MBI Deep Dives (Page 29)

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Google's "first mistake"

I have been listening to Acquired’s latest episode on Google. I haven’t finished the episode yet; I’m half-way into the four-hour episode. As you can imagine, there are a lot of cool anecdotes from the spree of some of the best acquisitions Google has made

Dollar General 2Q'25, Microsoft's Cybersecurity business

Yesterday, Dollar General published its 2Q’25 earnings and Microsoft attended Deutsche Bank's 2025 Technology Conference to discuss their cybersecurity business. I will share some thoughts on both of them behind the paywall. Subscribe

Meta's (lack of) Agency

Back in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook: “One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent. …recently we've gotten feedback from our community that public content -- posts from businesses, brands and media -- is crowding

Amazon's Ambition in Groceries: Part 2

Part 1 of this series can be read here Doug Herrington, the current CEO of Amazon Retail, became part of the S-team at Amazon in 2011. Herrington has been a key figure to push Amazon to groceries. Brad Stone in his book “Amazon Unbound” mentioned a particular memo by

The Promise and Pitfall of Agentic Commerce

We are entering the age of agentic commerce, where autonomous AI agents, acting as our digital deputies, will navigate the endless aisles of online stores, evaluating products and making purchases on our behalf. Agentic commerce promises to crush search frictions and expand the practical consideration set from a handful of

Never Sell: Episode 9-Global Payments, AI and Software, OpenAI and Anthropic Bubble?

For the “Never Sell” podcast, Scuttleblurb and I published a new episode today. You can listen to it here: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, RSS feed As a reminder, if you have any questions for either MBI Deep Dives or Scuttleblurb, please feel free to email us the questions which we may

Challenges for Self driving Semi, ADI 3Q'25 Earnings

Challenges for Self driving Semi I touched on the potential for self driving semi in my recent Deep Dive on Union Pacific, and mentioned the lack of entrenched unions for trucking industry can be a boon for them to integrate automation compared to railroad industry which is heavily unionized. The

Airbnb's unique demand driver

Traditional travel accommodation is still quite search driven. You go to Google or an OTA website/app and insert some details from the dropdown menu (destination, travel dates, number of guests, budget etc.) to pick your accommodation. But ever since going public, Brian Chesky has been highlighting that they would

Walmart and Target Earnings

Walmart and Target announced their earnings this week and while I don’t follow these businesses rigorously, going through their earnings simultaneously was an interesting exercise. If you looked at Walmart and Target’s same store sales growth trajectory in the last eight quarters, you might be tempted to think

Constraints, and challenges of value capture in the AI race

There are a couple of podcasts I would like to highlight today. First, Acquired interviewed Sierra’s co-founders: Bret Taylor (who is currently Chair of OpenAI board and former Salesforce co-CEO) and Clay Bavor (who was at Google for 18+ years). They have an interesting vantage point; they