The Kardashian Business Machine Fame is the distribution. Attention becomes product. Product becomes cash. Read time: 4 minutes THE SETUP Most people lead with the 57 % failure rate. That is the least interesting number in this story. The Kardashian-Jenner family runs 400 million collective Instagram followers as a distribution network. When a brand launches, those followers see it immediately, for free. A post becomes a sell-out. A sell-out becomes press. Press becomes revenue. No...
4 days ago • 4 min read
How Blockbuster Beat Netflix... And Then Killed Itself The strategy was working. The CEO was fired anyway. Read time: 5 minutes THE SETUP By the end of 2006, Blockbuster was winning. Netflix had just lost 55,000 subscribers in a single quarter. Blockbuster's new hybrid product had signed up 2 million customers in six months. Faster than Netflix had grown at any point in its history. Reed Hastings mentioned Blockbuster 22 times on one analyst call and admitted on record that he had not worked...
8 days ago • 6 min read
THREE EXITS: BREAKDOWN 15 Seconds. $19 Billion. McDonald's Knows Exactly What One Costs. Drive-thru is 70% of systemwide sales. A 20% throughput improvement on that base is $19 billion in additional annual revenue. No new customers. No new marketing. No new products. Just a faster machine and a company that calculated the number to the second. WHAT PEOPLE THINK McDonald's is brilliant at selling burgers. That's true. It's also almost entirely irrelevant to how it makes money. McDonald's...
11 days ago • 7 min read
THREE EXITS: BREAKDOWN Read time: 12 minutes IKEA has the world's largest unpaid workforce — and they've never asked for a penny In 2022, IKEA spent $310 million solving a staff retention problem. It had already solved the other one. THE WORKFORCE Two workforces. One on the payroll, the other isn’t. In 2022, IKEA had a staffing problem. Turnover hit 33 percent globally. Around 62,000 employees quit. Replacing them cost an estimated $310 million — roughly $5,000 a head in recruiting,...
15 days ago • 8 min read
THREE EXITS: BREAKDOWN Read time: 8 minutes Apple — John Ternus and the Impossible Job He has two options. One leads to slow decline. The other might get him fired. Congratulations on the promotion. SITUATION What the stock non-reaction actually told you On April 20, 2026, Apple announced that Tim Cook steps sideways to become executive chairman, and John Ternus takes the CEO role from September 1. Fifteen years of Cook. The most successful operational run in corporate history. A $4 trillion...
18 days ago • 7 min read
THREE EXITS: BREAKDOWN Liquid Death Hit $263 Million and Then Deliberately Broke the Machine That Got It There The playbook that opened 100,000 doors couldn’t hold a single one open. Cessario spotted the ceiling before it hit him. SITUATION What Liquid Death actually built January 2019. A $1,500 video. A product that was, when stripped of the skull logo and the heavy metal branding, just a can of water. By 2021: $45 million in revenue. By 2022: $110 million. By 2023: $263 million At 139...
22 days ago • 8 min read
THREE EXITS: BREAKDOWN GAME Entered Administration. The High Street Saw Failure. Frasers Won. Mike Ashley didn’t just reshape GAME. He turned it into its most profitable form. The administration was collateral. Frasers Group paid £52m not to rescue it, but to disaggregate it, extracting the brand and 200+ concession slots into an estate where those assets were already profitable. Then discarded the rest. Acquisition Price: £52m - June 19 – 30p/share Frasers APBT FY25: £560m - +2.8% YoY UK...
25 days ago • 5 min read
THREE EXITS · BUSINESS BREAKDOWN Marmite Was Not Sold Because It Failed Unilever's board sold a business generating 22.6% margins because Nelson Peltz's framework made the asset non-core and Hein Schumacher's pay depended on growth it couldn't deliver. $44.8bn: Enterprise Value 13.8x EBITDA / 3.6x Sales $15.7bn: Cash Proceeds Post-adjustments 65%: Equity Retained ~$29bn at VWAP $57.84 $600m: Synergy Target Run-rate, Year 3 SITUATION A profitable division gets reclassified as a liability On 31...
29 days ago • 8 min read
Priced Like Software, Built Like Services, Broken by Debt How Builder.ai raised $450 million on a delivery model it could never prove Read online THREE EXITS - BUSINESS BREAKDOWN Total Raised: $450mPeak Valuation: ~$1.5BRevenue Multiple: ~33xRevenue Restated 75%Cash Seized: $37M SITUATION A $50M debt facility. No CFO. Revenue later shown to be 75% wrong. All three conditions were visible at closing. In October 2024, Builder.ai's board approved a $50 million secured debt facility with...
29 days ago • 8 min read