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The Diff — 320 episodes · page 2 of 4
Exposed! Your Torrid Love Affair With Airline Fees
Building for Power Users
Antithesis: Debugging Debugging
AI-Based Disinformation Will Not Be An Especially Big Deal in the 2024 Election
Is "Social" an Enduring Category or Just a Phase?
Being Not-a-Tech-Company
Momentum, Intellectual Humility, and Missing Pieces of the Model
A Theory of Grift
Why Does Any Company Own its Corporate Headquarters?
How Many Trillion-Dollar Companies Should There Be?
How Should Higher Education Be Financed?
Graduating to Parallelized Strategies
In Investing, and in Life, The More Timeless the Discovery the More It's a One-Off Gain
Can Argentina Dollarize? Should They?
Risk: Too Much, Too Little, the Wrong Kind, or the Wrong Measure?
What Do Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake Really Prove?
LLMs and Communicating in More Dimensions
The Long, Long View of Interest Rates
The Economics of Startup Swag
A Bull Market in Facts; A Bear Market in Narratives
Predicting, and Knowing What to Predict
Paradoxes of Productivity Growth
"Capital Light" is a Trait of the Cycle as well as the Industry
Making A Match
Price-First or Thesis-First Research?
The Supply Chains of Bits and Atoms
Instacart is the Best and Worst Grocery Business Imaginable
Should We Expect Valuations to Mean-Revert Over Time?
Inside the Decline of Stack Exchange
Information as a Universal Complement and Universal Substitute
You Hate The Products You're An Early Adopter Of Because of Invisible Base Rates and Anthropic Bias
Don't Get Addicted to Fantasy Economics
It's Hard to Build a Durable Business Selling Durable Goods
Was it Worth it for Facebook to Become Meta?
AI Turns UGC into a PVP Zone
The Economics of Engineering Blogs
Reddit and Platform Politics
Where Does Stripe Go From Here?
Unavoidable Drawdowns
In Defense of Made-Up Metrics
Data, Prices, and Central Planning
Cava: One Brand, Many Channels
Why Do Equities Build So Much Wealth?
The Relationship-Transactional-Relationship Business Cycle
SVB in Retrospect
Why The Answer Is So Often Ads
Working with a Copilot
Dueling Over Platforms
Bet-the-Company Ideas
A Short 100-Question Diligence Checklist
The Banks: What's Next?
Financial Institutions and Franchise Value
Airlines: Unit Economics, Served Four Ways
Empiricism Disappears into the Black Box
Internal Software as a Competitive Advantage
History Begins Again for Big Tech
Companies and Entropy
Equity as an Option on Future Reinvestment
Where Fraud Lives and Why
In a Stable Career Track, Where Does the Risk Go?
Is AI More VBA or Steel?
Closing Industry Frontiers
How Companies Think About Layoffs
"A Solution in Search of a Problem" is a Low-Rates Phenomenon
The Uses of Friction
Why Finance is Hard to Decentralize
What Part of the System Needs to be Smart?
Money, Credit, Trust, and FTX
The Beloved Regional Grocery Store Chain Model
Kroger / Albertsons: Buying Data in Bulk
Is Mental Math Part of the Current Meta?
Snowflake Revisited
The Rise of Single-Result Search Products
Newsletter Economics in 2022
The Counterintuitive Economics of Hiring
The Porsche IPO and Mass Luxury
How Does Upwork Work?
The Other "MoviePass Economy"
A Taxonomy of Drawdowns
Turning Non-Tradables Into Tradables
Hand-Crafted Artisanal Liquidity Provision
The Economics of Noncompetes
Inventing Demand
Moderna's Bets: Moonshots and Platforms
Tegus and the Research Stack
Understanding Jane Street
Is Everything Getting Old?
Correlations go to One, in Good Ways and Bad
The Perks of the Recent Keynesian Tech Boom
The Network Before the Internet
NextEra Energy's Green Growth
Data's Limits and the Judgment Gap
Clean Trades and Dirty Hedges
Valuation Metrics: A Cross-Examination
AWS for Industry, But Better: The Railroad Investment Case
Snap: The Relentless Quest to Own the Interface
$1 Trillion Worth of Risky Loans Packaged Into Highly-Rated Securities is not the End of the World
Buy Now, Pain Later?
Cars Manufacture the Modern Middle Class
Refactoring Restaurants