Intel Problems

One of the first Articles on Stratechery, written on the occasion of Intel appointing a new CEO, was, in retrospect, overly optimistic. Just look at the title: The misplaced optimism it twofold: first there is the fact that eight years later Intel has again appointed a new CEO (Pat Gelsinger), not to replace the one I was writing about (Brian Krzanich),...

4d

Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History

Manage your Stratechery subscription. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is, particularly relative to its prescience, one of the most misunderstood books of all time. Aris Roussinos explained at UnHerd: Now that history has returned with the vengeance of the long-dismissed, few analyses of our present moment are complete without...

2w

Trump and Twitter

In December 2016, when then-President-elect Donald Trump summoned tech leaders to Trump Tower for a roundtable discussion, there was considerable debate about whether or not executives like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella should accept the invitation.1 I argued that they absolutely should in...

3w

New Defaults

Manage your Stratechery subscription. One of the most well-known papers in behavioral economics is The Power of Suggestion: Inertia in 401(k) Participation and Savings Behavior by Brigitte C. Madrian and Dennis F. Shea. From the introduction: In this paper we analyze the 401(k) savings behavior of employees in a large U. S. corporation before...

3w

The 2020 Stratechery Year in Review

Manage your Stratechery subscription. From the beginning of Stratechery I have posited that writing about tech is a way to write about everything, given the way in which the Internet is affecting every part of society. The pandemic of 2020 has put this thesis on steroids: the lasting impact of COVID will be not entirely new ways of living, but rather...

Dec 2020

Social Networking 2.0

Manage your Stratechery subscription. It’s a rather motley crew. One is a nurse, another a lawyer, a third an investment adviser. There are three programmers, a soldier, and a data scientist. An entrepreneur, a consultant, and, I just found out today, a nuclear engineer. The ring leaders are a hotel clerk and a person we have known for years, yet no...

Dec 2020

In Defense of Digital Advertising

Manage your Stratechery subscription. In 1990, Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which required nutrition labels for nearly all packaged food products; the label includes a standard serving measurement, calories per serving, and the “% Daily Value” for nutrients like fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates, protein, and a number...

Dec 2020

Stripe: Platform of Platforms

Today Stripe is announcing Stripe Treasury; from the company’s press release: Stripe, the technology company building economic infrastructure for the Internet, today announced that it is launching Stripe Treasury. This gives Stripe’s platform users powerful APIs to embed financial services, enabling their customers to easily send, receive and store...

Dec 2020

Five Lessons From Dave Chappelle

Manage your Stratechery subscription. While there are not huge differences between Stratechery Weekly Articles and subscriber-only Daily Updates, I do spend more time on the Weekly Articles trying to craft an overarching narrative; Weekly Articles, by virtue of being free, are better suited to sharing, and humans like stories, not just analysis. However,...

Nov 2020

The Idea Adoption Curve

Manage your Stratechery subscription. Matthew Yglesias, in his new book One Billion Americans, admits: The One Billion Americans agenda — tripling the American population — is a radical suggestion that lies well outside the boundaries of conventional political arguments. Ezra Klein, in his new book Why We’re Polarized, promises: What I...

Nov 2020