MBI Deep Dives

MBI Deep Dives

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

Meta's Myriad Questions

A couple of days ago, “SouthernValue” tagged me in the below tweet: Can we get a @borrowed_ideas and @evrgn11112231 podcast or spaces to discuss $META state of affairs? New regulation, AI model delays, internal chaos, tokenmaxxing then unmaxxing, agentic business prospects, Neocloud prospects (and willingness / timing) … lots to discuss.

The Geography of Time

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

Adobe's Continued Deceleration

If you’re on X (formerly known as “twitter”), you may be under the impression that Adobe’s growth has accelerated in FY 2Q’26 as I noticed quite a few posts mentioning how total ARR has finally accelerated last quarter. Unfortunately, Adobe’s ARR included $480 million from the

FICO: Capital Allocation, Management Incentives, and Valuation

Programming Note: This is the final part of my FICO Series. Last month, I announced that I would start publishing my Deep Dives as a series of posts rather than one single post. Having now tried that format with FICO, I’ll be reverting back to single posts for future

Automation's Asymptote: Part 2

Yesterday's piece ended on a question I could not quite resolve: it can be simultaneously true that humans remain in the loop and that the economics of being in the loop deteriorate. Shipper's frame-and-framer argument gave me a philosophical reason to doubt the automation

Automation's Asymptote

Anthropic launched “Claude Fable 5” yesterday which is the much anticipated “Mythos-class” model. Anthropic was already leading in most benchmark with its Opus 4.8 model, but Fable 5 created a bit more distance from its competitors. Anthropic’s pace of model release even when its setting the bar

FICO: The Contestable Monopoly?

This is part-3 of my FICO series. In Part 1, I traced the company’s history through the 2018-2025 pricing-power era and pushed back on the popular narrative that FICO’s monopoly was simply gifted to it by the 1995 GSE decision. In Part 2, I went

Veeva 1Q'26: Strong Present, Patient Future

Programming Note: Some of you may have missed my announcement in my last post that I would be taking a couple of weeks break and reached out to see if everything is okay. Thank you for your concern, and I am back to daily posting schedule. Just a small note