HERE'S WHAT WE COVERED IN THIS EPISODE:

1. Dyson skipped the market sizing slide and shipped anyway.

Dyson's Camera Jet costs $499. A camera in the brush head takes 28 pictures a second, finds the gaps between your teeth, and jets mouthwash in to floss while you brush. That is about $100 more than the best Oral-B. Only 30% of American adults floss every day. A third never do. Dyson told the Wall Street Journal he had no idea of the market size. He is 79 and owns all of an $8.3 billion company. Eddie says it sells anyway, because oral care superconsumers, the heavy buyers who own the floss, the water pick, and three brushes, buy on a point of view called whole mouth health. They are not spending $499 on teeth. They are spending it on their heart. It sold out in days.

2. Wall Street watched the launch. The numbers were somewhere else.

Two seats, no steering wheel, no pedals, no live stream. The stock fell 5.9% that Friday. Regulators opened an audit into how Tesla self-certified the car. About 1,000 Cybercabs are built and only 45 are registered in Texas. Underneath, driverless miles went from 380,000 in July to over a million. Austin went from 54 driverless Teslas in June to 128. Eddie walks the magic triangle, the three pieces that make a category real: product, company, and ecosystem. Toyota builds a car every 30 to 60 seconds. The Cybercab line takes 10, aiming for 5. Then tens of thousands of people applied to buy and run their own fleets. That is capital raising design. Elon got the public to fund the scale he would have had to raise.

3. A group chat did what an agent could not.

The average starting kicker or punter in a Power 4 conference makes $225,000 this season. Specialist pay jumped 61%, the second biggest raise of any position in football. The top kicker makes $600,000. These guys have known each other since they were 15, from the same camps. They put their salaries in a group chat. One kicker was offered $40,000, told the school he knew what a rival made and that his stats were better, and signed for $225,000. No agent. Christopher calls this knowing the value of your value, which is what we teach in the Academy: name what you do, claim what it is worth, and hold there. A bunch of teenagers built the most transparent pay market in the sport by texting.

Want the whole thing? Founding members get every mini-book we've ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners. $375 a year, about a dollar a day. Monthly is $20. You've done dumber things with $20.

Subscribe today!

Recorded Friday, September 11th. Every number above is as of that morning.

Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

Stay tuned for next week's episode.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

HERE'S WHAT WE COVERED IN THIS EPISODE:

1. Apple was seven years late and still takes 44% of the money.

Apple put the iPhone Duo on stage at $1,999. The other prices went up $100 and the base iPhone disappeared, so the cheapest new iPhone this fall is $1,199. Samsung has sold foldables since 2019 and shipments fell 15% this year. IDC still gives Apple 44% of foldable revenue in 2026, for a phone that ships October 23rd. How do you sell a $10,000 watch? Put it next to a $100,000 one. Superconsumers, the small group that drives most of the spending, will pay for a big jump in price when they get a different outcome. They hate 3% creep for the same old thing. The press covered the $100. The $1,999 phone is what made the $100 feel small.

2. Wall Street priced the end of corporate software. The software companies beat their numbers.

Salesforce stock fell about 30% this year on one idea: if AI writes the software, why pay for software? Then Salesforce beat and raised. ServiceNow beat. Workday and Snowflake came in strong. Salesforce jumped 22% in a single day on a deal to put Claude inside it, and it still trades at 16 times earnings against a 10 year average of 43. What enterprises actually buy is intellectual capital, the 30 or 40 years of knowing how this work really gets done, wrapped around the data as context. Eddie calls it the triple D: data, decision, damage control. AI can have the data. Nobody wants four people and a pile of agents when something breaks.

3. Nike took the word category off its own org chart.

Nike was worth more than $260 billion in November 2021. It is about $57 billion now, a 78% drop, and this month it leaves the S&P 100 after almost 18 years. Running, basketball, and soccer became men, women, and kids. Hundreds of retail partners got cut and brand advertising moved to digital ads aimed at people who already buy Nike. Hot dogs and sausages look like one category. Shoppers pay up for better beef in a hot dog and refuse to in a sausage. Get that wrong and the P&L blows up. The category makes the company. Nike brought the categories back at the end of 2023. This year direct sales fell 6% and wholesale grew 6%. The comeback is the thing they cut.

Want the whole thing? Founding members get every mini-book we've ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners. $375 a year, about a dollar a day. Monthly is $20. You've done dumber things with $20.

Subscribe today!

Recorded Friday, September 11. Every number above is as of that morning.

Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

Stay tuned for next week's episode.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

HERE'S WHAT WE COVERED IN THIS EPISODE:

1. The car with eight cameras just claimed privacy.

Tesla published its privacy principles inside a 216 page report. Three promises: give you choices about your data, stay transparent, protect everything. The product making those promises has eight exterior cameras, a cabin camera, microphones, GPS, and a cell connection phoning home on every car built since 2012. Eddie runs it through the magic triangle, the idea that a category gets designed across product, company, and category at once. Everyone waited on the product news. The news was the profit model. Free services sell you. Tesla charges a premium for the car, so it has no reason to sell you. Trust takes an eon to build and a second to lose. The press spent a week waiting on a flying roadster.

2. Tesla invented the scoreboard, then crowned itself on it.

37 million metric tons of CO2 avoided last year across cars, solar, Powerwall, and Megapack. That is 90 billion miles of gas driving that never happened. Eddie puts it in human scale: about 8 million gas cars gone, roughly every registered vehicle in Georgia. Offsetting it with trees would take 2 to 3 billion of them, a full Maryland of forest. Avoided emissions is a metric Tesla made up, which is the point. New categories need new metrics, because the old ones were built to score the old category. Christopher sees an empty lane: the environmental movement ran to both extremes and nobody owns the sensible middle. Most climate nonprofits never publish a number this clean.

3. Volvo owned safety in gas cars. Nobody owns it in EVs.

A normal airbag fires 50 milliseconds after impact. Tesla's fires up to 70 milliseconds before it. That swing is 0.12 seconds, and Eddie's math puts it at roughly 25 percent less force on the body. The US has 6.2 million crashes a year and 36,000 deaths. Speeding drives about 11,000 of them. Cut those by 25 percent and 2,700 people live. The Department of Transportation values a life at $11.5 million, so call it $31 billion. Christopher's frame: when the category changes, the brand hierarchy changes, so owning safety in gas cars does not carry into EVs. The one thing blocking self-driving is people not trusting the robot. Tesla is buying that trust six feet at a time.

Want the whole thing? Founding members get every mini-book we've ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners. $375 a year, about a dollar a day. Monthly is $20. You've done dumber things with $20.

Subscribe today! 

Recorded Wednesday, July 8th. Every number above is as of that morning.

Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

Stay tuned for next week's episode.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

HERE'S WHAT WE COVERED IN THIS EPISODE:

1. She owned the asset in 1967, before she had a single hit.

Elvis wanted half the songwriting on a song he did not write. Dolly said no, and everyone told her she was out of her mind. Seven years earlier, in 1967, before a single top ten hit, she had started her own publishing company with her uncle and owned the copyright on everything she wrote after that. Paul McCartney signed a deal he regretted for decades. His line: John and I didn't know you could own songs. Whitney Houston's 1992 cover sold 11 million copies and paid Dolly roughly $10 million in that decade alone. This is the creator capitalist, the person paid for the value they create instead of for their time. She wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love You in one evening.

2. A $399 duck is the cheapest way into physical AI on earth.

Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics shipped a $399 robot duck. Out of the box it walks, rollerskates, and picks things up with its beak. It sold 10,000 units and $4 million in week one, and orders are pushed past Christmas. The simulator, the training stack and the control stack are all open on GitHub. Days later Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $13 billion. New categories move in three stages: novelty, niche, then necessity. Roomba started as a novelty at Sharper Image, found a niche in the military, and became a necessity through daily cleaning. A superconsumer is the person who buys most and cares most, and the superconsumer of a novelty is never the superconsumer of a niche.

3. A $4 cut moved 40 percent more units. The price was wrong all along.

The Supreme Court ruled the reciprocal tariffs exceeded the administration's authority, so $128.7 billion is going back and about $100 billion was out the door by early August. Walmart got $2.9 billion and cut prices on 11,000 items including ground beef. e.l.f. Beauty got about $50 million, dropped one product by $4, and watched unit sales jump nearly 40 percent. It rolled the cuts across the portfolio and net sales rose 36 percent that quarter. The smart move is to discount the trip driver, the thing that gets you in the store, and leave the impulse item priced high enough to make you think twice. Ask Costco about the $1.50 hot dog. Capitalism rewards the flow of money, not the capture of it.

Want the whole thing? Founding members get every mini-book we've ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners. $375 a year, about a dollar a day. Monthly is $20. You've done dumber things with $20.

Subscribe today!

Recorded Friday, September 4th. Every number above is as of that morning.

Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

Stay tuned for next week's episode.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

HERE'S WHAT WE COVERED IN THIS EPISODE:

1. $12.7 billion over ten years is about one percent of a year's revenue.

Meta settled with 48 states and four US jurisdictions. The headline is $18 billion. The guaranteed number is $12.7 billion paid over ten years, against revenue of roughly $200 billion a year. That is about one percent. The attorneys general had asked for $200 billion. The product changes are real: a two hour daily default for under 18s, apps off from midnight to 6 a.m., notifications off during school hours, and only a parent can change any of it. Meta admitted no wrongdoing. Florida and New Mexico refused to sign. Meta's category was never social media. It started as FaceMash and it monetizes comparison. The next thing they want to sell you is an AI that knows everything about you.

2. One company out-earned twelve of America's biggest brands put together.

Nvidia did $96.2 billion in revenue in one quarter, up 106 percent, and $59.7 billion of net income in three months. Twelve of America's biggest companies, Apple and Walmart and Disney and nine more, made $57.9 billion combined over the same period. The stock finally rose after four straight quarters of beating and falling anyway. Revenue per gigawatt has gone from $18 billion with Hopper to $25 billion with Blackwell to $40 billion with Vera Rubin. Nvidia owns one layer of the six layer cake, the stack every AI business gets built on, and one layer never holds. That is why they are buying into open weight models. Half of America says it hates data centers. None of that hate shows up in these numbers.

3. The best AI return this month was $4 million on a potato chip line.

Kellanova spent four years building a live digital twin of Pringle dough. Sensors read 200 data points every millisecond. More than 200 parameters go into one chip, and every batch of potatoes is different. The investment was $4 to $5 million on a single line in Poland. It returned better than 40 percent, cut waste 13 percent, and lifted quality 10 percent. Belgium is next, the US in 2027. Those three plants run 705 million pounds of Pringles a year. In a legacy category, consistency is the product, which is why Budweiser tastes the same in Tokyo as in St. Louis. AI is very good at one instruction: do not deviate from the spec. There is no generative AI anywhere in this.

Want the whole thing? Founding members get every mini-book we've ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners. $375 a year, about a dollar a day. Monthly is $20. You've done dumber things with $20.

Subscribe today!

Recorded Friday, August 28th. Every number above is as of that morning.

Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

Stay tuned for next week's episode.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

HERE'S WHAT WE COVERED IN THIS EPISODE:

1. The Lakers just sold to people who do not have the money.

The Lakers sold for $12.5 billion, the most anyone has paid for a sports team. Mark Walter bought them a year ago at a $10 billion valuation, and he said yes in under 72 hours to a call he did not expect. He needed cash. The NBA caps debt at $475 million a team and limits any single fund to 20 to 30 percent, so buyers cannot lever these deals the normal way. Only about three owners could repurchase their own teams today. Buyers also write off the price over 15 years, roughly $830 million a year in paper losses. A super, the fan who cares most and spends the most, makes a good owner. A fund does not. Cash flow beats championships every time.

2. Nobody ever called a spreadsheet synthetic math.

A literary agent pulled a multi-million dollar debut novel in July because it could not verify the client wrote it. A Stony Brook researcher found 20 percent of Amazon ebooks showed substantial AI help. The Authors Guild's answer is a human-authored certification that runs on the honor system. One agent says a badly written submission now feels like a breath of fresh air. Vibe creating, where a person brings the idea and builds it out with AI, is not fraud. Nobody called a Pixar film a synthetic cartoon either, and people still cried at Toy Story 3. Publishers have kept the price of a book flat for 30 years and grown nothing. Readers buy what they like.

3. The gag clause was the problem, not the gigawatts.

A company offered one Maysville family $26.8 million for 463 acres, about ten times market. The family has farmed it since 1848. They said yes, then learned it was a 2.2 gigawatt data center, and said no. The rest of the town signed $110 million in agreements. The county's development director is under an NDA that stops him naming the buyer, and public records point to Meta. Kentucky law made opponents sue their own neighbors. A commissioner race turned on 163 votes. Lead with relationship capital, meaning trust built before money changes hands, and financial capital follows. Meta already trains electricians for free with a guaranteed job at the end. Walking in openly with that offer costs nothing and would have changed everything.

Want the whole thing? Founding members get every mini-book we've ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners. $375 a year, about a dollar a day. Monthly is $20. You've done dumber things with $20.

Subscribe today!

Recorded Friday, August 21st. Every number above is as of that morning.

Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

Stay tuned for next week's episode.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

HERE'S WHAT WE COVERED IN THIS EPISODE:

1. Burger King fixed the product and the company. It is still not different.

Burger King posted 8.5 percent same store sales growth in the US. Wendy's fell 7 percent. They rebuilt the Whopper with a premium bun and a box instead of a wrapper, hired the chef behind the Popeye's chicken sandwich, and the US boss put his phone number in social videos and took 3,300 calls. Franchise profit still dropped to about $185,000 a store from $205,000. McDonald's is five times bigger, so 8.5 percent off a smaller base is not the win it reads as. The magic triangle is product, company, and category. Burger King fixed two of the three. Nobody says let's go get a burger. They say are you up for In-N-Out. That is the whole difference.

2. Complaints are not a reputation problem. They are free category research.

Reddit is now the most cited website in AI answers. Its ad business did $762 million last quarter, up 64 percent. One agency sells brands 35 to 100 mentions a month starting at $2,500. A reputation package that removes or replaces negative content starts at $4,500. The software as a service subreddit banned promotional posts outright in June. There are four capitals: financial, reputation, relationship, and intellectual. Brands guard reputation capital and miss the other two. The complaint is almost never about your brand. It is about the category, and that is where new categories come from. Netflix came from late fees. Keurig came from bad office coffee. Indifference is the opposite of love, so the angriest person in the thread is the one worth answering.

3. A mascot is only worth buying if you can wait three years.

Crocs hatched Niles, a six foot crocodile, its first real mascot. Liberty Mutual went through Jim Henson's creature shop, six characters, and more than 160 ad concepts to land on a yellow fuzzball. Pillsbury put the Doughboy back at the center last fall and units rose 3.3 percent, cookies up 12.6 percent. System1 says a mascot needs more than three years of consistent use before it pays. Duolingo's owl went from 35,000 followers to 16.7 million over five years. Nobody in this story is buying the three years. A mascot works when it ties to the category, meaning the thing your customer is actually trying to get done. Aflac's duck tells you nothing about insurance. Commodity categories attract the most mascots for a reason.

Want the whole thing? Founding members get every mini-book we've ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners. $375 a year, about a dollar a day. Monthly is $20. You've done dumber things with $20.

Subscribe today!

Recorded Friday, August 21st. Every number above is as of that morning.

Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

Stay tuned for next week's episode.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

HERE'S WHAT WE COVERED IN THIS EPISODE:

1. The question is not how good your model is. It is whether we trust you.

Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word essay on Monday. Meta is releasing open weight models again, defending distillation, and starting a $1 billion fund for the towns around its data centers. He says the board should set model safety rules, not him. Meanwhile Meta is spending up to $145 billion on capital this year and $600 billion by 2028. As a category manifesto, a document that frames a problem and paints a new future, it works. The trouble is the give to get. You do not pay for Facebook, so you are the product, and the money comes from targeting you. He also holds super voting shares and can replace that board whenever he likes. Trust is the real bottleneck in AI, and Meta's record on it is thin.

2. Scarlet lettering AI is like shaming people for using spell check.

Pangram Labs checked nearly 57,000 LinkedIn items and found 41 percent of long posts and 30 percent of comments were entirely AI generated. On X it is 29 percent. On Reddit, 13. LinkedIn says it pulls 200,000 AI spam comments a day. It disputes the outside numbers and will not share its own. Detectors have scored writers who used zero AI at 60 percent. The Category Pirates version of writing is four parts: problem, point of view, plan, and polish. Use AI on plan and polish and you are smart. Outsource the problem and the point of view and you get slop. Nobody called the spreadsheet synthetic math. If a post is slop, hit unfollow. The worse problem on LinkedIn is the fake compliment before the pitch.

3. Airlines have the best pricing power they have ever had and are giving it away.

California wineries shipped 203 million cases last year, down 11 percent. In the air it runs the other way. United will pour nine and a half million glasses this year and has put $35 million into wine in two years. Jefferies says a 10 percent drop in passenger weight would lift American's earnings per share 11.7 percent. Fuel is 19 percent of what these airlines spend. Starlink is on 1,100 planes, and passengers are booking connecting flights on purpose to get one. The super of one is the super of nine, meaning the guy who is fanatical about Brunello speaks for nine more like him. Ask him what he drinks. Airlines charge eight dollars for bad Wi-Fi and give the good wine away free.

Want the whole thing? Founding members get every mini-book we've ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners. $375 a year, about a dollar a day. Monthly is $20. You've done dumber things with $20.

Subscribe today!

Recorded Friday, August 14th. Every number above is as of that morning.

Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

Stay tuned for next week's episode.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

HERE'S WHAT WE COVERED IN THIS EPISODE:

1. The best turnaround in casual dining ran on Wi-Fi, not AI.

Brinker International stock is up more than 500 percent since June 2022. Twenty straight quarters of same store sales growth. The CIO told the journal his team is not all in on AI. He bought a two year Wi-Fi overhaul across 1,200 restaurants, 23,000 iPads, and 9,000 kitchen touch screens. He got rid of the robot servers. Census data says under 20 percent of small firms use AI at all, against 37 percent of big ones, and that gap has not moved in five months. That is a leapfrog window. Market the problem, not the product, which means starting with what is broken instead of the shiny tool. A restaurant's problem is turns and tickets. Nobody needed a robot. They needed a button on the table.

2. Your next power company might be sitting in your backyard.

Base Power is three years old. It just closed a billion dollar round at a $13 billion valuation. Over 23,000 batteries are in the ground across Texas and the Chicago area, about 100 installs a day. Base owns the battery, sells you the power, then sells the stored power back to the grid when demand spikes. El Paso Electric is paying homeowners $250 a battery to test whether it can stop building for peak. Residential power prices are up 42 percent in five years. This is category design, which means building a new market instead of fighting for a slice of the old one. Utilities have been a government protected monopoly. The homeowner here is the customer, not the product, and at peak they are the seller too.

3. The degree is not the asset. The apprenticeship is.

Twenty undergrads at Indiana University run a real estate fund called Sample Gates Management. They have raised $12 million from outside investors, including one $700,000 check. This summer they sold a warehouse outside Indianapolis for 65 percent gross profit in 16 months. None of them get paid. Meanwhile the New York Fed says 41.5 percent of recent grads are underemployed. AI is making knowledge and execution close to free, so the knowledge worker, the person paid to apply what they know inside somebody else's system, is losing value fast. The creator capitalist, the person who makes new value with AI, is not. Pick the shortest path to an apprenticeship. The student who wrote the journal article about these kids is doing exactly that.

Want the whole thing? Founding members get every mini-book we've ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners. $375 a year, about a dollar a day. Monthly is $20. You've done dumber things with $20.

Subscribe today!

Recorded Friday, August 7th. Every number above is as of that morning.

Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

Stay tuned for next week's episode.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

HERE'S WHAT WE COVERED IN THIS EPISODE:

1. Alphabet's best quarter ever, and the stock fell.

Second quarter revenue was $119.8 billion, up 24%. Cloud grew 82% with a backlog of $514 billion, up from $460 billion in one quarter. Then free cash flow went negative for the first time ever, about negative $6 billion, because CapEx hit $44.9 billion, double last year. The same filing shows $242 billion in cash and securities and $186 billion in trailing operating cash flow. Cloud added $11 billion of new revenue this quarter. Search added $8.3 billion. A category king just won a second category, which almost never happens. Christopher's reminder: Amazon lost money until 2003, and its stock is up 300,000% since the IPO. One chart cannot hold all that.

2. Everyone else is bolting AI onto people. Fox is bolting people onto AI.

Fox spent 20 years at Skadden, then moved to Kirkland and Ellis in 2009 when it barely did M&A. Last year Kirkland became the first firm to bill $10 billion in a year. Now he has co-founded Irving, fewer than 10 lawyers and engineers, already advising on live deals in stealth. Kirkland set aside $500 million for its own AI platform. Freshfields partnered with Anthropic, and Cleary Gottlieb bought a legal tech firm outright. Eddie says the middle of the pyramid is where the value leaves, because associates were always the margin, not the expertise. McKinsey already bills 25% on outcomes instead of hours. The billable hour is the category being rebuilt.

3. You can do good and make 12x.

Optus Bank in South Carolina started in 1921. MF Bank in North Carolina started in 1907 and is the second oldest Black owned bank in the country. They are merging into the largest African American owned financial institution in the United States: $1.27 billion in assets, a deal worth more than $105 million. James Sills runs the combined bank. Five years ago, right before Eddie and Christopher wrote about justice deposits in Harvard Business Review, which asked companies to park treasury cash in Black owned banks instead of writing checks, MF traded under $4 a share. It is near $48 now, more than 12x. Netflix put in more than $100 million. PayPal put in $500 million. Nobody gave anything away.

Want the whole thing? Founding members get every mini-book we've ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners. $375 a year, about a dollar a day. Monthly is $20. You've done dumber things with $20.

Subscribe today! 

Recorded Friday, July 31st. Every number above is as of that morning.

Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

Stay tuned for next week's episode.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead