Scale Without Sluggishness

Scheduling and Disclosure Update

A few things I wanted to share: what’s coming up, a break I’m taking next week, and a change to my portfolio disclosure. What I’m working on I’m currently working on DoorDash, which I expect to publish sometime next month. After that, I plan to turn

Spotify Model Update

As mentioned yesterday, I am uploading my detailed Spotify model behind the paywall. The objective of this exercise is to gauge what metrics you need to underwrite to believe management’s long-term outlook provided for the business during the 2026 Investor Day. Subscribers get the daily journal and five+

Some Notes from Spotify's 2026 Investor Day

Spotify held its third Investor Day in May, eight years after the 2018 debut that asked whether it could win against the big tech walled gardens with their own music streaming offerings, and four years after the 2022 edition that asked whether it could ever be a real business with

On Father’s Day

Programming Note: As a reminder, every Sunday, I write pieces that are predominantly based on personal experiences which may or may not be loosely connected with investing. If you are reading MBI Deep Dives everyday, I think it would be rather useful for my readers to understand my personal lens

Airbnb's Fintech Opportunity

Airbnb first launched its guest travel insurance product in 2022. Then in 4Q’22 call, Brian Chesky mentioned that the guest insurance product was available in 8 countries and the product had been “really, really successful”. However, Airbnb didn’t quite provide much detail about the product’s trajectory until

Shopify at the E-com OS Layer

Shopify shipped its Spring ’26 Edition this week with 150+ updates. Given the plethora of updates, thankfully Eric Seufert had Venkat Prabhu (Director of Product for Shop Campaigns at Shopify) on the Mobile Dev Memo podcast to discuss the key highlights of Shopify’s recent product updates. One such highlight

What's Embedded in OpenAI's Stock Price?

OpenAI is still a private company. They have recently submitted a “confidential S-1”, so we don’t know their financials for certain. However, Financial Times (and Ed Zitron) both recently claimed that they have come across OpenAI’s actual financials. Based on this report, I did an exercise to

Airbnb's Incentives

On X, I often come across some version of a stock performance chart showing how Airbnb has performed since its IPO which has been largely flat for more than five years now! It looks particularly unflattering when you compare and contrast to its closest peer: Booking Holdings. Generally speaking, these

Owning the Hill

Satya Nadella spent part of last weekend writing a think piece on X titled “A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable”. I mostly nodded along while reading the piece, but there was also a lot of cynicism from many corners about his prescription of not mortgaging your IP to