Commerce

Today's Startups Are Designed To Be Monopolies On Day One From day one, startups are designed to dominate markets, overthrow existing Fortune 500's, and emerge as a monopoly. Sector after sector has become a winner-takes-all — or two-winners-take-all — bloodbath:

Learn From The Failure Of Consortiums Consortiums of independent companies have a high failure rate, despite their potential power. @Constellation Research studied the history of 100 consortiums, shared services models, trading networks, and open source communities. All attempted to bring together companies for their self-interest, yet 99% of these coalitions failed!

Key Features Extend Last Inch Network On Friday May 7th, 2021, Amazon announced a series of updates to Amazon Sidewalk. Sidewalk delivers last mile connectivity via a network bridge protocol on Amazon's smart home devices. The Sidewalk Bridge devices such as Echo products and Ring Floodlight Cams use a 900 MHz band and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), to extend WiFi networks

Think and Act Like A Digital Giant No matter how big your company, you’ll need to convince your shareholders or private investors to keep financing your long-term strategy for market dominance, even when the short-term gets rough.

Crypto FOMO Drives Capital Flows Out Of Big Tech (For Now) Retail investors have taken money out of the equity market and rotated into crypto to catch the wave. With all crypto's now worth more than $2 Trillion in market cap and Bitcoin standing out at $1 trillion, this poses a risk to the US dollar dominance as the reserve currency.

Short Term Thinking Crushes Traditional Companies In Fight Against Digital Giants If legacy companies want to compete with data giants in the age of extreme capitalism, spending capital on innovation needs to STOP being sacrificed for short-term profits.

It took 50 years for markets to consolidate down to a few dominant players. Now it takes ten. Countless industries went through gradual reorganization from hundreds or thousands of small players down to a couple of giants. But until very recently, the keyword was “gradual.” There’s no longer going to be a monopoly in each industry. In the next ten years, I expect to see about 100 dominant players in 50 distinct markets worldwide, in most cases with a duopoly of two giants per market.

Long-term loyalty is gone. Your customers will trade loyalty for convenience, value, or status. Consider Domino's. Even though they managed an A+ digital transformation in the 2010s, the company now faces a new existential threat. The enemy is no longer Pizza Hut; it's the new wave of food delivery companies like Uber Eats and DoorDash moving into its sector.

Coinbase Debut Legitimizes Cryptocurrency Trading Coinbase is the NASDAQ of Cryptocurrencies. They generate 96% of revenue from transaction fees and earned more in Q1 than all of 2020. The digital giant debuted as a profitable company on April 14th, 2021. At the time of direct listing, Coinbase shares opened at $381 and almost broke $429.54 throughout a volatile trading day.