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Why is AWS partnering with GCP?
On last Sunday, Google Cloud published a blog post about their new collaboration with AWS. From the blog post:
“Today, we announced a significant collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer a managed, private and secure, on-demand, solution for cross-cloud connectivity. This solution is designed to enable customers to
Behind the scenes: Airbnb vs Booking
A subscriber from Thailand recently reached out to me and let me know that he has experience of hosting his home through Booking.com, Airbnb, and Agoda. He was gracious enough to allow me access by making me a co-host. It was intriguing to observe these platforms through the eyes
Never Sell: Episode 12-Serial Acquirer ROIC, Fiserv Debacle and Management Credibility, Wise and Stablecoins
For the “Never Sell” podcast, Scuttleblurb and I published a new episode. You can listen to it here: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, RSS feed
Some of the relevant posts that we touched on this episode:
1. What exactly is CSU’s ROIC?
2. Fiserv’s October Massacre
3. Wise is probably
The Depreciation Battleground
I was in my Freshman year in college when I first watched this Khan Academy video “Is short selling bad?” To this day, it remains a key foundation for my belief that short sellers are a net positive force in capital markets.
Despite such belief, I myself never shorted any
Anthropic's focused bet, Portfolio Change
A programming note: As a reminder, I will take the next two days off for Thanksgiving, and hope to be back on Saturday. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
For a brief moment, Gemini was leading the benchmarks until Anthropic released Opus 4.5 this week. For the uninitiated, Sonnet and Opus are
Solving the "DoorDash Problem"
Nilay Patel from “The Verge” has recently been talking about the “DoorDash problem” for some consumer internet companies. What is the “DoorDash problem”? From The Verge:
“Briefly, it’s what happens when an AI interface gets between a service provider, like DoorDash, and you, who might send an AI to
Booking: The shareholder friendly OTA king
You can listen to the Deep Dive here
Booking’s modern identity as a dominant, European-centric travel aggregator obscures its chaotic origins as a quintessentially American dot-com darling: Priceline.com. The original company, founded by Jay S. Walker, launched in 1998 as Priceline.com. It was built on a strange,
The limits to our imagined vision of the future
A programming note: I hope to publish my Deep Dive on Booking Holdings tomorrow.
Since this is my first year of publishing daily at MBI Deep Dives, I am still thinking about some vacation policy. I will let you know once I finalize something, but for now, I would like
Meta's biggest competitor(s)
FTC’s lawsuit against Meta may be a colossal waste of time for everyone involved, but it did have one silver lining. Thanks to this lawsuit, we got access to a lot of documents and research work (both internal and external) which helped investors understand the company a bit better.
Walmart and Target CY 3Q'25 Earnings
It is a bit strange co-incidence, but CY3Q’25 was the last earnings call for both the current CEOs of Walmart and Target. However, the backdrop in which they are passing down the baton to the next person perhaps couldn’t be any more different.
In both cases, the new