"Age of Miracles"

Tencent's investments in Epic, Snap, Spotify, and more put it in the best position to bring about, and profit from, the Metaverse.

Read the original essay here.

Tencent is the most impressive company that Americans know the least about. In Part I of this two-part series, we go deep on Tencent's history, its core businesses, and its investment portfolio. We also explore how the company is the perfect implementation of William Thorndike's The Outsiders.

Link to original post here.

Shopify and a new wave of ecommerce infrastructure tools make it easier than ever to start a direct-to-consumer business, but it's harder than ever to stand out from the crowd. Michael Porter's Five Forces and his value chain concept explain why it's a great time to be an ecommerce platform, and a hard time to generate sustained profits as a DTC business. 

You can read the full post here.

Ali Montag joins Not Boring to tell us about a Linear Commerce empire you wouldn't have any idea about, unless you have kids. 

You can read the full post here and subscribe to Ali's newsletter here.  

Google should buy Slack to take on Microsoft with a modern solution in the productivity and collaboration space. 

You can read the full post here.

The Marcy Lab School's Reuben Ogbanna takes over Not Boring to explain how we can explain the tech talent pipeline beyond traditional schools and backgrounds.

You can read the full post here, and get in touch with me on twitter @packym to get intro'd to Reuben.

In this episode, we discuss what a SPAC is and why Juul is kinda the perfect company to go public via SPAC. 

You can check out the full post here.

Not Boring Investment Memos are deep dives on early stage companies that are currently fundraising, and that the Not Boring Syndicate is investing in. 

In this episode, we talk about Composer, which is aiming to close the wealth gap by giving investors access to more sophisticated tools for self-directed investing, with a clean, easy UI. Think of it like the best parts of Robinhood and Wealthfront, with a lot more muscle under the hood. 

You can read the full memo here.

Entropy Theory explains industry evolution as a story of ever-increasing chaos and suggests that the most successful businesses are those that use the latest technology to wrangle that chaos, until entropic forces unleash the next set of opportunities.

In this episode, we explain Entropy Theory through examples in real estate, tech, and employment. Why did TikTok succeed where Quibi failed? Why did Spotify take off while Napster got sued into oblivion? Entropy Theory is an attempt to explain. 

You can check out the full post here.

Gil Kazimirov joins us to share the surprising  history of the ringtone - the polyphonic pocket music that launched the mobile revolution.

You can read the full post here.