"Age of Miracles"

The way that companies tell stories and build narratives is changing -- from top-down storytelling to bottoms-up narrative-building. Because they're such empty vessels for narrative, NFT projects like CryptoPunks and Degenerate Ape Academy make a useful study.

We’ll cover:

Read the full post at Not Boring.

You may not know Lithic. Until recently, it was called Privacy.com. 

In May, it announced an Amazonian move: delivering the card issuing & processing infrastructure it built for itself via an API.

Now, it's worth $800M and growing like a card rocket.

This is a fun one. We'll learn about Lithic's pivot using the framework that Ben Thompson laid out in The Amazon Tax. Build primitives, incur high fixed costs, expose primitives via API, get increasing returns to scale.

Read the full post at Not Boring here.

Equi is building one of the most impressive investment tech products I've ever seen. 

The solution: Equi behaves like an alternative Fund of Funds in your pocket, providing non-UHNW investors access to a portfolio that would normally take at least $90M to construct. 

We cover: 

You can read the full post at Not Boring.

Pinduoduo is the fastest company in history to reach both $5 billion in revenue and a $100 billion market cap. The Chinese ecommerce platform, famous for popularizing the team buying and consumer-to-manufacturer (C2M) model, was the talk of the town last summer, and it's had an even more fascinating intervening 12 months. I teamed up with Lillian Li of Chinese Characteristics to go deep, and give the bull and bear cases, including:

You can read the full piece at Not Boring.

Bet you've never seen something like Axie Infinity.  

April: $670k revenue  

May: $3M 

June: $12.2M 

July (18 days in): $79.1M  

Axie is a blockchain-based, Pokémon-like game pioneering a Play-to-Earn model. People work by playing video game.  It looks cute. It's so much more.

You can read the full post at Not Boring here.

This is the first episode of a new series we're doing: not boring founders. It's a behind-the-scenes look at the companies I'm backing with Not Boring Capital, from the mouths of the founders building them. We'll talk about their products, but we'll also dive deep into how the businesses work, how they think about company building, and the strategies they employ to win. 

For our first episode, I'm talking to Saad Alam, the founder and CEO of Hone Health. Hone treats men's hormone imbalances and low testosterone by providing access to at-home lab testing, physician consultations, and medication such as Testosterone from the comfort of your home to get your SPARK BACK & BE YOUR BEST. It's also a fast-growing business that needs to get a lot of really hard things right. 

Saad is a phenomenal CEO, and you'll learn a lot from him about building and optimizing your funnel, branding, and how to get men to actually engage.

NOTHING IN THIS PODCAST IS MEDICAL ADVICE

If you'd like to learn more, check out Hone.

Unit21 builds modern infrastructure for activity monitoring. It just raised a $34 million Series B from Tiger Global at a $300 million valuation to expand from its first use case -- AML / fraud -- to serve the wide variety of use cases in which operators and analysts write and deploy business logic. The company is bringing AI/ML to the people. We'll cover:

You can read the full post at Not Boring.

We're switching it up this week. I asked Not Boring readers for questions on Twitter, and I answered ten of them. 

Read the full post at Not Boring.

NexHealth is a $400 million startup with a three-part master plan to accelerate innovation in healthcare:

You can read the full post at Not Boring.

Scale is a 5-year-old company building infrastructure for AI & ML. Already, it's achieved a lot: $100+ million in ARR, $7.3 billion valuation, and customers like the DoD, Lyft, Airbnb, & OpenAI. Today, we cover: 

You can read the full post at Not Boring here.