1/ When it comes to AI's application layer (slightly more developed) & Vision Pro's application layer (slightly less developed), we're early.

At this point on mobile, we had the flashlight app, lighter app, & beer drinking app.

It took a while for the app ecosystem to develop: 2/ The iPhone came out in June 2007; Uber was founded in March 2009.

Here’s a chart of US smartphone ownership, overlaying the foundings of WhatsApp (2009), Uber (2009), Instagram (2010), and Snap (2011).

This first wave of mobile took years to take shape.

Taylor Swift's Eras tour is set to make her the highest-grossing female artist of all time.

I've been thinking a lot about Taylor Swift as a businesswoman.

Let me geek out for a minute about Swift and what we can learn from her: First, it's no secret I'm a massive Taylor Swift fan. Billy Joel said it best when he called her "The Beatles of her generation."

This is partly an excuse for me to write about my favorite artist. But you also don't have to be a fan to appreciate Swift as a savvy businesswoman:

A question I think about often is: is brand a moat?

My answer has always been yes, but the recent deterioration of digital advertising makes the answer even clearer.

Brand is a stronger moat than ever, and that's not a good thing: 1/ To step back, marketing, in its modern form, essentially didn’t exist before the Industrial Revolution.

There was such little product differentiation that it wasn’t necessary. Then manufacturing exploded, and production became cheaper & faster than ever before.

More celebrity brands are failing.

Adidas is set to lose $200M on Beyoncé’s Ivy Park this year. That's on top of a $1.3B loss from Yeezy.

What went wrong? In order to work, a celeb brand needs to get three things right: 1) Authentic to the celebrity / creator

Ivy Park sales fell 50% in 2022. Adidas projected $250M, but the brand only brought in $40M. Ouch

Beyoncé has an aspirational, aloof persona that's at odds with Ivy Park’s athleisure style. IMO she should have created a luxury brand.

1/ One interesting shift: the globalization of culture.

From 2017 to 2022, 47 of the 50 most-streamed songs in the world were in English. But that dominance is slipping.

In India, Indonesia, & Korea, the share of English-language tracks has fallen from 52% to 31%. 2/ In Spain and LatAm, the share of English-language songs has slipped from 25% to 14%.

It's the same story on TV: in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, only about half of the most-watched shows are North American. In Japan and South Korea, it’s only 35%.

The most powerful trend in tech right now: "The TikTokization of Everything"

How it's reshaping literally every industry: To back up, there have been two major forces powering tech for the past decade: mobile and cloud.

Mobile facilitated the rise of massive consumer internet companies: Uber & Lyft, Instagram & Snap, Robinhood and Coinbase. Each was founded between 2009 and 2013.

One of the most underrated turnaround stories: Crocs

In 2021—19 years into the company's life—revenue grew 67% (!) to $2.3 billion. Profit margins improved from 22% to 31%.

From what I've read about it, the Crocs turnaround seems to come down to 3 changes the company made: First, Crocs trimmed its product selection by 30-40%. This helped the company improve margins and focus marketing efforts on its iconic clogs.

Crocs also announced that it would close all 558 retail stores, shifting entirely to e-commerce.

1/ There are two fish swimming along & they meet an older fish, who smiles & says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?"

The two fish swim on for a bit, then one of them looks at the other & goes, "What the hell is water?"

There's "water" all around us that we should question: 2/ When you start looking, social constructs are everywhere:

• Working in an office
• The 5-day workweek
• School
• Gender norms
• Marriage

We take things as gospel, but they're *manmade* creations. Many should stay as they are, but many should be challenged.

10 ways Gen Z is changing the world 🧵 First, why does this matter? Because Gen Z is now the largest generation in the US, with 86M people.

When you account for this scale, small behavior changes compound into macro-sized cultural shifts.

(By the way, many of these behaviors also show up in Millennials & Gen Alphas)

1/ I just read Cash App's investor day presentation, and I'm convinced it's one of the most underrated businesses out there:

• 80M users
• $600M in Q1 gross profit
• Top finance app 5 years running

Cash App exploded by bringing culture to finance 👇 2/ Most financial services companies approach their businesses like a bank. Cash App approaches its business like a consumer social company.

Just look at its design—splashy, loud, fun. Who else would showcase their product suite like this? No one.

1/ Lego is a 90-year-old company that grew sales +30% last year.

With the rise of the internet (and games like Minecraft), you'd think a physical product like Lego would struggle. But the company has reinvented itself for the digital age: 2/ I started thinking about this last week when Lego & Epic Games announced a partnership. Lego even invested in Epic Games's new funding round.

The vision: "create a metaverse for kids."

Then I got curious how a nearly century-old company grew sales by a third last year.

I went to a Banksy exhibit yesterday and was struck by how his work embodies Gen Z's worldview. Anti-capitalism, anti-consumerism, anti-institution.

A few of the pieces I was most struck by: "Barcode"

1/ 'The D’Amelio Show' is less a Gen Z re-creation of 'Keeping Up With the Kardashians' and more a warning about the pressures of being a creator.

In the first episode, Dixie has an emotional breakdown. Charli admits (far too casually) to having 15 panic attacks a day. 2/ In Forbes' ranking last week of the highest-paid TikTok creators, Charli ranked 1st ($17.5M) and Dixie came in 2nd ($10M).

But the show shines a light on the darker side of social media fame: the sisters talk about thoughts of self-harm & therapists make regular appearances.

Costco's Kirkland Signature brand is one of the most fascinating innovations in business. They do the unthinkable: lower prices *and* higher quality

Here's how they do it: 1/ To take a step back, Costco launched Kirkland Signature in 1992 as its private-label brand (the name was a nod to Costco's then headquarters in Kirkland, Washington).

Customers LOVE Kirkland. One guy even got a Kirkland Signature tattoo 👀

I'm always fascinated by how companies come up with creative ways to grow. Few are better at it than Calm. Here are 5 of my favorite examples:

1) Million-Dollar Homepage
2) Do Nothing For 2 Minutes
3) Baa Baa Land
4) 2020 Election Night Coverage
5) Naomi Osaka's $15K Fine

👇👇 The Million-Dollar Homepage:

Calm co-founder Alex Tew created a website with 1M pixels. He sold each pixel for $1. People & brands bought space on the site.

At one point, it was in the top 200 most-visited websites in the world.

Alex earned $1M and used it to launch Calm.

In the future, instead of measuring a creator's clout based on her Instagram following, we'll point to her market cap.

Tokens allow us to measure both breadth *and* depth of a creator's community. Examples 👇 Say Kim Kardashian launches $KIM ("Kim token") with 10M $KIM in circulation, each trading at $100. That gives Kim a market cap of $1B.

Say her sister, Kylie Jenner, launches $KYLIE also with 10M. At first, $KYLIE also trades at $100. They start out with an equal $1B market cap.

This is Kat Norton, better known as Miss Excel. She has over a million followers on TikTok and Instagram, where she markets her Excel courses.

She has 0 employees and makes up to $100,000 a day. When we think of the future of work, it might look something like Miss Excel 👇 To back up, what is it that Miss Excel is doing exactly?

She makes TikToks sharing Excel tips. She'll use "Drop It Like It's Hot" to explain a dropdown menu, or Doja Cat's "Best Friends" to explain why Index + Match are bffs.

She's fun, energetic, and actually really helpful.

Emojis are the language of our digital age. Here's the relative popularity for the emojis in each category: 1) Objects 💡 (left = more popular)

Modding is one of the most important but underrated aspects of gaming. And as we hurl toward the metaverse, it's going to become more important than ever 👇 1/ First, a definition: "modding" stands for modification. Modding is when a player of a game changes some aspect of the game. A player could change something small, like tweaking their avatar, or a player could overhaul the game completely.

Consumer internet is a $2 trillion market growing to $2.5 trillion by 2025. As we transition to a digital species, technology seeps into more of our lives.

I read through @activateinc's 2022 Technology & Media Outlook, and below are some of the most interesting slides 👇 Americans spend over 13 hours a day using technology and consuming digital media.

Multi-tasking (e.g., scrolling social media while watching TV) leads to a 32-hour day.

Moments of crisis lead to innovation:

Chicago Fire of 1871 ➡️ invention of the skyscraper

World War II ➡️ radar, atomic bomb, penicillin

COVID ➡️ mRNA vaccine, telehealth, online learning

But COVID's most revolutionary contribution might be a rethinking of how we work 👇 @DKThomp makes this argument in a great @TheAtlantic piece this week.

He points out that "quits"—as the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls them—are at an all-time high. In August alone, 7% of hotel and food service employees quit—that's 1 in 14 workers, just in a single month.