MBI Deep Dives

MBI Deep Dives

Airbnb: Inbound Headwinds, AI Moat Question, and a CTO Shakeup

The travel industry has received some not-so-encouraging news in the last couple of days. First, Skift reported that international travel to the US went down for eight consecutive months. Overall overseas visitation to the US fell 2.5% in 2025. With this year’s Football (Soccer) World Cup in sight,

"File over App", Veeva at JPM Healthcare Conference

Back in 2023, Steph Ango, CEO of Obsidian, wrote an intriguing piece titled “File over app”. It’s a bit philosophical piece. Some excerpt from the piece: “File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in

The Ecosystem Advantage: Part 2

While explaining Alphabet’s “ecosystem advantage”, I mentioned “the real advantage of Google is its ability to monetize Gemini through ads even though they are not putting ads on the core Gemini chat bots itself.” To say it differently, I consider it exceptionally likely that Google will insert ads in

China's Rise in Innovation Ladder and Questions for ASML

JP Morgan in its recent “2026 Eye on the Market Outlook” discussed four specific “What Could Go Wrong” for the market over the medium term. One that caught my attention is a section titled “China scales the moat with its own lithography-semiconductor technology…when, not if”. The section starts with

Software in Crosshairs: Part 2

After publishing “Software in Crosshairs” last week, I received some interesting feedback. One email from someone who works in enterprise SaaS stood out as he took bit of an issue with how Foundation Capital outlined incumbent companies’ inability to capture the context graphs. I am publishing his email with his

"The Compute Theory of Everything"

One of my favorite recent genre of content these days is annual reflection from AI researchers. Dan Wang isn’t an AI researcher, but I think his fantastic annual letters was inspiration among many. I will admit that through his letters, Wang has singlehandedly elicited from me a sense of

Climbing the Scaling Wall

Last month, Gavin Baker in ILtB podcast mentioned the following: “I think there's been a big misunderstanding of maybe in the public equity investing community, or the broader more generalist community, based on the scaling laws of pre-training, there really should have been no progress in '24

CoStar's Outlook

Rich Simonelli, the Head of Investor Relations (IR) of CoStar, wrote only two sentences in his “About” section on LinkedIn. The first sentence reads the following: “I maximize shareholder value.” Since becoming Head of CoStar IR in August 2024, this is how CoStar performed: Hmm, not quite my tempo. In

Scaling Law Skepticism

Peter Lee, Head of Microsoft Research, once quipped a joke about Moore’s law: “There’s a law about Moore’s law…the number of people predicting the death of Moore’s law doubles every two years.” As a reminder, Moore’s law is not a law of physics or

Alphabet's Alpha Bet

A couple of months ago, Demis Hassabis indicated what he is more focused on these days: World models are the thing I’m mostly spending my research time on. You probably saw SIMA 2 come out just a couple of days ago. I sometimes call it SIMA playing in the