What I Wrote Last Week
Luck – You Can Only Connect The Dots Looking Backwards
Business
Tim Cook just hopes that people think he is a good and decent man. When Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, all sorts of people and analysts doubted Tim Cook, Jobs’ handpicked successor. 15 years later, there is no doubter anymore. Cook took Apple from $350 billion to more than $4 trillion in market cap and the company is in the strongest position ever. What I admire about him is his humanity and decency. He once told a stakeholder “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI”. In this interview, he said he just wanted people to think he was a good and decent man. The person comes first. The executive comes later. I said on this blog repeatedly that I don’t doubt Apple’s outlook as long as Tim is in charge. The biggest test will be when he steps down. That time is here. He still sticks around as an Executive Chairman and undoubtedly continues to help Apple navigate the political challenges. Still, the next few quarters will tell how resilient he built Apple to be.
Stainless Steel Is Pricier and Trendier in the Home Than Ever. Consumer preference for home goods and furnirture made from stainless steel overcame the impact of tariffs, surprisingly boosting revenue and profit for specialized retailers and manufacturers.
Why Walmart is moving in on DoorDash, Uber Eats delivery action, starting with donuts, coffee and sandwiches. The idea here is simple. 90% of Americans are within 10 miles of a Walmart store across the country. Such is an incredibly valuable competitive advantage to have for Walmart and difficult for others to replicate. Plus, Walmart already did the hard work on last-mile delivery for its own delivery services. By allowing consumers to combine restaurant orders and goods from its own stores, the retail behemoth wants to expand its reach, add more value for consumers, increase basket size and boost stickiness. However, it may be trickier than expected. Delivery is a three-sided business. Walmart needs drivers. I don’t imagine they want to hire drivers permanently and a lot of drivers don’t want to be employed full-time either. Contract drivers will have to drop by a Walmart store, pick up an order, drive to a restaurant for the food items and then deliver. It’s a lot more work. If Walmart wants to compensate drivers for the additional effort, how much more expensive would it be for consumers? How much would it take out of merchants’ margin? Would they be willing to let it happen? While we can never count out a company with unlimited resources and enormous scale like Walmart, it will be interesting to see how this unfolds.
How Celsius Became the King of Normie Energy Drinks. “The following year, Celsius executives began conducting focus groups and discovered that, while its weight-loss pitch was falling flat, its health and fitness messaging was resonating. Around the same time, Fieldly was trying to get the brand back into 7-Eleven stores, but the chain wasn’t interested. “‘You guys are a gym-rat brand and, you know, Weight Watchers brand,’” he says they told him. “They said, ‘Listen, clean up the can.’” Celsius toned down the calorie-burning slogan and replaced it with “healthy energy.” Soon, they were being stocked nationally at 7-Eleven. Celsius unveiled an even slicker look in late 2016. When the new cans hit the market in 2017, business began to grow about 50% a year, David says. Unlike the mostly bombastic energy drinks on the market, Celsius’ minimalist, slender cans with images of fresh fruit gave the product the look of a natural drink, even if it used artificial ingredients like the sugar-replacement sucralose and synthetic vitamins. The pitch was particularly appealing to women, “who really hadn’t entered the energy category,” David says. The company was relisted on the Nasdaq, and in 2018, Fieldly became CEO. While she says Celsius is selling to everyone, the brand is also “very female-forward” with its sleek-shaped cans, fruity flavors and added vitamins including Vitamin B3 and biotin, which are both popular in skin- and hair-care products. “They’re going after that entire demographic, and they were very, very strategic about it,”“
Other Stuff I Find Interesting And So May You
Trump’s Tactics to Lower Beef Prices and Appease Ranchers Fall Short. You can see that there are different reactions to the “Ranchers First Initiative” by the Trump Administration from stakeholders with different interests in the beef industry. The hope is that imported beef with lower safety standards can increase supply and lower prices. But who’s to stop the Big 4 Processors to just take the imported beef and keep the same prices as for the American beef? They’d have an even bigger markup. And what about the food safety for consumers?
How Madrid built its metro cheaply. I know from first-hand experience that Madrid’s metro system is good. I did not know that it was THAT and the 3rd longest in Europe, only behind the metro in London and Moscow. The article laid out four main reasons why Madrid could expand its metro so well, so cheaply and so fast. I doubt that the US could replicate such success. Take environmental studies alone. Any project would be delayed by study after study and likely lawsuit after lawsuit. There are just too many conflicting interests from people with different backgrounds here. As the Spanish learned, time is more important than money. The longer a project drags on, the more likely it is exposed to macroeconomic turbulence such as inflation, economic crisis, etc…
14 Reasons Robotics is Hard. Robots are excellent at handling individual specific tasks, but cannot replace humans when it comes to novelty ideas, generalization or creativity. The more tasks we ask robots to handle, the more expensive it is to train them and verify their “output”.
Fractional Window Shopping. Genius ads!
The Life-Saving Secrets Behind Emergency Room Design. I love this series that teaches us why certain layouts are built the way they are. In this case, Emergency Departments (not Emergeny Rooms) are built to allow care for the people who need it most, not who arrive first, and to foster collaboration, communication and access to equipment; all of which can decide life and death.
Inside a quest to learn about the ocean’s mysterious “deep reefs”. “Scientists can dive into the deep reefs to try to learn more about these understudied places — as Rocha has — but exploring down at 100 meters requires more difficult, riskier technical diving than exploring at shallower depths. The deeper you dive, for example, the faster gasses get pushed into your tissues, which imposes limits on these really deep dives. Scientists might take some pictures in that time, or make some measurements, or collect a few samples, but then they have to move back upwards, a process which can take hours because they have to rise slowly to avoid decompression sickness. It is, obviously, not particularly efficient to study an ecosystem in five- to seven-minute bursts. People have also used remote operated vehicles and submersibles to explore the deep reefs, but those have their own issues, and cameras can’t always capture all the detail you might want, or photograph more secretive, cryptic animals. So huge gaps remain in scientific knowledge about these ecosystems. ““As soon as you drop any kind of clean structure on a reef,” Rocha says, “it starts getting colonized by larvae of everything around it — of sponges, gorgonians, corals. And then, because there’s all a lot of hiding spots between the plates — so between the floors of the hotel — they start getting colonized by shrimp, by mollusks, by ascidians, by anything you can imagine in the ocean. … And it becomes this stable, diverse mini reef, if you will, packed with a lot of biodiversity that would be very hard to collect all at once in any given reef.“
Stats
Healthcare cost per employee is expected to go up by 11% in 2027
“Subscription spending rose 7.7% year-over-year (YoY) in July 2026”
Minh Quang Duong 
Leave a comment