Email Addresses and Razor Blades

Stripe’s strategy, however, is focused on the long tail. It has millions of customers (including 1 million via Shopify) compared to ~3,500 for Adyen. It likely makes its margins on the long tail, while keeping prices low for big companies like Shopify for two reasons: 1) to keep Shopify away from competitors and 2) to collect the massive data from ... See more

This raises broader questions about the tech ecosystem and its investment model. I’ve been making the case for a long time that the natural endpoint is likely very large platforms and Aggregators on one-side, and a flourishing ecosystem focused on niches on the other, but implicit in the latter is that venture capital is not simply unncessary, it i... See more

Warby Parker might have started the DTC trend, but the true awakening came with Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s interrupting the somewhat ridiculous Gillette domination of razor blades at mass/retail. Would-be entrepreneurs and VC investors mistook this unique category situation (single dominant incumbent player, ridiculously high margins, small/ligh... See more

I regret that second step: I want to believe that companies that produce truly great content will have negotiating power with Aggregators, because customers will want what they have to sell. And, in very limited cases, that may be true. Anything beyond the very best of the best, though, risks a Wirecutter-type fate: yes, the investment in content p... See more