Category
Product
- ·3 min read
40 Million Daily Users vs 5,000: What a North Star Is Actually For
In 2024, Duolingo filed a 40.5-million daily-active-user number with the SEC, up 51% in a year, with more than ten million people holding streaks over a year long. The same year, Rabbit sold roughly 100,000 R1 devices and its founder admitted about 5,000 people used one daily. Both companies had a big number to point at. Only one of the numbers measured value received — and the distance between those two kinds of number is the entire argument for choosing a North Star carefully.
- ·3 min read
Healthcare.gov: The Rescue That Invented a Playbook
On October 1, 2013, Healthcare.gov launched after roughly three years of work across more than fifty contractors — and collapsed on contact with its users. Reportedly six people enrolled on day one. Two months later it worked for the vast majority of visitors, and the fix wasn't a relaunch or a new contractor. It was a small team adding the things the project never had: monitoring, twice-daily contact with reality, one prioritized list, and small releases shipped continuously. The interesting question isn't why it failed. It's why the rescue worked — and how a two-month emergency became codified government practice.
- ·3 min read
Innovation Accounting: Funding What Doesn't Fit a P&L
You can build the separate unit, the lab, the intrapreneur program — and watch all of it die in a single budget meeting, because someone asked a two-quarter-old venture for its ROI. The immune system that kills good ideas doesn't always look like a hostile VP. Sometimes it looks like a spreadsheet, applied honestly, by people doing their jobs. Here's the financial machinery that funds new bets without lying about them.
- ·3 min read
Figma vs Adobe XD: What Losing a Category Costs
Adobe launched XD in 2016 as a fast-follow with the best distribution in design software, and still lost the category so completely that its endgame was agreeing to pay $20 billion for Figma — a deal that died under EU and UK regulators in December 2023, costing Adobe a $1 billion breakup fee and XD its life. Then Figma IPO'd in July 2025, priced at $33 and closed at $115.50. The receipts for losing a category rarely come this itemized.
- ·3 min read
We Don't Sell Saddles: Positioning With a Moat, and Without One
In 2013, Slack refused to sell 'group chat' — a category littered with corpses — and positioned against email instead; 8,000 invite requests arrived in the first 24 hours of the preview, and the company eventually sold for $27.7 billion. Nine years later, Jasper raised $125 million at $1.5 billion as an 'AI writing assistant' — five weeks before ChatGPT gave the core of that position away for free. Same discipline, opposite outcomes, one lesson: positioning is a choice about what your differentiation is anchored to, and anchoring it to something you don't control is borrowing.
- ·3 min read
Intrapreneurship: Kickbox, 15% Time, and the Myth of the Corporate Rebel
The Post-it note took twelve years, Google's 20% time quietly died of manager incentives, and the heroic corporate rebel is mostly survivorship bias — we only hear from the ones who weren't fired. What actually produces innovation from within isn't rebellious personalities. It's systems that make permission cheap and evidence mandatory: slack-time policies, a $1,000 card in a red box, and a real venture path instead of a suggestion box.
- ·3 min read
Three Horizons and the Ambidextrous Organization: Where New Bets Should Live
The two most-cited frameworks for structuring innovation inside a big company are both routinely used wrong. Three Horizons was a portfolio-attention tool that got corrupted into a delivery timeline — and Steve Blank has argued the timeline reading is now actively dangerous. Ambidexterity has a 35-project evidence base almost nobody reads past the diagram. Here's what each actually says, where each breaks, and how to decide where a given bet should live.
- ·3 min read
Nokia and Kodak: Two Ways a Strategy Fails to Cascade
On July 8, 2015, Microsoft wrote off $7.6 billion on a Nokia acquisition it had paid roughly $7.2–7.9 billion for — the write-off was bigger than the purchase price — and cut 7,800 jobs. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975, invested billions in the technology, was roughly the #1 US digital camera seller around 2005, and still went bankrupt in January 2012. Two completely different diseases, one autopsy line: the strategy never cascaded into anything that could ship and make money.
- ·3 min read
Why Good Companies Kill Good Ideas
Kodak built the first digital camera in 1975. Blockbuster's management proposed the Netflix-killing strategy in 2004. Neither company was blind, and that's the uncomfortable part: the ideas died because good managers, doing exactly what good management prescribes, rationally killed them. Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma is a structural diagnosis, not a culture complaint — which means the fixes have to be structural too.
- ·3 min read
Blockbuster Didn't Laugh: The Netflix Story the Record Actually Supports
In 2000, a cash-burning Netflix offered itself to Blockbuster for $50 million, and Blockbuster passed. That much of the legend is real. What the legend leaves out is that Blockbuster later built Total Access, a counterattack that by Antioco's account was beating Netflix — until a board fight, franchisee economics, and a billion dollars of debt killed the commitment behind it. The real lesson isn't about arrogance. It's about what happens to a coherent strategy when the organization stops paying for it.