framework of treating each day as a bank of 1,000 minutes changed the way he works, and why success can still feel insufficient after you achieve all of your dreams.

3w ago
upstartsmedia.com
Exclusive: Fin Ships A New AI Agent In First Release Since $3.6B Salesforce Buy

The company's bet: customers will increasingly use one, or just a couple, of more powerful agents to handle cross-functional tasks, instead of replacing current human job functions on a one to one basis. "It would be sad if we end up reinventing the world with a dozen different, disparate tools," Traynor says.

4w ago

Most people can't distinguish between 'this is hard' and 'this is impossible.' That confusion kills more good ideas than competition ever will. The question is never whether something is hard—it's whether the difficulty is structural or merely unfamiliar.

4w ago
stratechery.com
2026.40: Dots and Question Marks

something like Muse could aggregate Aggregators, which is to say it could be the most valuable product in the world.

4w ago
lennysnewsletter.com
All of the Lenny & Friends Summit talks are now online!

It's never been easier to build something nobody wants. As building gets easier, choosing the right thing to build, knowing what good looks like, and caring enough to fix it are becoming increasingly important for successful product teams.

1mo ago

The best CEOs I know are teachers, and at the core of what they teach is strategy. Most companies deteriorate because they compromise on one or two key strategic choices under competitive pressure. A business that stands for something specific — and refuses to stand for everything — is a business that can actually win.

1mo ago
notboring.co
Airbound: As We May Move

"If an aircraft can be more versatile than the car, faster than the train, and cheaper than the bus, then you can replace all of them. That is the universal vehicle we intend to create."

1mo ago
ai-supremacy.com
AI Evolution: Merchants of Compute

Crusoe is now the most backed private neocloud in terms of equity, enabling it to get significant debt for expansion. They are a vertically integrated company independent from grid readiness that has overcome early reliance in customer concentration with OpenAI, now serving Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and Jane Street.

1mo ago
notboring.co
Would We Send Our Kids to HAA?

The challenge with that, though, is that who knows what a good job will be in fifteen years? Our parents didn't send us to McGill and Duke to become bloggers. But one of the things you learn raising kids is that it's a lot easier to move with them than against them. If they can find something they love, your effort will go to getting them to stop doing it instead of getting them to start.

1mo ago
ai-supremacy.com
The most Viral new AI model isn’t an LLM at all

What TypeSafe AI is doing differently is building a model specifically around these kinds of typed, probabilistic decisions, rather than taking a general-purpose LLM and prompting it to behave like a classifier. Typesafe AI claims that at $42 per billion input tokens and free output, intelligence becomes a resource accessible to all.

1mo ago

The best businessmen I've ever known were all great simplifiers. They had an uncanny ability to cut through the noise and find the one or two variables that really mattered — and then they just ignored everything else. Most people drown in complexity they created themselves.

1mo ago

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