Business
Andy Jassy Is Rewriting Amazon’s Playbook for the AI Age. If this were a piece proposed by Amazon’s PR team, it would be a successful one. The article did a great job painting Andy Jassy in a positive light, including attention to detail, the ability to connect with other CEOs, his Amazonian trait of believing in innovation and having a positive outlook. Amazon stock has trailed S&P500 and other tech giants such as Apple or Google under Andy’s watch, but so far in 2026, it has performed well. This and next year may be an inflection point where Andy’s Amazon will take off and so will others’ opinion of him as a CEO.
Retailers Are Making Expensive Bets That Shoppers Still Want to Go to Stores. Retailers need to get a lot of things right to woo shoppers, such as merchandise, store experience, customer service, prices, location and meeting expectation. Store appearance is certainly important. Target knows that. They spent several billions several years ago under the previous CEO to renovate the stores and had an astounding success. However, as mentioned before, store appearance is just a factor. Target learned that lesson in a hard way in the last few years. The recent law passed under the Trump administration incentivizes retailers to invest in their stores, but that’s just table stakes. The key is what comes on top of having nice-looking stores.
How PepsiCo Used Walmart’s Data to Rethink Launch Playbook. Pepsi launched its first prebiotic drink online and used the generated data to drive the offline introduction. The company learned that consumers loved the taste the most and prebiotic was NOT the primary attraction. That insight, coupled with the flexibility of having an in-house creative team, drove the brand to make appropriate changes.
Why Japanese companies do so many different things. While Western companies prioritize focus, Japanese companies are not afraid to compete in multiple areas. The example of Toto is very interesting. The company is known for products in the bathroom. Now, it plays an important role in the AI industry, due to a small obscure operation that makes up no more than a rounding error. Who would have thought?
The Low-Tech Playbook That Will Launch SpaceX’s Stratospheric IPO. “Bankers will make phone calls to feverishly allocate some $80 billion worth of shares and pair buyers and sellers. It’s a process that hasn’t fundamentally changed since the IPO boom of the 1980s. They do this even for the biggest, most-technologically savvy companies heading to the public markets. OpenAI is preparing to file confidentially for an IPO in the coming days, and Anthropic is also eyeing a market debut later this year. It may be called an initial public offering, but in the case of a hot IPO, there’s a lot of rejection. Many investors don’t get the shares they want.“The afternoon before SpaceX’s stock market debut, the board, executives and top bankers will hold a closed-door meeting. There the group picks the company’s book of investors. There’s no automated formula for allocating IPO shares, bankers say. The process still depends on decades of experience assessing which investors are reliable long-term holders and which are merely claiming they won’t quickly sell after the IPO. “The group reviews the order book line by line in an allocation process that can stretch for hours. One banker who has worked hundreds of deals said he tends to group orders based on whether he believes the investor is likely to hold on to the stock long term or whether they’re likely to flip and take profits day one.“
Other Stuff I Find Interesting
The Illusion of CPO. A very good article on Co-Packaged Optics, a hot topic in the chip industry and the AI race. I am not an engineer with a technical background, so this topic is out of my depth. Thanks to experts like damnang and others, I get to learn a bit more and hopefully leverage it into some investment earnings.
Engineering the disposable diaper. A fascinating story on the history of disposable diapers.
Wild blueberry farms across Maine suffer as climate change upends growing seasons. If your business is threatened by climate change, there is no easy or near-term solution. The world is still heavily relied on oil and gas, and the conflict in Iran is emphasizing that need even more.
Hanoi’s humble beer glass and the memory of a nation. “Hommel brewery, the first in Hanoi, was established in 1890. Making beer was expensive, so supply was low and prices high: the drink was reserved mostly for colonial officials. Due to a shortage of materials like glass and metal there were no bottles or containers and the beer was instead kept in reusable kegs. As part of its postcolonial nation-building efforts, the new government decided that beer should be made widely accessible as a small but meaningful boost to public morale in the subsidy era. The answer was Bia hơi. But serving it proved complicated. Beer was available at the government-run beer stations and everyone in a queue was allotted a ticket for purchase. It was being served fresh, so bottles were impractical. Most people brought their own cups, making standardised portions impossible. Then the Vietnamese Central Cooperative Union of Handicrafts and Crafts, CCUHC, came up with a solution: a standard-sized glass designed specifically for a single serving of Bia hơi. One ticket equaled a single cốc of beer. Across Hanoi, beer was no longer measured by the keg, the server, or the buyer’s wares, but by the cốc. To order a beer was to receive a cốc.”
Stats
TikTok Shop Small-Biz Sales Grew 66% in 2025
BNPL usage is also more common in households with children, at 18.7% penetration
Minh Quang Duong 
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