Every election cycle, there’s a great Vonnegut quip from A Man Without a Country that inevitably makes the rounds. Today, it seems more timely than ever.

Vonnegut’s (f)law of course extends far beyond the presidency into corporate America, where a small handful of tech CEOs now bear the responsibility of operating quasi nation states. And to put it simply, you have to be flatly outside your mind to want any part of the power and responsibility that comes with any of this.

Throughout his presidency, I always wondered if 46 possessed the requisite level of sociopathy needed to play quarterback of the free world. Only when he stubbornly refused to face his own mortality did it become clear that he was probably crazy enough to do this all along.

In the end, some semblance of sanity won out over Biden’s raw lust for power. Facing a 38/56 approval vs. disapproval split, mass donor revolt and desperate pleas from across the party to step aside, the President finally gave way. For what it’s worth—-and that is absolutely nothing in the context on needing to win in an election in November— I believe history will remember President Biden far more fondly than the prevailing sentiment does. Noah Smith has already declared Biden the best president of his lifetime.

Assuming it is Kamala Harris who receives the nomination, it’s a helpful reminder that the class presidents are ultimately just a front. In America, it’s the PTA wine moms who hold all the real power.

Jokes aside, Harris has been dealt a tough hand—for starters, the Secret Service shouldn’t have let her anywhere near Drew Barrymore whose interview was bad to the point of national security threat. Structurally, the Vice Presidency is an utterly bizarre job where the second most powerful person on the planet has minimal discernible impact on policy. But even in this context, Harris has been a uniquely enigmatic and invisible vice president. As the sun rises this morning, outlets from Politico to the New York Times are scrambling to tell the American public what Harris’s policy stances are and doing a pretty uncompelling job. Hell, at least we know Gavin Newsom is tough on China.

What Harris needs most is time to fundamentally reintroduce herself to the American public to run on something other than not being Donald Trump. So far, kamalaharris.com has a nice little redirect to ask for your money without any semblance of a policy platform.

What Harris actually has are three months to convince roughly 100,000 so-called “moderate” voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada who will decide the election— most of whom hold an eclectic and paradoxical hodgepodge of far left and far right views— that she offers a vision for America that best aligns with their values. If she wins, she’ll have the most demanding job in the world and the weight of being the first woman to hold the presidential office— all while facing an opposition that at some level will question the fundamental legitimacy of her election.

Kurt’s right. You’ve got to be clearly disturbed to want that job.

Amazonia 

My quick take on the current thing in the Amazon ecosystem

A Cacophony of Capitalism: The numbers are in for Amazon Prime Day and this year’s soiree drove an estimated $14.2B according to Adobe Analytics.

There’s been shockingly little chest thumping from Amazon on this so my bet is that this actually fell short of their internal projections but it is a gargantuan and impressive number nonetheless. It’s also maybe a kinda bullshit statistic?

Amazon doesn’t disclose the first party data here so Adobe has become the trusted source for Prime Day (and other major events like Black Friday/ Cyber Monday) for more nearly a decade. But their methodology is….confusing to say the least.

This makes a lot of sense for being a reliable way to report key eCommerce benchmarks like conversion rate & AOV and make statistically significant assumptions about DTC volume based on a representative sample but…..there’s a couple of layers of obfuscation between this and Amazon volume.

In any event, the same narrative has swirled around Prime Day for years now. Media figures, analysts and everyday consumers say there are “no good deals this year” and then proceed to spend record breaking amounts of money on the platform. Make no mistake about it— Amazon continues to be stunningly effective, even if more for demand capture than demand creation. Of course, brands have to be mindful of what this means though—a customer using Prime Day to finally buy the Bissell Little Green steam cleaner (pro tip—buy one if you haven’t already) they’ve had in the cart for months isn’t the same as a customer deciding to buy Bissell over competing products. Increasingly, Amazon is a tougher channel for driving the latter outcome and a better one for the former.

Cocktail of the Week: The Watermelon Negroni

It’s been a historically heavy week so to counter that, I’m giving you something specifically light and crushable. This week’s cocktail comes from Alex, whiskey king and proprietor of the Fort Hamilton distillery in Brooklyn.

I’m generally a negroni purist and a Dorothy Parker diehard so I came in about as skeptical to this cocktail as you could imagine. But you know what, it just kinda self-evidently slaps. So here ya go:

• 1.5 oz. Fort Hamilton Gin

• 1 oz. fresh watermelon juice

• .5 oz. sweet vermouth

• .5 oz. Faccia Brutto (I’d use Campari here but NY distilleries have to use NY products in their tasting rooms)

As Anthony Bourdain would say, have two.

Thanks as always for reading. Back in two weeks with a more traditional US of Amazon essay and updates on two other writing projects.

P.S. I know it’s passe for any blog writers to admit their mistakes. Packy McCormick, arguably the best of us thinkbois going, wrote three years ago that crypto Pokemon was going to become the economic engine of the developing world……and then just never said a word when it obviously didn’t.

But I feel compelled to mention that my election prediction was wrong. Biden will in fact, not win the election with 279 electoral votes. Another L for Mikey.

P.P.S. I wonder how many times that “San Fran Chronicle” article was shared in degenerate group chats and email threads. No link but…..IYKYK

Welcome to 62 new subscribers and Happy 4th! Quick programming note— I’m working on two new recurring columns covering inflections in AI, commerce and media with a couple of publications many of you read consistently. Excited to share more on both initiatives with you all in the next edition.

Thus, United States of Amazon will now publish on a once per month(ish) basis with a little more frenetic blog energy and a heavier emphasis on the “United States” piece since I can’t as easily sell my Americana ramblings to established media players. Will be treating this a canvas to workshop ideas with smart people and throw some more jagged, unfiltered thoughts into the ether for feedback.

Hope you’ll all stick around but just want to give a fair warning on what you’re getting into. Let’s get to it 🙂 

There was a debate last week and…….oh who the hell cares? Nothing that transpired last Thursday told us anything we didn’t already know.

Back in November, I opened the inaugural edition of this newsletter with the following declaration:

My incredibly pompous word choice notwithstanding, the calculus for the election will be far simpler than that. Biden will either win or lose based on the prevailing sentiment around inflation. 

Before digging into this, I must take a second to acknowledge the obvious– Democrats are fumbling the bag on a historically easy election to win by running a candidate in cognitive decline, gaslighting the American public about his condition and simultaneously ensuring the voting populace remains blissfully unaware of his accomplishments and the cornerstones of his agenda that have significant mass appeal. It’s an embarrassment of epic proportion.

Amazingly, they might still get a lifeline if inflation continues to fall, though it’s an uphill battle. Even though inflation will be <3% by November, several household essentials are truly 20%+ more expensive than they were three years ago.  Reasonable people can disagree as to whether or not the Biden administration has managed this well but it’s top of mind for voters.

Of course, voters by and large don’t rationally analyze macro Consumer Price Index data— they anchor on heuristic signals from tracking the price of items they know and love. In economics, “The Big Mac Index” is a tool for measuring the purchasing power of different currencies but it works just as well for inflation.

Here’s the problem— thanks to generations of galaxy brained MBAs and consultants being unleashed on humble proletariat institutions like McDonalds and Taco Bell, the Big Mac (or Crunch Wrap Supreme) Index is a funhouse mirror. At the most basic level, the price you pay for fast food varies wildly depending on if you have the app installed or are a member of a restaurant’s loyalty program. In a more sophisticated sense, the entire experience you have at a fast food kiosk is now an algorithmically optimized adventure designed to get you specifically to pay as much as your previous purchasing patterns suggest might be possible. If you opt into this experiment, the price you pay for a single Big Mac may well be cheaper than it was five years ago, subsidized by those of us who don’t.

So customers who are less digitally savvy or have reasonable qualms about telling Experian and Cigna when they get high as a giraffe and eat seven gorditas are heavily subsidizing customers who order in-app. Along the way, they are losing their sense of economic reality, believing things are rapidly getting a lot more expensive than they actually are.

And there you have it folks— the quarterback of the free world will be determined by whether or not a few swing voters in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan have the McDonalds app installed when they decide to crush a quarter pounder after a few beers.

I’m sticking with my prediction from January— when the dust settles Biden wins against all odds with 279 electoral votes.

Amazonia 

My quick take on the current thing in the Amazon ecosystem

Direct to China: Much like Frank Lucas did in the heroin trade five decades ago, Amazon has cut out the middleman, launching a marketplace that will ship direct from china. Andy Jassy, American gangsta.

When the news first broke, I wrote on LinkedIn that this feels like some “Day 3 shit” and I stand by the position. While I generally assume that Amazon is playing three moves ahead of the competition, this does not feel like a move made from a position of strength.

Amazon is on defense here against Temu and Shein, a position it does not often find itself in. Temu simply gives Amazon existential fits like no company has before because they can run the Amazon playbook on easy mode. In the most reductionist form, Amazon’s dominance is due to the fact that it was able to sustain massive losses to chase top line growth. To pull this off, Amazon had to convince Wall Street to reimagine the entire framework it used to evaluate retail businesses. If Pinduoduo (Temu’s parent company) runs low on cash, they can simply remind the powers that be in Beijing of the geopolitical value of getting American shoppers hooked on a Chinese owned marketplace.

If Amazon operated at a sane scale, it might choose to just abandon the boondoggle of chasing cheap, unprofitable commodity products altogether. Let the Chinese have a brutal, low margin business that fills our landfills (and balls?) with microplastics—we’ve got drones, AI and the cloud infrastrucutre that powers the world to build. Amazon Basics has always been a controversial business inside Amazon with several executives feeling that it’s a needless, low margin regulatory magnet whose main benefit is providing kindling for Lina Khan’s fire. Exploiting a loophole in the US regulatory ecosystem to further enrich Chinese manufacturers at the expense of American small businesses is unlikely to win brownie points in Washington.

Of course, Amazon can’t think this way— it’s a $2 trillion business that needs to capture Chinese factory business to continue feeding the beast. Or more accurately, Amazon doesn’t want to think this way. The Bezosian ethos lives on; any end short of the total domination of global commerce is insufficient.

As I type this, Amazon’s stock is at all-time highs.

Dispatches from America

The current vibe across the land

“Our Asshole”: When I first started my career in tech in 2015, the era of hyper indulgence was at its apex. Dropbox had happy hours with steak and whiskey every Friday that seemingly anyone could get into. But in the orgy of VC cash and unbridled tech optimism that defined the first half of the 2010s, no company was more widely revered than Uber.

Within months, the vibe would shift as a wealth of negative press would envelop Uber, portraying Travis Kalanick as the consummate tech bro and in retrospect, largely making him a fall guy for a shift of institutional power to tech companies that society was not yet ready for. Through it all, most Uber employees were steadfast in rallying behind their leader. I remember chatting with one reasonably new and junior Uber employee amidst the worst of the backlash against Travis. His response said it all:

“Objectively speaking, he’s probably an asshole but he’s OUR asshole.”

So too is the current Silicon Valley sentiment on Donald Trump. Much ink has been spilled about a so-called Trumpian wave sweeping the tech ecosystem but I don’t really think that’s what is happening here. As noted by Mike Solana in Pirate Wires, actual donations from tech power brokers to right wing politicians have barely increased. But more importantly, it’s not so much Silicon Valley as the former president who has changed.

The media is notoriously awful at covering Trump’s actual policy positions partially because covering the soap opera is more profitable and partially because the man himself often seems unclear on what he believes. Thus, Matt Stoller does the lord’s work in this piece, meticulously tracking Trump’s retreat from attacking big business.

The Trump of 2016 was a swashbuckling renegade who posed a real threat to all forms of institutional power, corporate or otherwise. The Trump of 2024 is, at least policy wise, a fairly conventional big business Stooge. Maybe Peter Thiel predicted this all those years ago when he made himself a pariah to back the former President.

The main thing that has changed about the technology business from 2016 to 2024 is simply how much more institutional power the industry has. The five largest companies in the world are all technology firms—there’s no such thing as bigger business.

Donald Trump is simply not a threat to that. So they kiss the ring.

Once again, Happy 4th of July! If you’re so inclined, shoot me back a quick note to tell me what you’re grilling this weekend. My backyard is mostly out of commission during my home renovation so I live vicariously through you all.

This post was originally published in Sherwood News (the media arm of Robinhood) on Monday. Usually when I write a guest column for another outlet, I republish my original “Mikey’s version” draft here to get my most unfiltered and irreverent thoughts in front of you all.

But in this case, I really think the Sherwood team made the piece unequivocally better so I’m publishing exactly as it appeared there with my own cut at a headline. Some bonus commentary on Cannes and the proverbial cocktail recipe follows the piece. I welcome and encourage your banter always at mikemallazzo@gmail.com 

The image Sherwood picked for me. Back to DALL-E next time

For years, the success of the two largest consumer-tech platforms in America — Amazon and Meta — moved in lockstep with the US retail entrepreneurs who relied on their services to grow. But with every passing day, the tech giants’ business has become increasingly decoupled from those US sellers and instead tied to China. 

Some US entrepreneurs are struggling on the platforms. Earlier this year, longtime Amazon reporter Jason Del Rey wrote about several sophisticated Amazon sellers who believe their businesses are facing “extinction” because of rising advertising costs and changes to storage-fee structures. Meanwhile, at Meta, direct-to-consumer sellers are experiencing weekslong performance glitches and diminishing returns for ads.

Despite the so-called apocalypse for American start-ups, both Meta and Amazon are notching record profits. A big reason? They’re benefiting from a huge influx of money from Chinese sellers, ranging from behemoths you’ve heard of like Temu to a huge pool of smaller sellers with names like — wait for it — NUTSAAKK. 

Chinese firms injected over $7 billion of revenue into Meta in 2023, fueled by the fast rise of Temu, according to analyst Brian Wieser. Temu was the top advertiser by revenue in 2023 for both Meta and Google. While Chinese firms account for only 10% of Facebook and Instagram total ad spend, they’re a huge growth engine:  money spent by Chinese entities doubled in a year where Meta overall saw 16% YOY revenue growth.

Just three years after Meta went on a comprehensive product and PR blitz built around American small and midsize businesses, its latest earnings call had only two core themes: AI and increased demand from China. 

Meanwhile, Amazon’s latest annual report cites a “significant” dependence on Chinese sellers, estimated by by Marketplace Pulse to account for roughly half of all third-party gross merchandise value and 25% to 30% of total e-commerce on the platform. For all the chatter about Temu in the investor and operator zeitgeist, the revenue generated from Chinese-owned businesses on Amazon with names like DOKOTOO and the aforementioned NUTSAAKK is orders of magnitude bigger.

American shoppers bought roughly $200 billion worth of products from Chinese-owned businesses on Amazon last year. This equates to roughly a net $70 billion that lands in Amazon’s pocket, not counting the money that Chinese brands spent advertising on Amazon. For comparison, the gross merchandise value of transactions on Temu totaled about $15 billion in 2023, with roughly 60% coming from the US.

Momentum Commerce data, as re-envisioned by Sherwood

If you’re looking for proof of concept on where Meta — and even Alphabet’s — advertiser base is headed, look no further than Amazon.

The most under-the-radar big-tech partnership inked in the last year is Amazon and Meta’s deal to integrate Buy With Prime into Facebook and Instagram ads. This partnership opens the floodgates for many Chinese Amazon-native sellers that historically haven’t advertised on Facebook and Instagram to now profitably see traffic from these platforms. 

While Temu is now pulling back spending in the US, Chinese-owned commerce writ large is not. The full power of Facebook is about to be unleashed for the long tail of Chinese-owned businesses. 

Fuel for investors, a squeeze for US sellers

From a stock-market investor’s perspective, this influx of Chinese brands is myopically good for Amazon, as it will be for Meta. Amazon’s cut of seller fees exceeded 50% for the first time in 2022, and Chinese operations have the gross margins to remain profitable while continuing to invest heavily in Amazon’s wildly lucrative advertising ecosystem. 

In a nutshell: when none of the cut is going to an American go-between, Amazon can juice its own take rate on every sale. “Your margin is my opportunity,” Jeff Bezos famously said. 

In both Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s letter to shareholders and Andrew Ross Sorkin’s softball interview that followed, there’s a glib dismissal of the American third-party seller that fueled Amazon’s rise, as if they are now an afterthought. 

Jassy comes off as almost purposely obtuse, as if understanding the minutiae of how seller fees work on the platform was a gauche position. This was best exemplified by his consistent emphasis on top-line GMV growth of independent sellers on Amazon and his quip that “sellers are making a lot more money selling on Amazon than they could on their own.” It’s an easy slip to make, but a clumsy one; whether or not sellers truly make money is not a function of their top-line growth, but rather their bottom-line paycheck, which is more squeezed than ever before. 

To be sure, the refrain that Meta and Amazon are broadly bad for American small business has been sung since practically the moment these platforms came online. Traditionally, it was a tired and reductionist trope — an attempt to arbitrarily add another populist appeal to the case for regulating big tech. Press darlings Hero Cosmetics, Zesty Paws, Simple Modern, HexClad, and True Classic are but a small fraction of companies that went from nothing to nine figures on the back of the historic hyper-growth opportunity that Meta and Amazon created.

In a sense, both platforms served as the outsourced innovation arm for stagnant American consumer-packaged-goods conglomerates. Brands like Native were spun up by talented entrepreneurs, rapidly scaled on Facebook ads and sold for nine figures in the amount of time it takes a Fortune 500 company to finish a PowerPoint deck.

Competitors alongside a Simple Modern water bottle.

You couldn’t profitably build a Zesty Paws from scratch in the US today — the prevailing cost per click of running an Amazon ad for dog supplements has risen roughly 10 times since its launch amid a morass of poorly policed offshore knockoffs, a particularly extreme example of a much larger trend. When I search for a Simple Modern water bottle, for example, I’m inundated with ads for direct-from-China operations with names like BJPKPK or Konokyo, which sell on razor-thin margins at less than half the cost.

Simple Modern can sustain the assault because they’ve spent years building a powerful brand moat. But Chinese brands are rapidly building the same brand-equity firewall, garnering significant brand recall among American shoppers who now seek out their products in search. Whether they build these brands through intricate artistry or just by brute-force flooding the zone with ads is no matter; the end result is the same.

Why should we care? 

So if you aren’t an emergent brand that sells products via Amazon or Meta, what does it matter if Chinese firms dominate the platforms? Here, I’d ask two slightly different questions: whom exactly do Meta and Amazon answer to, and whom does their broader growth now serve?

For the everyday American consumer, the net result of Facebook’s algorithms being less effective for DTC brands and Amazon squeezing sellers will be a significant increase in the price of consumer goods sold by American-owned companies. To remain profitable, brands will have to raise prices a lot, outpacing the current rate of inflation. By and large, shoppers may not have much choice but to bear the brunt of this cost if they want to buy from American companies.

This is particularly interesting because FTC Chair Lina Khan’s lawsuit against Amazon is being brought as a pretty conventional antitrust case that, at its core, argues that Amazon’s monopoly power raises prices for consumers. On the surface, Amazon Senior Vice President of Global Public Policy & General Counsel David Zapolsky’s smugly confident response to the complaint seems to parry this well with a grand patriotic through line about how 500,000 independent businesses selling on Amazon creates American jobs and keeps prices low for American consumers. If the government can prove that Amazon’s steadily increasing take rate forces American sellers in particular to raise prices to run sustainable enterprises, Khan can win the case on highly traditional antitrust grounds. 

For now, we’re left with a peculiar arrangement. Amazon and Meta stock are among the largest holdings in pension funds, American municipality investments, 401(k)s, and popular ETFs. Tens of millions of Americans depend on Amazon and Meta going up to fund their mortgages, childcare, and retirements. By extension, everyday Americans now have a vested interest in the success of Chinese factory operations over American small business. 

In the coming quarters, the most important story in technology and geopolitics will be the degree to which “made, sold, and marketed by China” and the decline in profitable growth for American start-ups prove to be directly causal.

In early 2018, CB Insights ran a poll asking readers which stock was the best bet to buy and hold for 10 years. Alibaba won in a final four that also included Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. The stock is down more than 60% since. Alibaba never crossed the chasm of selling directly to the American consumer and paid an existential price for it. KWEB, an ETF tracking popular Chinese internet stocks, is down more than 70% from its high-water mark in 2021 as sentiment increases that China, in and of itself as a closed ecosystem, is “uninvestable.”  

Suffice to say, Chinese enterprises and the biggest American tech companies need each other to grow. It’s those pesky little American start-ups on the outside looking in.

Amazonia 

My quick take on the current thing in the Amazon ecosystem

The Prodigal Son Heads to Cannes: Many of the richer, more successful, and more reverent people in my professional orbit are in Cannes this week while I am not. There’s a lesson there in taking yourself seriously that I’m going to choose to ignore.

Of course, the real Lady Whistledown at this year’s ball is Amazon who has a whole ass port + villa called A’Maison. The incredibly original play on words notwithstanding, A’Maison is really just the Amazon exhibition for the mere commoners. There’s a massive yacht rented for the real big dogs because well…there’s always a bigger boat.

More than anything else, I find it poetic that Amazon is embracing the inanity of Cannes at precisely the same moment that Jeff Bezos has discovered his alter-ego as a true Cuban lothario in Miami. Amazon will be forever shaped in Jeff’s image and if he’s finally gonna live like Pitbull, so too must his firm. They are two parts of the same being.

At some level, I have no problem with any of this. What’s the point of making fuck you money if you ain’t gonna fuck? With the government’s case still over a year away and any notion of antitrust still feeling like a Leviathan that is permanently out to sea, Amazon has won in every sense of the word. But is there any joy in being the victor if you don’t savor the spoils?

However, it’s hard to marry the riviera orgy with the cold realities of the layoffs occurring in many of Amazon’s business units. In particular, a company founded on the principle of customer obsession is slashing down to the bone in its customer experiece organization…..while directors and above get treated to a private Foo Fighters concert. 

If everything could ever feel this real forever. If anything could ever be this good again.

Cocktail of the Week: The Guarnaschelli

One of my favorite projects on the internet is Delia Cai’s Hate Read. The concept is exactly as it sounds—each writer gets a soapbox to absolutely rail on the thing they hate most. If Cai ever blesses me with the chance to grace her pages, I have but one submission. I aboslutely hate how the entirety of culinary media in the United States has been subsumed by Alex Guarnaschelli.

Look, I don’t know Guarnaschelli personally— she may well be a wonderful person and my ire here is mostly directed at the Food Network producers. But holy hell, the character that Food Network created is an aboluste affront to the craft of cooking entertainment. Food Network Guranaschelli is like if you trained an LLM exclusively on the Rachael Ray cookbook, taught it to be human by having it shadow the worst PTA mom at your kid’s school and then gave it the charisma of Ron DeSantis. So it gives me no joy to say that her Spiked Earl Grey Lemonade is sublime and should be your drink of the summer.

Simply double the vodka (to cope with drawing inspiration from the most reductionist Food Network crap imaginable) and cut the sugar in half and you’ll be set for any barbecue.

• 1 cup granulated sugar

• 9 earl grey tea bags

• A fifth of vodka

• 1 ½ cups lemon juice (about 10 lemons)

• One additional lemon sliced thin for garnish

Make your sweet tea, let it cool, add the vodka and lemonade and serve over a lot of ice while lamenting the current state of mass market cable television.

Thanks as always for hanging out. Got a week at the Rockaway Beach Hotel coming up soon so please send me any strong summer beach reads.

Today’s column is an interview with Dana Mattioli, author of “The Everything War”, a meticulous and jaw dropping account of Amazon’s quest to fundamentally reset the limits of corporate power. The book comes after investigating the company for five years at the Wall Street Journal where she is the newspaper’s lead Amazon reporter. Dana is an eighteen year veteran reporter at the Journal across the retail, M & A and technology beats with a heavy focus on investigative pieces.

I’ve been writing columns about Amazon’s thirst for hegemony since 2017 and the book is chock full of page turning stories I was wholly unfamiliar with. I won’t spoil any specifics but the Everything War is more page turning thriller than classic business story. In the same way that The Power Broker perfectly captured the zeitgeist of how one man reshaped America in his image in the mid 20th century, The Everything War tells that story in the internet age…with Bezos making Robert Moses look like a mere amateur. 

You can purchase The Everything War here at Bookshop or if you’d love to bask in the cognitive dissonance, here on Amazon. 

Mallazzo: Let’s start with the early years. So much of Amazon’s dominance is rooted in the fact that they convinced Wall Street to tolerate steep losses on the prospect of future growth……an absurd notion for a retailer at the time. In that regard, early CFO Joy Covey (who was killed in 2013 by a van carrying Amazon delivery packages) seems like the most important employee in Amazon’s history as she primarily sold Wall Street the dream.

Why isn’t she a household name in Silicon Valley and broader American business lore?

Mattioli: Employees from those early years told me that without Joy and Jeff’s salesmanship during the company’s IPO that Amazon would likely not exist today. It might not have even made it a year past its IPO.

They did something that was incredibly unusual at the time – they convinced Wall Street that Amazon should not be valued based on its earnings, but on its growth. That’s common today, but was not by any means back in 1997. And this gave Amazon this incredible lifeline. They could undercut competitors on pricing to steal market share, they could reinvest in growth without having to manage to Wall Street. Their competitors, meanwhile, had to hit their earnings targets every single quarter or risk going bankrupt. This meant that their competitors couldn’t even get enough money from their boards of directors to properly start an ecommerce arm.

There’s a scene in the book that is pretty telling. Gerry Storch, then a senior Target executive, gets yelled at by Target management for spending $10,000 on a web domain address for Target. So Covey and Bezos’s ability to go for years without profits created this strategic advantage over the rest of retail that just created a wider and wider delta between Amazon and everyone else. (This paired with a tax loophole that allowed Amazon not to collect sales tax in many states for as recently as 2017 was deadly for a lot of retailers.)

I think Joy’s involvement in training Wall Street in those early years is really underappreciated. Without that foresight and salesmanship, Amazon would likely not be the company it is today.

Mallazzo: One of my favorite little telling details in the book is how often Amazon PR/comms goes out of their way to object to fairly innocuous depictions of Bezos being “ruthless” or “belligerent” in incidents from decades ago. Amazon didn’t respond to many of the sweeping exposes in the book– any idea why they specifically dug their heels in here?

Mattioli: The book has a number of exclusive anecdotes that show the extent to which one of the world’s richest people can be remarkably petty and thin skinned. This includes Bezos calling up the new CEO of Toys R Us during his first week of work and asking “How’s it feel to work with poor performing people?” to telling a fellow CEO “Your margin is my opportunity.”

In later years as Bezos’s profile rose, he urged his deputies to use a combative stance with politicians and reporters that often backfired and led to some high-profile own goals, like Twitter spats with Joe Biden and members of Congress. Amazon’s team botched government relations in Washington, D.C., with a pugnacious Bezos often sabotaging the company’s efforts because his snap reaction was to fight with those who criticized him or the company. Amazon survived four years of a Trump White House where the president continuously attacked Bezos and Amazon only to be spurned by the Biden administration which deemed Bezos “too toxic to touch.”

I think Amazon’s responses in the book specifically to unflattering anecdotes about Jeff reflects this combativeness that you see throughout the book and this broader personality trait of Bezos being very sensitive to personal criticism, even if some of the things they push back on are dated and less consequential than the truly shocking behavior in the book related to the company’s business practices.

Mallazzo: By the time the FTC’s case against Amazon officially goes to trial, Jeff Bezos will be five years removed as Amazon CEO. That said, the trial could serve as a major referendum on his legacy. How much do you get the sense he’ll be puppet mastering parts of Amazon’s defense vs. stepping aside and letting Andy Jassy and David Zapolsky run the show?

Mattioli: I don’t think he will be a puppet master here, because as the book shows, Bezos was a) horrible at DC interactions and b) didn’t like spending his own time on lobbying and courting politicians.

That being said, while he won’t orchestrate the company’s response, his broader legacy is the culture he created at Amazon. I think that some of the predatory behaviors in my book are driven by the company’s culture. I have covered companies for nearly 18 years at the WSJ and I have never encountered such an aggressive and cutthroat culture as I have at Amazon ( and I used to cover investment banks!) They use stack ranking, they backload stock and there is a real fear of being axed. This is a pressure cooker that causes some employees to do whatever they can to stay ahead and keep their jobs. Even if Jassy wanted to change the culture – and I am not sure he does – it would take years to reverse the ways that Amazon employees are conditioned to behave and to win. And in the meantime, I think that could result in more problematic and anticompetitive behavior.

If you’re auditioning for your job each day against equally brilliant coworkers, it could be hard to resist taking a look at data you’re not supposed to see and copying a product. It could be difficult to “forget” intelligence you learned in deal talks and not use it in your own product. It could be hard to kick sellers off your website selling dangerous goods since they are padding your numbers.

Mallazzo: While cynicism dripped throughout the media industry over Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, the paper actually did reasonably well under his ownership (for a time) with minimal signs of overt intervention from the boss.

Was there ever a real Amazon information flywheel play for Bezos in owning the Washington Post or do you still mostly take him at face value that this was an earnest investment in preserving a pillar of the fourth estate?

Mattioli: This is the rare instance of a billionaire buying a newspaper and not trying to exert political influence. From what everyone has told me about Bezos’s ownership of The Post, he does not meddle in the journalism. But, that doesn’t mean that the perception of owning it for the wrong reasons hasn’t hurt him.

Some of the funnier parts of the book related to reporting out the pissing matches between then-president Trump and Bezos. For Trump’s part, he couldn’t imagine a world in which a rich person would buy a newspaper and not use it to attack his enemies. So, he viewed every investigation and negative article from The Washington Post during his time at the White House as a direct assignment from Bezos to the Post’s reporters, which was entirely not the case in reality. So, between being jealous of Bezos’s wealth (a scoop in the book) and the Post’s negative coverage of his White House, Trump attacked Bezos, The Post and Amazon publicly and in tweets for four years.

Anthony Scaramucci even told me recently that in his short tenure at the White House (just ten days) the President called him into the office and asked him: “Can we break up Amazon? I hate this son of a bitch Jeff Bezos and I hate the Washington Post."

Mallazzo: THE MOOCH ENTERS THE CHAT! The Post lost $77M last year so maybe even the most relentless business genius of our age isn’t cut out for the media business 🙂 

Swiching gears, The US Amazon seller community is always something of a mercurial lot but current frustrations with the platform are at a boiling point. Any sense from your reporting whether improving the relationship with American sellers is seen as a core initiative? 

Mattioli: That dynamic with sellers is truly a love-hate relationship. It’s interesting, I think at the senior levels of the company, executives truly don’t understand how hard it is for their own sellers and they view it as a really rosy relationship. What I found while investigating the company for this book is that many sellers feel like they are caught on this hamster wheel where every year the economics for them get worse and the economics for Amazon get better. There are scenes in the book where Amazon’s private brands employees are literally spying on their third-party sellers to copy their products for Amazon Basics because of the pressure cooker culture at Amazon. We also show the human toll for sellers of being beholden to one platform. Forty percent of everything sold online in the U.S. is on Amazon.com. There are 200 million Prime members worldwide. Sellers have to be on Amazon, and Amazon knows that. That means that Amazon has been able to steadily increase its cut of what sellers make on the website. A decade ago, on average, Amazon took 19% of every dollar a seller made. Today, Amazon takes 45%. That’s made things untenable for a lot of sellers while only bolstering Amazon’s bottom line.

There’s an example in the book that really paints this picture. This seller took over his Dad’s Ohio-based business which sells items like industrial-sized buckets. He wants to bring it to the digital age so he puts it on Amazon, and they get orders from all over the country, which seems great. But after all of Amazon’s fees, from advertising to logistics to Amazon’s cut, the $10 million in revenue he makes on Amazon.com dwindles down to just $30,000 in profits. He is floored by how little he actually makes at the end of the day and basically says he can make more as an Uber driver. That dynamic is playing out all over Amazon.com with sellers.

Mallazzo: Much of the challenge for independent American sellers is the exponentially increasing cost of PPC, something that is exacerbated by Amazon’s laissez faire attitude towards grey-hat tactics used by Chinese sellers and occassional direct manipulation of the marketplace to box out rival brands.

You’ve done a ton of excellent reporting on Amazon’s manipulation direct keyword blacklisting of key competitors in particular, a blatant anticompetitive practice.

Why do you think Amazon’s ad manipulation has flown relatively under the radar from an antitrust perspective compared to things like Amazon Basics and buy box suppression?

Mattioli: When the Federal Trade Commission or Department of Justice bring forward a lawsuit, they have to make a cohesive argument, and it can’t be a kitchen sink sort of case where they throw in every anticompetitive or problematic behavior they’ve found. When it comes to the FTC case against Amazon, the agency alleges that Amazon is an illegal monopoly, and they focused on a very narrow set of behaviors related to Amazon’s ecommerce power and how that has resulted in higher prices for customers on Amazon.com but also the rest of the internet.

This case is a pretty classic “consumer welfare” lawsuit, which is how the last 40-something years of antitrust law has been interpreted, even though FTC chair Lina Khan has railed against just judging competition based on prices for consumers. To me it signals that the FTC is being more careful in its lawsuit against Amazon. The agency had some pretty big losses in tech where it relied on more novel antitrust theories. This one relies on a standard of enforcement that the courts have recognized in more recent history.

Mallazzo: And therein lies the dilemma facing Lina Khan— she’s making a consumer welfare case against an institution that is broadly still among the most popular in America. Politically speaking, Amazon has always enjoyed considerable bipartisan support from the more moderate (well, really corporate) politicians on both the left and the right while facing sharp criticism from both parties populist factions.

Who creates more headaches for Amazon internally– AOC type figures on the left or Josh Hawley on the right?

Mattioli: For a very long time Amazon (and Big Tech more broadly) had been welcomed with open arms in D.C. The Obama administration was notoriously chummy with technology companies, and these companies were celebrated for being innovative garage startups that were major employers and bastions of innovation. But more recently, there has been this techlash where politicians and even consumers have grown wary of the effects of these companies.

One of the strangest things about reporting out this book was how in such a fractured political landscape where Democrats and Republicans pretty much agree on nothing, they agree that Amazon is too big. Antitrust is an area with bipartisan support. We saw that with Congress’ bipartisan investigation into Big Tech and we even see that now with the FTC case. There are republicans that call themselves “Khan-servatives” who back Lina Khan. This is an area where Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren actually agree with Matt Gaetz and JD Vance. Where Biden and even Trump have some common ground.

Mallazzo: In 2016, Amazon banked on a Clinton presidency and was highly fearful of Trump’s vitriol against the company. But the political landscape has shifted since then with Trump softening towards big tech and Biden showing some antitrust zeal.

Who do you think Amazon is quietly pulling for in the 2024 election?  

Mattioli: It’s a really good question and I don’t think they have great prospects on either side of this. In 2020, Amazon was really hopeful that a Biden presidency would be more positive for them after four years of Trump publicly bashing Bezos and the company. Amazon had hired Obama press secretary Jay Carney to head up public relations and government relations and he had worked for then-VP Biden and had great relationships. But. the last four years under Biden, have arguably been worse than under Trump. While Trump was mostly rhetoric and vitriol, Biden has taken action. He picked Amazon’s biggest foe, Lina Khan, to head the agency regulating Amazon. Biden has been notoriously pro-union while Amazon has tried to suppress union efforts. Biden’s White House has also shunned Bezos. There are scenes in the book where Carney is pretty much begging his friends in the Biden White House to invite Bezos to events and round tables and they won’t, because as one aide put it: “It’s so much easier to have conversations with someone who’s not out there kicking the shit out of you.”

Then, there’s Trump who has openly called Amazon a monopoly. I spoke to Peter Navarro for the book and in addition to calling Bezos a “sociopath” he said that a second Trump term would have resulted in a break up of Amazon. I don’t think either White House will welcome the company with open arms.

Dispatch From America

My quick take on the most interesting current slice of Americana

The CCP Hires Some Consultants: While I go back and forth on whether the prodigal Scott Galloway is a good pundit, his 2019 theory that SoftBank was a CIA operation to funnel $90B from Riyadh into Western democracies will forever be at the top of my jealousy list as the piece I wish I had written.

Turns out Masayoshi Son has some competition for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In an unbridled act of national service that has garnered minimal headlines, McKinsey has been quietly advising the Chinese military under the front of an operation called the “Urban China Initiative.” Sensing that the United States military has become overly bureaucratic and vulnerable agianst a more agile foe, the consulting firm heroically stepped up to the plate. Instead of advancing its military capabilities, the People’s Liberation Army will spend the next decade sifting through 2,500 slide Powerpoints trying to figure out what the fuck MECE means.

For years, reasonable people have wondered how the firm could remain under endless investigation with nobody going to jail for its role in getting millions of Ameicans addicted to painkillers. Now we know— the Justice Department swallowed its pride realizing the invaluable role that a bunch of 23 year olds with khakis and Harvard degrees could play in shaping the next century of geopolitics. Who says smart people should build things?

Cocktail of the Week: The Creamsicle Screwdriver

There’s no genre of cocktail making that I find quite as satisfying as introducing people to upscale versions of drinks they think they hate because they’ve only had the $10 plastic handle Vodka version of them. Immediately, the screwdriver comes to mind. When made with just vodka and shitty store bought orange juice, screwdrivers are cut out for little else besides the 8AM sorority tailgate. You’re a grown-ass adult now, you can do better.

However, with a little bit of love and the simple introduction of a rum floater, the drink transforms into the piece de resistance of brunch cocktails. Here’s how it’s done:

• 3 oz. FRESH SQUEEZED Orange Juice

• 1.5 oz. vodka (i’ve been using Luksosowa recently which I think is a really good value at ~$17 for a fifth)

• .5 oz. Diplomatico Rum

• Bar spoon of vanilla extract

• Few dashes on Angostrua bitters

Squeeze your oranges, add vodka and stir like you usually would. Then, mix the rum, vanilla and bitters and carefully float the mixture over the top of the drink. The relative difference in buoyancy here makes this a pretty easy float that doesn’t need much technique. Sip and savor the subtle transition from vanilla to orange.

Thanks as always for reading. And because we live in the greatest country in the world, you can book Anthony Scaramucci on Cameo for $57. I love you all.

A hearty hello to 34 new subscribers who have joined since I last published. Those are some pretty weaksauce growth numbers on my part so I’m extra thankful to those of you who joined this week.

This week’s post originally appeared here in Future Commerce. If you’re in New York and want to attend the premeire event on the intersection of culture and commerce, I highly recommend grabbing a ticket their Visions summit at MOMA on June 11. Absolute steal for $99.

For a more explicitly Amazon-centric version of this post, please see here for a guest column I penned in Jon Elder’s Amazon Insiders newsletter. If you own or work for a business that sells on or competes with Amazon, I hope you already subscribe.

This is half macro thinkpiece, half tactical growth scheme of mine with a call to action pertinent to my day job at Forum Brands. Getting back to our usual format, an Amazon news round-up and a cocktail recipe follows at the end of this post.

The Future team’s creative > my usual DALL-E game

Amidst the macro resurgence of Shopify, Meta, and Amazon stock, there’s only one motif reverberating among all eCommerce operators:

The CAC is too damn high. 

Outside of these geniuses who have managed to take a $9 Alibaba Dyson dupe, sell it for $100 on TikTok Shop, and arb a $100M+ run rate TikTok shop business in less than one year, the hacky arbitrage era is over in online commerce and we don’t really know what will come next. 

Despite the short-term pain, I believe this is a healthy development for commerce. As I wrote in “After Arbitrage”

The pre-iOS 14.5 playbook took too much panache and pageantry out of brand building; exiling creative raconteurs in favor of growth hackers. It also made building a brand largely a single-player exercise, a solo video game an entrepreneur played with and sometimes against the Facebook and Amazon algorithms.

At its best, commerce is a collaborative endeavor, an MMORPG, if you will, that merchants play and win together. If there’s a platinum lining in CAC’s becoming unsustainable, it’s that the next decade of commerce will be made multiplayer out of necessity, where brands work together to split the cost of customer acquisition.

We’re seeing the infancy of this trend in post-purchase recommendations and shared Facebook audiences via platforms like Disco and the quiet rise of Shopify Collectives. Soon, brands will be more actively sharing customer lists, running affiliate placements on each other’s blogs, and buying and selling highly performant inventory in each other’s newsletters as the convergence of content to commerce barrels ahead. In time, a truly decentralized retail media network for Shopify feels like a sure bet and could prove to finally pose a threat to Amazon’s hegemony. I know it ain’t the glamorous stuff you want to build but the rebels need cheaper performant ad inventory, Tobi and Harley. The days of outsourcing that job to Zuck will end gradually, then suddenly. 

The First Step

Four entities in and around commerce have true scale: Google, Facebook, Amazon, and TikTok. Yes, yes, set aside the thread of Temu and Shein for a moment. Until you are north of $10M at a minimum, the only growth hacks and partnerships that move the needle are those that directly reduce CAC in driving traffic from these platforms. Everything else is mostly a distraction.   

Thus, the first tangible examples of multiplayer commerce will be in the form of partnerships where brands work together to increase the scale of profitable traffic they can drive from one of these platforms. A couple of months back, I went on the DON’T V LOOKUP podcast to propose a model for collective media buying. The rest of this column serves to explain this in more detail and to recruit partners for the effort. 

How it works: 

The basic idea here is very simple. I aim to build a consortium of brands that approach content-based affiliates with offers to underwrite the creation of new articles. With brands willing to pay commission rates of ~30%, affiliates can drive significant paid volume, increasing their profits and driving scale for brands at a 3-5X topline ROAS (more on how this math shakes out below).  

These partners will create high-quality content that features all of the products in a format that doesn’t directly rank the items or make any SKU out to be better than others in the list. The publishers here will be selective, only featuring items that they organically think are best in class or fit their broader content strategy. The end result will be articles with editorial framings like: 

• Best gifts for new moms   

• The 12 can’t-miss items with more than 10,000 5-star reviews 

• Six can’t-miss products that hit shelves last month 

• 25 best things you can buy on Amazon under $35

Done correctly, this is one of the last corners of digital marketing arbitrage left in our ecosystem, where brands can pay at a guaranteed (albeit aggressive) affiliate rate, and partners can drive a ton of scale by buying cheap, broad traffic. 

On the brand side, this is largely a variation of some common themes that have been prevalent in the industry for years. It’s essentially a mashup of advertorial-style landing page campaigns, social whitelisting, and conventional affiliate deals with content partners. At the end of the day, the core innovation here is simply being in it together with like-minded brands.

Buying traffic has been a part of the commerce media playbook for years. Several large publishing houses have quietly built high eight- and nine-figure businesses off of Google and Meta buying funded by affiliate commissions. But it has never been done collaboratively with a consortium of like-minded partners, ALL helping to foot the bill in one shot.

While the unit economics of paid traffic are getting tougher, savvy publishers are also driving historically high conversion rates, and with several brands kicking in a significant percentage of sales, there’s a tipping point that will allow publishers to buy orders of magnitude more paid traffic than they could just working with 1-2 partners on an article.  

The Media Partner Equation 

OK, so how the hell is this profitable for affiliate publishers?  Without going too much into the nitty-gritty, there are two variables here that make the unit economics particularly interesting for sophisticated publishers:

1. When publishers send paid traffic subsidized by brands to high-performing commerce articles, they earn not only increased affiliate commissions but also additional ad exposure and possibly even a pathway to more paid subscribers.

2. When brands are willing to send the traffic to Amazon specifically, publishers can receive full cart value on Amazon Associates commission + brand side incentives. If several brands are all adding generous incremental rates, you can see how the overall yield economics are VERY favorable. 

The real threat is the rate limit at which commerce media buyers can do direct deals. This is a volume and velocity game.  Rates that can be sourced through networks are way too low and doing one-off deals with brands is not scalable.

But it has never been done collaboratively with a guild of like-minded brands presenting a unified offer, radically shortening the deal flow. So let’s build one. 

Putting it to the Test

This is not strictly an academic post; I have media partners standing by waiting for me to bring them brands in addition to those owned by Forum. For this first run, here are the criteria of like-minded brands I’m looking to partner with: 

• Willing to send traffic to an Amazon PDP at 30%+ commission (ideally leveraging Amazon Attribution), where you will receive 10% back in brand referral bonus. Effectively, it’s net 20%...or a guaranteed 5X ROAS test. 

• <$50 AOV for most products you sell. I’m particularly excited to get a few $20-30  products into this test to challenge the prevailing wisdom going around eCommerce Twitter that it’s no longer possible to be profitable at this price point. 

• Reasonably short purchase funnel/lowish consideration impulse buy.  

• Strong Amazon conversion rate and fully optimized listings with strong copy, A+ content  

• ANY category will be considered, but I’d be most excited about parenting and wellness brands as there likely will be additional collaboration opportunities on other co-op growth dreams and schemes of mine :)

If I’ve piqued (for the love of god, not peaked) your interest, please fill out this Google Form. and I’ll be in touch. 

If this initial run is successful for all parties involved, I’d love to run many more like it off Amazon, both to Shopify listings and potentially other marketplaces. In general, higher AOV items will perform better in this model, so if we can drive scale at the $30 price point, imagine what we can do together with upmarket brands. 

What starts as simple collaborations on affiliate partnerships will be the spark that ignites a much broader fire in how we think about partnerships living at the center of customer acquisition. Overall, my endgame here is to create something of a modern-day guild among like-minded brands that could comprise broader shared media buying, audience & data swaps, multiplayer loyalty programs, joint newsletter ad deals, and possibly even publishing houses built together by eCommerce operators.

Let’s go build the future of multiplayer commerce. 

Amazonia & Dispatches From America

My quick take on the week’s most interesting stories in the Amazon ecosystem & beyond

180 Million Members: As Amazon prepares to release the second season of “The Rings of Power” later this year, let me just say uneqivocally that are no words in Elvish, Dwarvish or the tongues of men for how absolutely insane it is that Prime surpassed 180M US shoppers in this quarter’s earnings report, growing at 8% year over year.

If either presidential candidate could just get half of Amazon Prime members to vote for him in 2024, that man would win the popular vote by 8-10 points.

The Everything War: Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Mattoli dropped her long awaited novel on Amazon’s quest to remake corporate power— I’m about halfway through and it does not disappoint. The book received a wealth of advance and post release praise including from the one and only Anthony Scaramucci. As a side note, Mattoli, Mallazzo and Scaramucci sound like three ambulance chasers from Bensonhurst who would defend the Gambino crime family and I’m so here for it.

We’ll have a Q & A here with Dana here as soon as I power through the rest of the book this week 🙂 

For now, you can snag the book here at Bookshop or if you’d love to bask in the irony, here on Amazon.  

Patriot Games: If you haven’t seeen Nikki Glaser’s abolsutely sublime roast of Tom Brady on Netflix yet, what can I say? Head over to Twitter, find the clip, and crank it in the office on full volume. Nikki Glaser and Eli Manning— the heroes America needed.

While Glaser stole the show, I’m still in absolute awe of the stunning image rehabilitation of Bill Belichick since his unceremonious departure as Patriots head coach. In the last few months, this man has gone from being the soulless, demonic spawn of Darth Sidious and Newman to a fairly likable, half-drunk uncle. For all the talk of Mark Zuckerberg’s stunning PR turnaround, thepublicist Coach hired deserves an even bigger raise.

Cocktail of the Week: The Aviation

Amidst the grand revival of pre-war cocktails, the prettiest pony of the bunch has yet to have her revival tour. My dear friends, it’s up to you. Let’s make 2024 the year of the hot boy aviation summer.

My riff on the classic cocktail uses the usual ingredients but in slightly different proportions than the barkeep’s manual.

• 2 oz. Dorothy Parker Gin

• ½ oz. Luxardo Maraschino Liquer

• 2/3 oz. fresh squeezed lemon

• 1/2 oz. Creme de Violette

Per tradition, Dorothy Parker is my choice of gin but any classically botanical forward swill will do. No substitue for Luxardo and fresh squeezed lemon here- do the right thing. Of course, the star of the show is that bizarre purple floral mixture. Give it a chance to shine.

In general, I’m absolutely militant about cutting back the sweetness in classic cocktails. In general, you’ll find me slashing simple syrup and sugary tinctures with nearly the same reckless abandon as any savvy cook has when they triple the garlic or vanilla in a recipe. But here, I actually amp up the Creme de Violette above the classic proportions. You’re making a purple drink— if it isn’t Smoke on the Water deep purple and doesn’t immediately evoke running through a field of violet wildflowers, what’s the point? You wanna hear Tom Petty sing the chorus when you lift it to your lips.

As always, shake like your life depends on it and enjoy.

If you’ve made it through all 2,235 of these words, forward this along to a friend who likes growth, democracy, or a good stiff drink.

We’re soooo back— welcome to 76 new subscribers who joined us since I last published.

When you write a blog called United States of Amazon and the president signs a bill that could potentially upend both commerce and US-China relations, it warrants pouring a couple of late night armagnacs and tickling the laptop keys. So here goes…..

This is a quick turn column so no Amazon news roundup or cocktail recipe this week. I love you all but I’m just some guy with a full time job, precocious kid, and stalled out housing rennovation that is draining my life force writing on an arbitrary two hour deadline I set for myself and this was the best I could do ❤️ 

“Tik-Tok, time’s up” in the style of Salvador DALL-E

Well, it happened folks. Late Tuesday night, the Senate approved a bill that nestles the forced divestiture of TikTok between $61B in aid to Ukraine, $26B to Israel and a nebulous little $8B of miscellaneous military-industrial complex spend to “counter China’s military might.” With apologies to Upton Sinclair, this is how the sausage gets made in Washington.

For all the hoopla, the legislation is sort of a nothingburger for the entrepreneurs who sell on TikTok. Brands that have invested heavily in TikTok Shop will have a few more quarters to operate on the platform while the legal process sorts itself out. TikTok Shop is highly unprofitable and can’t burn cash in perpetuity– the fees and take rate on the platform will only go up as the platform gets more commoditized. By the time TikTok is forced to divest or shut down, the arbitrage window on TikTok Shop and glory days of hypergrowth will be over anyway. Get it while you can, boys and girls.  

For the Biden administration, it’s a risky political gambit. Given the aforemetnioned lengthy legal and appeals process, Biden is unlikely to notch a major political win in the runup to the election. Even if Satya the dealgod swoops in and Microsoft buys TikTok and operates it in more or less the same manner minus emailing user data to Beijing, that would go down in 2025. If Bytedance plays hardball and loudly refuses to sell, Biden could be left holding the double shitbag of pissing off young, progressive voters who Democrats need to turn out AND looking far weaker in his ability to enforce his will against popular Chinese enterprises. Trump, who has mostly opposed the TikTok ban, would absolutely feast. Biden deserves credit for stubbornly and perhaps fooilshly carrying on. Once again, the Presdient proves that his best trait is not listenting to people on Twitter.

Tangential to the forced sale, there are a ton of juicy sub-narratives that have swirled around TikTok since the original House vote, mainly the quiet part that Tiktok loses money being forcefully said out loud. I’ve long posited that TikTok’s investment in Shop was largely a lobbying expense, a bet that centering its narrative around an emerging commerce marketplace and Shein/Temu competitor would seem less to regulators like an existential threat to democracy than the current iteration of the app. While I stand by that claim, the revelation that TikTok proper potentially loses BILLIONS of dollars suggests that even with a mainline to 170 million Americans, the foundation is less secure than it seems.

As I’ve joked before, I don’t know if I want TikTok banned because I’m an ardent patriot or just a crusty 31 year-old in CPG who doesn’t want to have to learn another social media platform. I don’t think my position is particularly unique—banning TikTok is a vibe more than a strict appeal to logos but it won over Congress at breakneck pace. While the legal case is tenuous, there’s a large consensus forming that half of Americans getting push notifications from the CCP, isn’t in a manner of speaking, the American way.

But overall, what has stood out the most to me about the movement to ban TikTok in the US is how it is making strange political bedfellows before our very eyes. As the never shy Matt Stoller quipped on Twitter, “the bizarre alignment of Trump, the ACLU, and far-left progressives in support of Chinese government control of American communications is amazing.”

One popular piece of internet discourse is that the TikTok ban is just a classic example of horseshoe theory, as both a far-left coalition led by AOC and a far-right coalition led by Marjorie Taylor Greene were among the no votes. This is the talk track for most who support the measure as it neatly positions support of the bill as the reasonable patriotic position shared by sensible folks on both sides of the aisle. Even if technically correct, I find this explanation highly unsatisfactory in appreciating the weirdness of what is going on.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, in voting yes on the original bill, all but 15 Republicans took a position that is in opposition to the current sentiment of the prevailing party lord. When is the last time that even one Republican who still wanted to have a long career in the GOP broke convincingly from the former president?

Unable to retreat to their familiar reductionist ideological tropes, our politicians and pundits alike are being forced to…….actually evaluate a complex subject on its merits and develop a viewpoint on the fly. There isn’t a clear “correct” tribal answer on what to do with TikTok and this is both breaking and rebuilding lot of political brains.

Furthermore, if you’re a politician simply trying to follow the lead of your constituents, you’ve spent much of the last weeks fielding calls from both teenagers and retirees alike who are hopelessly addicted to the platform. Irregardless of your ideological biases, there are two reasonable perspectives that you could derive after hearing this deluge of messages:

1) Holy shit, I can’t make these people quit TikTok cold turkey. Geopolitical implications be damned; my constituents love this product and it fills a real need in their life.

2) Our nation is slipping into a CCP controlled digital requiem for a dream and I need to take action immediately before its too late.

Two politicians who are dimaterically opposed on most third rail issues may find common ground on supporting the proverbial TikTok ban while two legislators who agree on almost everything else may find themselves landing on different sides of the TikTok line. This is good. Politics is supposed to be a god awful, hot mess of competing interests and lesser evils. The simpler and more certain it is, the dumber we get.

Democracy is a hell of a drug.

One final appeal— if you’ve subscribed recently and we don’t know each other personally, reply to this note and say hey. I’d love to hear your thoughts on TikTok as I try to formulate my own.

Haven’t written here in a minute— been busy at the day job and have a couple exciting pieces in the works for some much larger newsletters in the space. Cheers to ~150 new folks who have joined since I last published. As more folks serendipitously discover United States of Amazon, I promise that this newsletter is truly about the biggest stories at the intersection of tech, commerce and democracy.

But every once in a while, I reserve the right to treat this as my own personal blog to just tell a story. So this edition is about a town, a large family and the fuckin’ callous assholes that tore it all to pieces. Per usual, the one thing you need to know in the Amazon ecosystem this week + a cocktail recipe follows.

A realist painting of an ominous sunset over Downtown Oakland by DALL-E

How can you not be romantic about baseball?

Today is Opening Day, the most immaculate spectacle of pure Americana. Irrational hope springs eternal on the crisp March breeze…everywhere except Oakland.

The Athletics limp into the season with a roster of dime store renegades assembled like a wardrobe exclusively bought on Shein. The most generous projections predict the team will lose 100 games. Their abomination of a stadium—which they may not even be able to play in after this season—still leaks sewage. Relations with fans are so fraught that the team has had to block replies on its official social media accounts. The highlight of the past three seasons is a certain misdemeanor that took place in the top row of section 334. The team’s owner is such a cynical affront to the American pastime that Ken Rosenthal quipped that his very existence “threatens the integrity of Major League Baseball as an industry.”

There’s little to say about the soulless ghoul behind the curtain that hasn’t been said already. Reliever Trevor May said it best in a rant worthy of Hunter S. Thompson:

So instead, I’ll tell a story about a kid from Long Island lost in the California wilderness and the family that took him in…..

My (now) wife and I landed in Oakland almost ten years ago, with no dream or cardigan but an untrained rescue bulldog that Kate shrewdly adopted weeks before we moved 3,000 miles from home. Our first stop was a bedroom in an Airbnb labeled by the owner as a “house in transition” for transients needing a place to crash for a month or two in the Bay, a fact we learned after we arranged the booking. Across the hall lived a 40 year-old guy whose engagement in Kansas City had fallen apart, prompting him to toss his dog in his truck and drive west, leaving his job, home and former life behind.

So here we were, starry-eyed 22 year olds fresh out of school shacking up in a commune with people in various stages of mid-life crisis with a dog dropping 2+ deuces a day on a stranger’s rug, being scolded for not knowing how the fuck to compost. Welcome to California, kid.

I had no real intention of staying in Oakland…..until we looked at one place in San Francisco, a basement apartment near Alamo Square that could only be decsribed as a long hallway with a kitchen at the end of it. Even in 2014, the rent was >$2,000— Kate and I laughed to each other wondeing who in their right mind would ever consider such a place at that price. As we were leaving, two young women walked in, took one look and basically offered to sell their pancreases to the broker to get the place.

Exasperated, we booked a late afternoon showing at an apartment complex in downtown Oakland. As fate would have it, the A’s had a 1PM day game and we had a few hours to kill. And so a love affair began.

I’d grown up a New York sports fan but my arrangment with the Yankees was always tenuous at best— I like nothing more than a plucky, gym rat underdog and the Evil Empire doesn’t exactly fit the bill. When we first showed up at Oakland Colosseum, I fell for it all. Amidst the crumbling microcosm of America’s infrastrucutre, I saw a far more zealous sports fandom than I could ever imagine. Our centerfield outfield section was maybe one-third full but it seemed the whole outfield knew each other. Furthermore, they knew the bartenders, the concession guys, the ushers…many of whom I’d learn later had worked at O. Co for decades. It was like I’d stumbled into someone’s living room masquerading as a baseball stadium.

Over the subsuquent two years, we went to many more A’s games in many other sections of the stadium and the same dynamic held. We brought our dog twice decked out in gear, once where she marked her turf on the centerfield warning track and then galavanted over for a photo opp with Sean Doolittle. Whenever we wanted, a $10 afternoon of great times with great people was at our beck and call.

Our story of course pales in comparison to the scores of families who grew up in the East Bay for generations, the kelly green and gold imprinted on their souls. But consider this, if the Oakland A’s greater family could leave this much of a mark on a callous kid from New York in just two years, imagine the holes left in the hearts of the true diehard fanbase that had been with this team through earthquakes and acts of God committed by Derek Jeter.

Watching A’s ownership go out of their way to gaslight both the elected representation of Oakland and core diehard fanbase has been one of the most mystifyingly and pointlessly cruel spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. It’s been a case study in the depraved distance from common humanity that only an ungodly amount of money can buy.

We only lived in Oakland for two years, in an apartment off of Lake Merritt. When we left, they charged the next tenants $600/mo more than we had paid. Looking at the price histories on places in Jack London Square or Temescal is a unique exercise in self flagellation for millennials— as recently as the early 2010s, $1M+ starter homes and luxury condos went for $200K.

Broadly speaking, Oakland is a fascinating paradox. Across its Overton window— which essentially ranges from center-left to fully left of the dial— nobody seems entirely happy with the direction things are going. At any given moment, the town seems on the verge of tearing itself apart with civil and often profoundly bizarre political strife. Mothers sit on the sidewalk with their children waiting for buses because a place that at times seems a caricature of the left has taken the progressive position of removing all of its benches. When I first returned a year after we moved, I was struck by the insane rate of turnover amongst businesses downtown.

Yet somehow, the quotidian vibes that permeate the joint are the best you’ll find anywhere. On a 60-75 degree sunny Sunday afternoon— more or less the weather 10 months out of the year— there’s truly no better place than the banks of Lake Merritt, swamp rats and all. Whether it is the greyhounds flowing at Van Kleef or Mad Oak, the chef at Abura-Ya leaving chicken in the fryer to come out and slap the bass at an impormptu block party or some weird punk ruck shit in a warehouse, the town just knows how to have fun.

The A’s, Raiders and Warriors were largely the glue that held the place together…..and now all will be gone. When the Warriors won their first title in 2015, dudes did donuts in Cadillacs downtown and poured bottles of champagne on a crowd, high-fiving cops less than a year removed from the Ferguson protests. During the victory parade, Marshawn Lynch and MC Hammer rode on a snail float that breathed fire.

The Warriors left all that and most of their diehard fans—largely working and middle class East Bay families who powered the WE BELIEVE run— to build a stadium that was slightly more convenient for venture capitalists to go to with their, very real, not at all paid for girlfriends. I’d say Fisher pulled a hold my beer with the A’s Vegas move but there’s no chance he drinks the peasant’s swill.

Over the last decade, several of baseball’s brightest young stars have come up through the Athletics farm system. The team has not made an earnest attempt to keep a single one.

In the summer of 2014, Billy Beane dealt young all-star and franchise centerpiece Yoenis Cespedes to the Red Sox for Jon Lester, a clear three month rental player who Oakland couldn’t afford to keep long term. In retrospect, this was the last desperate gambit from a man who knew he’d never again be afforded the luck and luxury to field a championship caliber team. As much of Beane’s Moneyball guile became commoditized, the A’s were reduced to a poverty franchise.

Lester got lit up by the Kansas City Royals in the wild card game, left in free agency for the Cubs and won the world series two years later. The A’s never again made a move that looked like it was done with winning in mind.

When Josh Donaldson signed as a free agent with the Toronto Blue Jays that offseason, he took out a full page ad in the Oakland Tribune, not so subtly implying that he would have done anything within reason to stay. He won the 2015 American League MVP in Toronto.

Now the A’s are moving to Vegas without any real, discernible plan for how to do so, a pawn in a billionaire failson’s quest to fulfill some sense of self-actualization on his fucked up hierarchy of needs. In his wake, thousands of fans for whom the Athletics are a way of life have to watch an eviscerated zombie of a franchise lose 12-3 to the Astros and Rangers night in and night out.

How can you still be romantic about baseball?

Amazonia 

My quick take on the week’s most interesting story in the Amazon ecosystem

Clinique, Welcome to Amazon: Estee Lauder launched Clinique on Amazon yesterday in a move that’s gotten shockingly little pickup in the retail press. The move is undoubtedly good for Amazon, a win for the American consumer and a smart time for Estee to swallow their pride and align with Amazon’s prestige beauty push.

Courting masstige FORTUNE 1000 holdouts, espeically in daily, routine based products is arguably more strategic for Amazon that heading off Temu at the pass downmarket. But while much is made of the deluge of Chinese sellers, rising fees and lax Amazon enforcement—and rightfully so—-an influx of big brand name holdouts entering the game presents plenty of challenges to Amazon native brands in the ecosystem.

Hero Cosmetics largely exists because of the temporary reluctance of big box drugstore beauty to fully ape into Amazon. With Clinique, Estee has both a massively established brand and gargantuan ad budgets to box out a new, more slightly upmarket version of Hero that might be getting cute ideas. Every day, the SMB American dream on Amazon gets a little bit harder.

Cocktail of the Week: The Cadillac Margarita

Every year, Brooklyn’s finest event, Margarita Rumble coincides with my birthday weekend. While they’ve cowardly reduced the number of margaritas from unlimited to 15 (we used to be a proper country), it’s still a great time.

At home, I have all kinds of margarita variants that I often whip up from watermelon basil to pitaya raspberry to a frozen avocado cialntro jam. But this week, I’m offering up my favorite riff on the classic. Let’s do it:

• 1 oz. tequila

• 1 oz. mezcal

• 1 oz. Combier (cheaper than Cointreau and equally good here)

• Tiny squeeze of fresh agave syrup

• Juice of one plump lime

• Floater of Armagnac poured over a spoon

Two notes here— I find the half tequila, half mezcal to be the ideal margarita mix. It still tastes classic but you get a kiss of smoke without overwhelming the expected flavor profile.

The traditional "cadillac” margarita floats with Grand Marnier which I find too sweet. That said, the silky richness of a cognac or armagnac on top of the acid of a margarita is just damn delightful. Is it stupidly indulgent or the mark of an aristocrat who like to party? Yes.

If you’ve made it this far on this roller coaster, a small ask. Please forward this to one other person who likes the Oakland A’s, commerce, technology or democracy….or hates dudes like John Fisher

Back to our regular(ish)ly scehduled programming next week

The following is a (slightly amended repost) of a guest column I ran last week in Jacob Donnelly’s outstanding publication, “A Media Operator.” If you are at all interested in the business of media, Jacob’s newsletter is an absoulte must.

This is the Mikey’s version— the draft I sent to Jacob before he prudently and expertly edited it down. I’m reposting here for two reasons:

1) I don’t think our audiences have much overlap so should be new for most of you . For those who have seen it before, you can now appreciate the value of a good editor.

2) Jacob cut one or two of my zingers that I want to bring into the world.

As always, “Amazonia” and a cocktail recipe follows.

A robot shops for a smartphone by DALL-E

As first reported by Axios, CNET is on the block, a marlin among relative minnows in the flurry of commerce media firesales. 

For Red Ventures, the time is right to swallow their pride and offload CNET to a strategic buyer that needs the jolt of panache that quality media provides. CNET’s core asset is brand and that brand erodes every day that it lives under the wrong steward. 

But the question remains– who would spend north of $200M to buy a media company with a chart that looks like this?

Existential angst around SEO-driven media is at an all-time high, putting search dependent media valuations at an all time low. If ever there was a right time to fade semantic search hype and place a contrarian that the core search experience is one of the “what won’t change in 10 years” Bezos isms, this is it. While renting 65% of your traffic is a precarious foundation, CNET’s value if leveraged correctly extends far beyond the 25 million eyeballs Google throws its way each month. 

To recenter their grand strategy back to the Geek Squad roots, build the best retail media platform in the space, and acquire the preeminent source of training data for an AI assisted shopping experience, Best Buy is the company that should make the move. Let’s dive into why. 

Overcoming inertia 

Nearly five years into CEO Corie Barry’s tenure, Best Buy is in a state of corporate ennui. The stock is up only 20% since January 2019— a timeframe where Walmart is up 68%, Amazon 85% and Target 90%. And for my favorite narrative violation, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Ulta, Tractor Supply and DICK’S Sporting Goods are all up more than 100% in that time span.  

When former CEO Hubert Joly first took the leadership post at Best Buy, he staked the retailer’s claim to remain relevant in Amazon’s world:

Ten years later, Best Buy is no longer meaningfully differentiated against any of these vectors. In the decade ahead, there are three existential challenges that Best Buy must solve and plugging in CNET addresses all of them. 

Re-centering the brand around expertise 

To still have a raison d’etre in the modern retail landscape, Best Buy’s brand has to be synonymous with consumer electronics expertise. Short of that, it’s a subscale retailer with near impossible margins and no cloud computing business attached to it.  

From a tactical perspective, this largely comes down to effectively answering the longtail of esoteric SEO queries poised by shoppers, the domain of commerce publishers. Post Google’s updates,  CNET– as a standalone entity owned by an arbitrage driven media consortium– has less unique value. But CNET– as a repository of high quality content– can accelerate Best Buy’s suddenly very realistic efforts to own page 1 of Google and whatever version of search may follow.  

Both chasing the same consumer search trends, Best Buy’s merchandising strategy has followed in lockstep with a lot of new product areas CNET covers, including skincare, furniture and parenting gadgets. There’s a whole top nav header on Best Buy’s website titled “Yes, Best Buy Sells That.” Here and perhaps only here, Red Ventures’ thirsty expansion of the brand into questionable adjacent verticals could prove a feature, not a bug as CNET’s archive of expertise extends to the vast majority of the Best Buy catalog. 

Growing a best in class retail media platform.  

More importantly, CNET plugs in brilliantly to Best Buy’s retail media network. While retail “media” is generally an overromanticized misnomer– half the market size is sponsored product ads in Amazon search– Best Buy has arguably the most robust product offering in the space beyond simple search driven demand capture.  

Best Buy Ads already include activations with influencers, affiliates and experimentation in onsite product reviews. Adding CNET’s wealth of inventory and customer data would allow for some very complex packages to be built for brands that advertise on the network, focused around accelerating discovery for high ticket items.   

Building the most novel AI-driven product discovery engine

Last week, Amazon rolled out Rufus, its genAI powered shopping assistant to….let’s just call it tepid acclaim. The earliest demo use cases are not particularly impressive– suggesting flowers and candy as Valentine's Day gifts isn’t exactly the type of bespoke shopping concierge we’ve been promised. As I wrote here two weeks ago:

Amazon never hurts for lack of data, which often becomes its achilles heel in overcoming the paradox of choice for shoppers. For years, Amazon attempted to solve discovery by injecting publisher content into the core search experience via the Onsite Associates program. Via direct relationships and partnerships with third parties, Amazon amassed a wealth of content that ranged immensely in quality and ultimately became tuned out by customers as Amazon overzealously embedded mediocre “expert” reviews into search. The company’s earliest attempts at AI suggest a version of the same mistake. 

With CNET expert recommendations as its main training data, Best Buy could outflank its largest rival. For inspiration on how to do this, look to travel media firm Skift which rolled out an AI chatbot, trained exclusively on its library of well reported content. 

Most product recommendation algorithms still suffer from presenting shoppers with too many uncontextualized options– layering AI on top of a plethora of garbage in, garbage out review data and pay to play affiliate makes the experience worse, not better. Backed by CNET’s library of articles and product guides, Best Buy could aim to build a true best in class deployment of AI that actually shortens the purchase funnel and ultimately recreates the in store expert online.

Best Buy already has the right ethos here– the chatbot on its website immediately attempts to set you up with an in-store appointment with a rep or opens a chat window where you can ask a customer care agent questions. To test this out, I did three open-ended chats with a rep, looking for recommendations on a “work laptop to replace my Lenovo Thinkpad X1”, a 24” electric dryer that can run on 110V” and “a good starter smartwatch to track my workouts.”  In each case, the rep did a solid job, asking smart questions and narrowing down to 2-3 solid recommendations but it took 10+ minutes and the content/justification for each recommendation seemed limited to exact sell spec information on PDPs. The customer care agent was tactfully persistent and tried to push me well down the funnel but ultimately couldn’t add that extra layer of qualitative help that well, this article did. 

A brighter future for CNET 

If CNET gets absorbed by another media rollup or private equity firm, there will be no way off the desperately thirsty programmatic and affiliate hamster wheel. Increasing the pure cashflow CNET can throw off will depend on cranking out more content in hopes of fincreasing traffic, opening additional programmatic inventory or recapturing SEO juice that Google has minimal interest in returning,  Sisyphean tasks in the current environment. Under Best Buy, the main KPI can be the customer trust that CNET provides for the mothership. Said another way, for the CNET <> Best Buy deal to work, the #1 thing CNET will have to optimize for is creating great journalism. That's a rare healthy incentive alignment. 

Ironically, becoming the first media domino to fall to a retailer gives CNET the best chance to go back to its free-wheeling, editorially sacrosanct roots. 

The bigger picture: 

Even as commerce media has grown considerably over the last decade, retailers and media companies have remained two fundamentally distinct business models, linked solely as strange bedfellows by affiliate marketing.  Long a bullshit-industrial complex punchline, the convergence of content and commerce is happening-- as Hemingway would say, "gradually, then suddenly”.

With a loud splash at NRF and some quiet updates to select titles, Hearst has proudly declared itself a true commerce marketplace. We now live in a world where the world's largest publishers are fancying themselves as retailers and FORTUNE 500s and late stage startups are building real media entities. The bar for these projects is getting higher– Sherwood Media has assembled quite a squad. 

While much is made of CAC increases for brands in a post iOS 14.5 world, profitable customer acquisition for retailers is an even tougher conundrum. Amazon isn’t giving brands a 10% referral credit for subsidizing traffic to their website purely out of the goodness of their heart– it's a tacit admission that the unit economics of customer acquisition just don’t work for marketplaces anymore. Add it all up and this is the year that a major retailer makes a splash and buys a media property.   

Ultimately, success for non media companies (or media companies for that matter) buying vertical media brands always comes down to culture. You’ve got to as Logan Roy would say, “f***ing love” whatever aspect of news you cover. In this light, Wired was never gonna get the chance to be truly weird under Conde just like CNET was never going to get the chance to properly geek out under Red Ventures. 

That’s why I’m hyper bullish on Eric Church and Morgan Wallen buying Field and Stream out of Recurrent– I have no idea if their people can operate a media brand but I have high confidence that Church and Wallen f***ing love fields and streams in a way no spreadsheet jockey ever will. That counts for a lot.  

I’ve never been deep inside Best Buy– what I can’t say for sure is if they still have enough unabashed tech nerds in the organization to pull this deal off. Let’s hope there are still a few geeks in the squad.

Amazonia 

My quick take on the week’s most interesting story in the Amazon ecosystem

Pants That Show Dong: The Major League Baseball uniform fiasco is by far the best story going in America. I wanted to make it the feature this week but when you’re following up a story on a brand called NUTSAAKK, you can only go so far before the motif goes limp.

At its core, Major League Baseball messing up pants is a story of inflated corporate power in commerce. Fanatics, the exclusive distributor of MLB apparel, is the comsummate example of an artifiically protected monopoly getting old, fat and not giving a crap in the wake of nonexistent competition.

Years ago, I worked with the eCommerce leads at Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur in the UK where the full eCommerce experience is handled individually by each of the clubs. Both Spurs and Liverpool employed two of the smartest teams I’ve met in my time in commerce and delivered unique merchandise and digital optimization strategies that rivaled any of the most sophisticated apparel retailers in the game. And most importantly, you could see anything through the shorts.

Cocktail of the Week: The At Home Espresso Martini

There are few things in life I like more than an espresso martini. It’s a Four Loko with elegance and panache. I liked them before they were cool, while they were cool and love them long after. As Frank Turner would say “this shit wasn’t fashonable when I fell in love, if the hipsters move on, why should I give a fuck?”

I make a few variations including a hazelnut (ft. Frangelico), a caliente (ft. Ancho Reyes) and an “oh crap, I’m out of coffee liqueur” (which uses maple liqueur). But for you all, I’m sticking with my classic. Here goes:

• 1 oz vodka

• 1 oz Mr. Black coffee liquor (some notes on this below)

• .25 oz Cometeer condensed ice coffee (more notes on this below)

• 2-3 dashes Black Walnut bitters

• A hint of vanilla extract (hint, ALWAYS get this at Costco)

Shake like an absolute maniac and enjoy.

Cometeer is highly concentrated so the flavor here is going to be strong. That’s what you want. You won’t get quite the perfect silky texture you get from using proper espresso but you also won’t have to brew espresso and I think the flavor is even bolder.

On the coffee liqueur, St George’s NOLA is by far my favorite for drinking on its own but it isn’t quite sweet enough to cut through here. Kahlua is a garbage sugar bomb syrup. Mr. Black splits the difference for me— too sweet to enjoy neat but perfect at balancing all the flavors in this drink.

Have three of these tonight and write your memoirs.

Back in action this week after a brief hiatus with what I think of as the quintessential United States of Amazon story.

We’re also adding a new section— each edition from here on out will end with a cocktail recipe where I share whatever I’m drinking this week. In the words of our greatest American hero, Salute Mi Familia 

Oil on canvas painting of a sack of chestnuts by DALL-E

In real life, perfect microcosms do not exist. Searching for one is the folly of the mediocre writer looking for a crutch to get out of having to explain a massively complex problem such as say, how the most powerful civilian institution in America could ultimately wither away.

Or so I thought until the newsletter gods (ok three of my subscribers) blessed me with the serendipitous discovery of an Amazon brand called NUTSAAKK. Fire up the AC/DC while you read this incredible brand story below.

First off, despite the mountain of evidence, I refuse to believe that something this sublime is AI-generated. This is a genius bit from the funniest guy in Guangdong who knows exactly what he’s doing and giggles every time an order hits his Seller Central account. Everything about this copywriting is four dimensional chess. The blatant lie about the founding date (the brand’s sales history starts in 2023), the significance of the logo being shaped like a nut, and the adherence to innovation all read like a brand Jin-Yang would start to con Erlich. 

While NUTSAAKK is a particularly egregious example, it's decently microcosmic of the overall state of the Amazon marketplace which is awash in random strings of characters that add billions of dollars to Amazon’s bottom line. NUTSAAKK’s hero products have >100 five-star reviews, a decent proxy for showing they have a non trivial volume of sales. 

The brand’s execution isn’t bad. There’s halfway passable AI generated creative, a keyword jammed product title and PDP copy that is within the confines of standard English. If the brand’s landed costs are low enough (and coming right from China, they should be) and they have a decent command of PPC ads, the unit economics here work very well for this to be a highly profitable operation. Two years ago, spinning up passable creative, writing decent product titles and writing PDP copy within the confines of standard English were all barriers to entry that allowed American businesses to thrive selling Chinese goods. With every passing development in AI, those barriers fall further.

Despite meaning “strong and stable good products”, NUTSAAKK has no need to last long to fulfill its purpose. This is a simple in and out job. Presumably spun up on the back of some keyword arbitrage opportunity, NUTSAAKK will rise fast and cash out before the going gets hard. Its owners can make a quick buck, celebrate the Lunar New Year, wait out a short refractory period and then launch a line of laundry room accessories called  SCROOTUMM next spring. Such is the 2024 Amazon circle of life. 

It’s one thing when Temu lights money on fire to advertise unprofitably on Facebook— I joked in the last newsletter that it’s a $6B wealth transfer from Beijing to American 401k and pension holders. It’s another when indie Chinese private label sellers advertise directly on Amazon. Chinese factory operations and a $1T+ American hegemony growing at the expense of American small and medium sized businesses is….politically complicated. Furthermore, it’s a populist layup on the campaign trail for either Trump or Biden if they want to lob a few zingers and vaguely patriotic appeals to swing voters. 

For the first time, Amazon acknowledged how intertwined its gaudy Q4 numbers are with the growth of Chinese sellers on the platform:

The word “significant" is doing a gargantuan amount of work here. Estimates in the Amazon community range quite a bit but most observers feel that it is in the ballpark of 50%+ of overall third-party GMV and 25-30% of all Amazon marketplace dollars. 

I've long scoffed at the notion that Amazon is truly vulnerable. My opinion has always been that all of Jeff Bezos's talk that any business goes to zero on a long enough timeline was savvy PR bluster to head regulators off at the pass. Amazon's PR has always been incredibly good at paradoxically positioning the company as smaller and less powerful than it really is.

But for the first time in Amazon’s recent earnings numbers (a whopping $170B of overall Q4 sales and >$10B net income), I see the tiniest traces of existential risk. If more of Amazon's revenue comes from Chinese brands that are intentionally ephemeral, does Amazon itself risk fading towards ephemera? If Amazon’s market share is to meaningfully fade, it won’t come from external competition. It will come from flying too close to the sun and taking short term cash grabs from the NUTSAAKKs of the world. 

Amazon's doom story has been written before, almost religiously every six months by a writer at NY Mag or The Atlantic who has never worked a day in the ecosystem. It's the ads everywhere that are going to do Amazon in....or the random no name brands…..or the increasing Prime cost….or the favoring private label….or the sheer scale of Jeff Bezos’s ambition (what idiot wrote that piece?)  Amazon can resist any one or two of these variables and keep on chugging along. But ever so slowly, it’s starting to look less like a rogue wave and more like the perfect storm. 

Death by a thousand NUTSAAKKs

Amazonia 

My quick take on the week’s most interesting story in the Amazon ecosystem

Walmart is Buying Vizio: Once again, I choose to highlight a story that serves as confirmation bias for one of my core theses and proves that one of my previous pieces was correct. This is why you build your own newsletter and “own your audience.”

I don’t have much more analysis to add here. Retail media is huge and getting bigger, Walmart is thirsty to capture more of Amazon’s upper funnel media power and this deal makes a shit ton of sense (though should draw at least a little regulatory scrutiny.

As it happens, there’s another media business on the market for <10% of the price that a savvy retailer would be wise to snatch up. I wrote about this yesterday for Jacob Donnelly’s A Media Operator and may have more to say on it here next week 🙂 

Dispatches from America

A potpurri of vibes from across the land

The Wall Street Journal Discovers Vegas: Thankfully this piece is paywalled so you (hopefully) can’t read about a WSJ columnist finding out that you can in fact frivolously spend money in Las Vegas:

Slashing your DC bureau and shuttering the entire team covering US-China relations while publishing (and presumably covering the bill for)…..whatever this is…….is quite a look folks

How to Buy a Company: Congratulations to the “gigachads” who now own Children’s Place

Cocktail of the Week: The Tropical Cosmo

For readers that make it this far, we have a new treat…a weekly cocktail recipe. It’s cold in NY so I’ve been capturing the spirit of the islands with the ultra manly…..tropical cosmopolitan. If Carrie only knew about these, there woulda been a lot more sex in our city.

Here goes:

• 1.5 oz white rum (I like Wray & Nephew overproof but any rum will do)

• .5 oz Cointreau (Triple Sec is probably fine but I’m a snob here)

• .5 oz GOYA guava concentrate (more notes on this below)

• .25 oz Velvet Falernum

• The juice of half of a voluptuous lime (or 1 full lime if it isn’t as robust)

Shake vigoroulsy and enjoy. This drink is sweet and the complexity comes from the velvet falernum so no need to use your good rum here. Even Bacardi is fine.

These cartons of GOYA are an absolute mixology godsend. Essentially, they are concentrated fruit purees that are injected with liquid sugar for maximum flavor. Most importantly, they are not cut with other cheaper fruit juices like many store bought brands. At >35g of sugar per 8oz serving, it’s an absolute travesty that these are marketed and sold to children but they have no equal in drinks like this. Use sparingly, a little goes a long way.

Breaking the DALL-E train cause only one image makes sense here. Besdies, the still of this video presereves the DALL-E aesthetic

If I were to tell you the following things about a hypothetical company…

• The efficacy of the firm’s core product was reduced by ~50% for many customers due to a blatant, monpolistic shot across the bow from one of its competitors. 

• The company has lost $42B since 2020 betting its future on something McKinsey thought was a good idea. 

• Of its peers, the company is the most visibly behind in pivoting to AI/bringing user facing AI tools to market .  

• The firm recently laid off 22% of its staff.

• Only a third of US teens use this product, down from 71% in 2014. 

• A strategic risk on this company’s 10K is the fact that their founder wants to occasionally fuck around and find out by fighting people who are a lot bigger than him.  

….You would of course correctly posit that this company is doing better than ever. In fact, said company has a >$1.2T market cap, has 4x’d off its lows in 2022 and is surging near all-time highs.    

While I conceptually understand how Facebook pulled this off (focusing like hell on the core ads product again), I’ll never truly “get it.”  Several years ago, I wrote a piece on how the core Facebook product was broken beyond the point of repair that I still mostly agree with. My attempt to sell a stroller on Facebook Marketplace this week has been a dystopian nightmare. The Instagram account we use to occasionally toss up a quick cute photo of our daughter and bulldog is awash in spam pitches and DMs to turn our offspring into micro-influencers. Meta is damn near unusable yet there are plenty of users happily there and clicking away on ads. 

The answer here is simple— Facebook’s advertising product is spectacular. For the purpose it’s meant to serve, it may be the single most effective product to ever come out of Silicon Valley. The degree to which even highly sophisticated advertisers essentially let the Facebook algorithm make major decisions for them because it can do it better is highly underappreciated.

To say that Facebook is a laggard in AI also isn’t entirely fair– while there aren’t transformative user facing genAI features, AI is hard at work doing the most important thing for Facebook…….making its ads more effective. 

The lesson here is equally simple. Don’t bet against Mark Zuckerberg and especially don’t bet against the product that has the lion’s share of a boomer’s attention. So long as the latest pickleball and mahjong meetups are happening on Zuck’s platforms, Meta will continue to print cash.  

Thus, if I’m Facebook, there’s only one data point that truly worries me. Ever so quietly, it came out in Shou Chew’s testimony on child safety that the average TikTok user is now over 30 years old. What was perceived as a data point meant to appease regulators, I believe was a subtle sleight of hand to the market that TikTok is ever so slowly encroaching on Facebook’s most valuable turf. The youth have eyeballs but the olds have the money.

In 2023, Facebook made $13.69B from Chinese advertisers alone, largely on the back of a ~$6B cash injection from Temu. 

If we take the Occam’s razor here and assume that Temu is a massively unsustainable Ponzi scheme that will collapse in a blaze of glory, then Zuckerberg is 2023’s grand geopolitical hero. In effect, Facebook impeccably executed a massive sovereign wealth transfer by taking $6B out of Beijing and deploying into everyday Americans’ Vanguard accounts and pension funds. Reasonable people can debate how much of a threat Temu poses to American industry but based on 2023 numbers, Amazon is humming along just fine.  

All told, Facebook is playing this absolutely brilliantly. They’re arbing dollars from China without getting into any sort of strategic partnership with Chinese companies, locking down longer-term, joint value creating partnerships with Amazon via Buy With Prime integrations in ads and leaving the door open to pursue their own commerce ambitions.  

I’ve long believed commerce will ultimately be part of Facebook’s endgame for no other reason but market size. Online commerce is a >$1T opportunity, set within the broader $6T that retail contributes to US GDP alone. Globally, digital ad spend is about a $600B market in 2024. With the metaverse looking like a nothingburger, Chinese style superapps still mostly a fantasy in the West and existential privacy concerns about Facebook as a core AI player, commerce still seems like Facebook’s longterm refuge. Zuck also has the luxury of sitting back on his mountains of cash and watching TikTok Shop attempt to forge a path against Amazon to decide how he wants to enter the fray. Not a bad deal.

Amazonia 

My quick take on the week’s most interesting story in the Amazon ecosystem

Long Live Rufus: Nearly eight hours after I argued that many of Amazon’s recent product updates were designed to collect AI training data from users, Amazon officially rolled out Rufus, it’s genAI powered shopping assistant.

While I appreciate Amazon making me look like I know what I’m talking about, it’s hard to be impressed by the earliest Rufus demos. Suggesting flowers and candy as Valentine’s Day gifts isn’t exactly the pinnacle of innovation. Broadly speaking, the biggest asset that Amazon has for Rufus is potentially also its biggest challenge. Amazon has an ungodly amount of review and purchase data…but in aggregate, will that just lead to AI suggesting obvious, lowest common denominator product recommendations?

Dispatches from America

A potpurri of vibes from across the land

America The Beautiful: The European mind will be forced to comprehend this  

OK, fine. Here are more great tweets about MetLife Stadium hosting the World Cup: The end of Sweden, the pinnacle of grift, and the beauty of Seacucus  

Should’ve been a cowboy: RIP to Toby Keith, a far more complex country star and political figure than many headlines let on.

Let he who has never had 10+ Bud heavies and belted Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue cast the first stone. For the rest of us, pour out a tall one for Toby. Or put a boot in someone’s ass. It’s the American way.

Welcome to 50 or so new readers who have joined since last week! If we don’t know each other, reply to this email and say hi. Keeps me out of spam and I make a new friend.

Turning on a few light paid growth levers for the first time next week to make this thing a real venture so this felt like my last week to really let the colorful prose fly. Begrudgingly PG-13 from here on out.

A robot kindergarten class photo by DALL-E

In the immortal words of Tallahassee, 2024 is the year for AI to nut up or shut up. After a year of fawning coverage, the headlines around AI are starting to read a little more like this: 

What’s the deal with Anthropic’s gross margin?  

Why does Open AI only have <300 enterprise customers?  

How many AI companies are now actually doing more than $10M in revenue? 

As Benedict Evans says, the vibe in tech right now is still AI and everything else. With that lens, it’s hard not to view every single little innocuous move and product update from large tech companies as castling on the AI grand strategy chessboard.  

Case in point: Last week, Amazon quietly increased its backend keyword limit from 200 to 500 words, a move largely celebrated by sellers and other operators on the platform. The obvious interpretation to this is that with every passing day, Amazon becomes an increasingly commoditized marketplace and opening a longer tail of keywords helps sophisticated operators find pockets of SEO juice. But dig one level deeper and you see it’s just another training da(y)ta source for AI.  

While the AI battleground was initially fought in the more esoteric corners of tech where Silicon Valley sells to Silicon Valley, both Open AI and Anthropic are starting to sign FORTUNE 500 businesses that drill deep into mainstream America. OpenAI counts Estee Lauder, Carlyle and PwC on its client roster while Anthropic is servicing 70% of the largest banks and insurance companies in America along with LexisNexis and Pfizer. 

What companies that touch the mainstream American consumer do with the training data we unwittingly have been feeding them will define where AI lands on the hype cycle by the end of this year. Like Swifties becoming experts in Cover 2, AI impacting our daily lives will happen gradually, then suddenly. 

In that vein, the most visceral reaction I had to a product launch in 2023 was when Shopify announced a new AI tool called Sidekick. At the time I wrote the following (in a separate newsletter I write for a trade publication called Martech Record)

Sidekick knocked me on my ass because it wasn’t promising to just automate the backend tasks of eCommerce. It was promising to fully run the key functions that separate the good brands from the great. Looking back now 6+ months from launch, I don’t really know any commerce operators leveraging Sidekick for core business functions. Whether or not that changes is a big theme that I’ll be watching closely. 

When it comes to desperately trying to make AI happen, it is my old friends at LinkedIn who set the standard. 

From a grand strategy perspective, LinkedIn is staring down the barrel of a fascinating opportunity. With Twitter engagement cratering and Elon Musk potentially six months away from getting bored and dumping this thing on private equity, LinkedIn has a real chance to become the place that actually drives the professional narrative in tech. As recently as 18 months ago, that sentence would have read like comedy. For all its cringe, LinkedIn possesses a secret weapon here– a large team of highly talented reporters and editors who, if deployed correctly, can both curate and evoke conversation. 

With this golden goose in front of it, LinkedIn is choosing to focus on…checks notes….. force feeding AI into the core member experience via weird prompts to hit up recruiters with AI-generated messages. And in one of the most shamelessly egregious ways to build up an AI archive, the company has introduced collaborative articles. 

I love LinkedIn. All told, I think it’s the most unequivocally net positive big tech product out there. But holy hell, collaborative articles is putting LinkedIn on a path to becoming the undisputed thirsty bitch of the AI wars. 

If we are to have an AI dominated future, I believe it is our patriotic duty to make it as weird and fun as possible. To that end, I treated the LinkedIn AI to a little training data when it interrupted my day to ask me “how to best track customer behavior” as an eCommerce website?”  

Chuck Schumer be damned, the future runs on wintergreen ZYN.   

Amazonia 

My quick take on the week’s most interesting story in the Amazon ecosystem

Wanted: Attorneys to litigate against Amazon: When Lina Khan is on Twitter still trying to build the team that is going to litigate FTC vs. Amazon, I gotta say that reads like advantage Amazon.

Look, I’ve always given Khan a lot of the benefit of the doubt. As a writer, how do you not love someone who made a cult classic out of a 50 page law school paper and parlayed that fame into one of the most quietly powerful posts in America. If nothing else, Khan is living proof that if you spit out a little fire content, good things can happen.

My take on Khan has been that many of her perceived missteps have been chess moves in a decade long battle to win hearts and minds before FTC vs. Amazon actually goes to trial. Take some Ls but get some perceived overreach and bullying behavior from Amazon on the record.

But for me, blasting out the FTC job posting on main just feels kinda weak and desperate? In any event, FTC vs. Amazon isn’t expected to see a courtroom until 2026 at the earliest so there’s plenty of time to assemble a squad

Dispatches from America

A potpurri of vibes from across the land

The prodigal son heads to Davos: Capitalism sucks until the moment you can afford a hot tub  

Kissinger’s Diary In retrospect, maybe it wasn’t a great idea to let Holden Caufield play quarterback of the Free World  

Drunkards, fools and the United States of America: Credit to Armand Domalewski for the best take on the discovery of lithium ion in California 

Going back to the well of revisiting an old column from my “Out of Ink” series from 2018/9 since several of you wrote to me that you were into it when I did this two editions ago.

This week, I’m coming back to a piece I wrote called “Apple, Amazon and the Great Media Wars to Come” that argued that Amazon and Apple were on a collision course for control of the free press.

This is a tough time to revisit this as layoffs hit journalism hard this week and several “benevolent” billionaire led institutions. But alas, here’s the full repost of a column that ran on March 27, 2019 with commentary in bold.

An Apple rides a boat down the Amazon by DALL-E

For a company that looked like it had frankly given up on selling to the commoners, Apple’s keynote this week was a refreshingly egalitarian product launch. The company announced a low-interest credit card, a TV streaming service, and the long-awaited Apple News+.

Even with the ludicrous 50 percent tax Apple levies on publishers, the potential ubiquity (read: 1 billion iPhones) of Apple News+ makes it about as close to a potential savior of journalism as the free market has the ability to create. No other company can offer the same scaled combination of distribution and bundled incentives to entice people to pay for news. No other company except the sleepless giant in Seattle.

Before diving into that, let’s take a quick look at the publisher side of the Apple News+ equation. There’s a tendency to treat the business dynamics of publishers as a homogeneous plight, but the economics of the New York Times and the New Yorker are vastly different, to the point that a single model cannot well serve the interests of each. Furthermore, even as the industry transitions from advertising to subscriptions, media economics is largely a zero-sum game where a user subscribing to the Wall Street Journal often does so at the cost of canceling their membership to the Akron Beacon Journal. All of this is to say that Apple News+ is not an industrywide panacea, but a fit for a particular type of publication.

For the premium magazines in the Apple News collection, paying half the revenue as a tribute to Apple for distribution is a no-brainer. Texture (the company Apple acquired to serve as the backbone for Apple News+) was originally established as a joint venture between Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, and Time Inc. to overcome the basic impossible unit economics of trying to sell magazines as a standalone entity. Even in the glory days, magazines were largely distributed through a multichannel marketing company called Synapse (founded by the son of famous Time editor Marshall Loeb), which bundled magazines with credit card offers and frequent flyer programs.

Here I think the Jim Collins quip that the only two ways to succeed in media are bundling and unbundling is particularly astute. Media is in a rapid period of decentralization with wildly declining institutional power and independent creator brands holding power. In time, these will get rolled up into powerful institutions……that then once again will get broken apart. And on and on it goes, it’s a way to pass the time that beats the hell out of pickleball

Conversely, for the New York Times, which now boasts more than 4 million standalone digital subscribers, staying off the platform and continuing to own its distribution was an obvious call. The decision to join Apple News is a bit of a head-scratcher for the Wall Street Journal, which charges hundreds of dollars per year for standalone subscriptions. While the publisher will offer only a curated selection of general interest news, it’s a brand-dilution risk for a company that has spent a century cultivating a premium image.

The companies that faced a truly fascinating decision here were the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. Both are elite regional newspapers whose grand strategy for the past decade had been trying to establish a stronger beachhead as national publications. Buoyed by a hyperambitious plan to hit five million paid subscribers, the Los Angeles Times has taken the gambit. The Washington Post has not.

There are plenty of sound business reasons why the Washington Post may choose to steer clear of Apple News. But as always, it’s hard to ignore the $146.1 billion elephant in the room, especially when that elephant owns both the Post and a company that will come head-to-head with what Apple is trying to build.

As long posited by the tech intelligentsia, Apple’s endgame here is pretty clear. The company can now offer the news as part of a power bundle designed to make you helplessly dependent on its ecosystem. Standalone access to the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and New Yorker for the price of a Hale and Hearty soup is a pretty decent deal for consumers. If the price is knocked down to $5 per month if you subscribe to Apple Care, add Apple Pay to your phone, buy an Apple Watch, etc., it’s a steal. The broader ramification here is that Apple could use bundling to own a frightening share of a wallet that includes your banking, telecommunications, entertainment, professional equipment, fitness, and, potentially, health insurance data. How we feel about that as a society is a subject for another post.

Commerce operators in particular tend to be cynical about Apple’s privacy first approach but it’s helpful to remember just how much truly sensitive data Apple has on its customers that isn’t just shit you clicked online. Even if it’s faux moral grandstanding to ultimately launch their own ad tech product, I feel better that Apple at least gives lip service to privacy

If Apple succeeds, only one other company can build a bundle that is so deeply intertwined in our daily lives. Not coincidentally, it’s the company whose subscription product has a 90 percent renewal rate and counts 100 million members. While Apple owns the most ubiquitous content-consumption device in human history, this company actually makes one that is far better for reading.

Amazon is not a company to be dwarfed in scale of ambition and, like Apple, appears to have its eyes on the health care sector in the long term. For now, Amazon could package pretty tight bundles around adding premium publisher content to Amazon Prime and Prime Video. It could experiment with using the news as a lever to sell more Kindles and Alexas. If we’re really barreling toward a voice-dominant future, a morning where Alexa reads you personalized headlines may not be far off.

So in case you haven’t noticed, we aren’t barreling towards a voice dominant future. Two totally different hype cycles but worth remembering how convinced the punditry that voice was the future when you read about AI applications that have questionable utility.

In the months ahead, Amazon is going to make a far bigger play for media, partially out of patriotism and partially to provide another lever to make the Amazon Prime ecosystem even more frighteningly sticky. For Bezos, reviving the Washington Post is part civic mission, part petri dish for understanding how to build a successful media business.

Amazon has nipped at the margins by selling subscriptions through its platform, but it’s finally starting to get a bit more serious. The company is already making its first foray at directly hosting content on-site by republishing articles from top commerce publishers. While this looks like a tactic primarily designed to increase conversion rates from search, it’s a potential Trojan horse for building relationships with large publishers. Aesthetically, this has a long way to go before one could imagine reading a 3,000-word political think piece in this format. But it signifies that Amazon places a certain premium on the ability of content to boost its core business.

And, like Apple, Amazon has enough cash on hand to essentially acquire any media entity at any time. Access to content, publishing interfaces, design chops, and anything else you’d want for building a media business is just a swipe of the pen away.

Inthe 2010s, publishers found themselves as commodities in a grand battle between Facebook and Google to sell ads. In the 2020s, publishers will find themselves as a commodity in a grand battle between Apple and Amazon to sell superbundles.

This core thesis of the piece ultimately fell flat. For starters, “media” as I defined it here is just too small of a market to play into the grand strategy of Apple and Amazon. The whole magazine business is almost a rounding error in the Airpods P & L. To the degree that Apple and Amazon really did go head to head, it was in streaming, a much bigger industry.

Overall though, the whole China inspired “superbundle” idea has less steam than it did in 2019. Elon may have bought Twitter with those kind of grand ambitions but superbundle is a sort of 2017-2019 Silicon Valley vernacular relic. As Benedict Evans says, “AI and Everything Else” now.

Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad deal for publishers, but more than anything else, this will once again intertwine media’s fate with the ethos of big tech leadership. For Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Google, the plight of journalism was acceptable collateral damage for the growth of their ad businesses. We must hope Apple and Amazon view publishers differently.

The best argument for Apple as media’s tech guardian is the fact that the company has consistently placed a premium on using highly qualified editors over algorithms to curate news. Of course, this looks radical only in the context of the dystopian approach of its peers.

Many have speculated whether Facebook’s legacy would be different if Mark Zuckerberg had hung around Harvard long enough to take a few of those pesky ethics classes. Tim Cook attended Duke, which means he learned that he has carte blanche to charge through opponents without ramification. Kidding (and tears for Tacko) aside, Cook hasn’t quite waxed poetic about the Fourth Estate à la Bezos, but he has gone to the Twitter bully pulpit several times to opine about the importance of a free press.

The now dead hyperlink here was Duke being the beneficiary of a number of bullshit calls and advancing in the NCAA tournament. Mercifully, they lost to Michigan State soon after with a team full of first round draft picks. Ha, Duke sucks.

As for Amazon, its overall sentiment on the press is quite hazy. On the one hand, Bezos has shown no hint of interfering in critical coverage of Amazon in the Washington Post, going so far as to hire a reporter explicitly to dig deep into Amazon’s skeletons. In 2016, New York went as far as to name Bezos “the Valley’s lone defender of journalism.” At the same time, Amazon is one of the greatest corporate manipulators of media in business history, using everything from leadership lessons to flying drone patents to control the narrative around Bezos’ company. If Amazon pushes deeper into publishing, which tenor would win?

I thought Bezos caught some unfair criticism for the Washington Post’s coverage— there were never obvious, proven signs of editorial meddling and for a while, the paper did well under his stewardship. But last year, the post lost $100M and Bezos looks primed to be the latest guy to find out that media is a damn hard business. And he’ll likely do what many billionaires have done before— get bored and move on.

Amid an unknown future for media, one thing is for sure: When it comes to the dissemination of information, it is big tech’s world. We’re all just reading in it.

Amazonia 

My quick take on the week’s most interesting story in the Amazon ecosystem

Profoundly Boring: Those were the scintillating words that Google staff engineer Diane Hirsh Thirault shared on LinkedIn following the layoffs. First off, I’m not gonna lie— it’s validating for me to write a piece and then see Google go and make my argument for me the next day and have its current employees lash out. Ocasionally good to feel like you know what you’re talking about.

Secondly, Diane’s a badass and a great writer through and through. But her post reminds me of something interesting. I’ve known several employees at all the big tech firms for years at the deep romanticism of eras past for employers has seemed gone for years at Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft. Folks I know at these companies are appropraitely mercenerial— most feel they have a great job they love but it’s a W2 job that can end at any time and folks are under no illusion to the contrary. Google somehow seemed to retain a certain early 2010s tech mythical status in its employees’ eyes long after other employer brand stars faded. I’d venture that’s all gone now.

Dispatches from America

A potpurri of vibes from across the land

Trump Wins New Hampshire Primary: I continue to be shocked by how many well-educated, politically aware folks do not understand that Trump vs. Biden is an inevitability in November. Trump is ahead of Haley 67-12 in the latest 538 aggregate poll. Spin whatever coping narrative you want that Haley’s results in New Hampshire show Trump’s weakness with independents or whatever but here’s the deal, Trump’s on a heater right now. Plenty of time left for that to change but denying the reality does Democrats zero good. I’ve written about how and why I think Biden wins in the end but I disagree with most of the punditry that New Hampshire showed real weakness for Trump.

Ultimately, Trump will run against Biden because the majority of American voters are casting ballots that say they want Donald Trump to run against Joe Biden for president. You’re free to feel a certain way about this—I certainly do— but it does no good to deny reality.

“The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter” is a fake quote that has been attributed to both Churchill and Thomas Jefferson. I still believe on a long enough time horizon, the people ultimately find a way to get it right.

A little late sending this out today— blame Brian, Phillip and the team at Future Commerce for an outstanding “salon” event at Daniel Sunday night where the sommelier kept emerging with new sublime wines to try which made Monday a wash. If you’re in retail and ever get a chance to attend one of Future’s events, do it.

Back to the normal, evergreen format this week and making good on my promise for pithier takes.

Cyberpunk rendering of an AI interviewing for a job in tech by DALL-E

The current macro environment around big tech is an utterly bizarre set of paradoxes. The S & P is ripping near all-time highs but large tech companies are operating far more out of fear than greed. SaaS stocks are flying high again yet Cloudflare’s CEO is shamelessly firing ramping salespeople with bizarre allusions to Chris Paul. Interest rates in the US remain stubbornly high but capital is still pretty cheap in China, empowering firms like Temu to attempt mass digital colonization efforts of US market share. And there are more and more layoffs.     

As reported by the Verge, Google’s quiet layoffs continue with another 1,000+ jobs shed this week. This follows Amazon cutting 35% of headcount at Twitch and a broad wave of early 2024 layoffs. 

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy recently confirmed that Twitch is still not yet profitable, despite garnering a reputation for stiffing top talent and having the most predatory revenue splits in the business. Amazon getting antsy isn’t entirely shocking given the company’s increasing prevalence of Day 2 vibes and overall impatience with the loss leading parts of its ecosystem. 

Best I can sort it out, the wind in big tech blows towards hyper austerity for everything but the following:  

1. The myopic thing that prints all the bottom line cash today…..which for Google, Facebook and Amazon is ads.  

2. The thing that tech CEOs believe will existentially determine their fate….which for every large tech company besides Apple is AI.  

Any job that falls outside of these two buckets in big tech is on the most precarious footing we’ve seen in the industry since the great financial crisis. But where things really get interesting is when AI starts getting applied to the ads money printer. There are whispers of Google massively reorganizing its 30,000 person sales team in a move that could see thousands more cuts. Color me skeptical. 

For all the well-deserved hype that Perplexity is generating as a bold, user-first reimagining of discovery, a bunch of blue links under a bar on a page is still the only viable business model for search today. Neeva did a lot of the same things Perplexity does well and burned through tens of millions of dollars in VC searching for users who would pay a baconeggandcheese per month for a better search experience. Google is smart and somewhat besieged by the innovator’s dilemma. The last thing they are gonna fuck with is the AdWords sales engine. 

On the one hand, it makes sense for big tech to be relentlessly focused. Here’s what a year of going back to basics look liked at Facebook: 

Zucky boy living his best life

On the other hand, it largely sucks if the most powerful institutions on earth are reduced to only betting on ads and AI. Shareholders of the individual equities be damned–it’s better for our nation if large tech companies use the enormous profits they generate from being societally blessed monopolies to be as weird and experimental as possible across several vectors. I think of FAANG as having something of a social contract with America. We’ll overlook the externalities of them holding unprecedented corporate power if they build a dope future for us. Doing so requires a tolerance for risk and living in the experimentation layer that is no longer en vogue. 

As an employee in tech though, it’s never wise to fight the tide. In bull markets, I do “zero to one” business development. In bear markets, I do enterprise sales.  

Amazonia 

My quick take on the week’s top tactical story in the Amazon ecosystem

Walmart Introduces Brand-Term Targeting:  This is wild to me. A $4B search media operation just introduced one of the 101 capabilities of search engine marketing. Holy hell, retail media is so early. 

Let’s give Walmart the benefit of the doubt here. Conquesting competitor keywords is one of the lamest technologies in the ecosystem, a tax on small businesses and brands that benefits the large platforms. Maybe Walmart spent years debating the morality of introducing it to Connect but finally caved? Lol, probably not.

Dispatches from America

A potpurri of vibes from across the land

Cha”bad” Boys: Credit to the New York Post for an absolute clinic in headline writing here around the story that has captivated New York for more than a week. Ladies, if he lives within 200 miles of NYC, I can guarantee you that he is no longer thinking about the Roman Empire, the architectural marvel that is modern suspension bridges, or obscure baseball players from the mid 90s. He’s thinking about how he too can build an extensive labyrinth of tunnels with the boys just because.

Dr. (Short?) King: Today I learned that MLK was 5’6” and a half which makes him…….. Martin Luther SHORT King Jr.  Ok, gotta get these jokes out while this newsletter still only has a few hundred subs. In all seriousness though, I often wonder how much would be different if Letters From a Birmingham Jail was required reading in U.S. public schools. To reduce Dr. King’s legacy in so many Americans’ eyes to “I Have a Dream” and a few more comfortable soundbites is precisely what he wrote against. 

Trying something a little new here. A few years back (mid 2018-2019 to be precise), I wrote a column with Medium called “Out of Ink” which focused on the “future of media in an era of tech monopolies.” It was a good gig, with guaranteed payouts and a built-in audience, two luxuries I’ve yet to recapture. Naturally, I wrote about Amazon quite a bit because that’s what I do.

Periodically this year, I’ll be revisiting some of these pieces to see how they’ve held up. Hopefully, it will be a fun way to remember what the zeitgeist was pre-COVID and look back on a long forgotten world.

Yes, this is a bit of a copout from writing new stuff— I’ve promised to publish every week and I have a lot going on. But I think it’s an intersting idea. Drop me a note to let me know what you think. What follows below is the full repost of a piece called “Breaking Amazon’s Hype Machine” from November 9, 2018 with commentary in italics and bold.

Van Gogh style painting of a piranha. Sorry DALL-E, I’m getting unhinged

In a marginally better anticlimax than most M. Night Shyamalan plot twists, reports indicate that Amazon has decided to split its HQ2 between Long Island City, New York, and Arlington, Virginia. Mercifully, Amazon’s grand quest to use the starry-eyed idealism of mid-market politicians as a tax-evasion bargaining chip against NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is finally over. New York is getting 25,000 more sweaty bodies on the rush hour 7 train while Arlington will have lunchtime lines at Sweetgreen that stretch into the Pentagon parking lot.

Overall, the HQ2 hoopla was a brilliantly executed PR stunt that was created to keep Amazon constantly at the top of American consumers’ minds in a narrative that it squarely controls. HQ2 provided Amazon with millions of dollars of free earned media and a cover for everything from its warehouse workers peeing in bottles to a precipitously quiet 20 percent decline in its stock price. Along the way, it taught us a lot about the paradox of effectively reporting on and talking about Amazon.

As the world’s largest online retailer, the current No. 3 media company in the U.S., a dominant force in cloud computing, and the single-largest corporate influence on the U.S. economy, nearly everything that Amazon does or says is “news.” But staying focused on which of Amazon’s announcements are actually newsworthy and deserving of analysis while Amazon continues dropping flying drone warehouse red herrings is near impossible.

South Africa’s premier investigative journalism outfit calls itself AmaBhungane, Zulu for “dung beetles,” in a proud acknowledgment that the literal function of media is to sift through shit so that the rest of us don’t have to. Thus, the more shit you throw at journalists, the tougher the job becomes. And, arguably, no American entity outside of the White House creates more news than Amazon.

On the same day that Amazon’s double HQ2 was leaked (and one day before the most important midterm election of our lifetime), the company announced free shipping during the holidays, introduced a program to hire its own drivers, and said that it would no longer host booksellers from South Korea, Hungary, and other nations. Good luck trying to analyze any of those things in-depth for a story on deadline. Thinning newsrooms lack the resources to dig every signal, so they’re forced to publish a hell of a lot of unfiltered noise.

For example, the grapevine chatter last month that Amazon was “considering” opening 3,000 Go stores spurred weeks of speculation about Amazon’s impending invasion of brick-and-mortar retail stores from nearly every major American media outlet. But here’s the rub: Every company is “considering” doing anything at any given time. Faux announcements like this create an anti-competitive advantage for Amazon by taking real value out of companies. Whether or not Amazon explicitly intends to, the company blatantly manipulates the market simply by issuing press releases, and reporters are willing participants.

The risk here is that when Amazon sneezes, the entire retail sector catches tuberculosis. Stitch Fix’s stock slid 20 percent upon the announcement of Amazon Scout, a service that is initially focused on home design and that, in its current iteration, actually presents no discernible threat to Stitch Fix’s business model. As any Amazon action produces an equal and opposite reaction, covering unsubstantiated Amazon rumors is dangerous business.

There’s also a tendency in media to overestimate the magnitude of any statistic that has to do with Amazon. A figure like 3,000 convenience stores sounds like a paradigm-shifting amount until you consider that 7-Eleven has 11,000 stores in Thailand alone. Consistently, Amazon’s market capitalization is erroneously conflated with GDP (the correct framework would be to compare Amazon’s revenue with GDP), creating an archive of incorrect assertions that Amazon is more valuable than the aforementioned Thailand. Ultimately, this contributes to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because Amazon is so big, any tactical action it takes is immediately declared to be game-changing. The flood of (often superficial) media coverage then takes off, essentially providing a windfall of free marketing for the everything store.

As many of Amazon’s big-tech compatriots come under increased scrutiny, Amazon has a key trump card that keeps the public sentiment largely in its favor. CEO Jeff Bezos is a brilliant writer and a maestro of a storyteller, capable of seducing the tech media with his prose. You can learn more about the fundamentals of business by reading a single Amazon letter to shareholders than you do in most MBA programs. As a result, these letters are religiously quoted verbatim by reporters, allowing Bezos to directly define how his company is portrayed in the media.

Combine the scale of news created by Amazon, the dearth of reporters covering retail markets, and a CEO who is the biggest walking sound bite since Yogi Berra, and you have a company whose control of its public perception is unprecedented. And as a company that can bend the global economy to its will, Amazon should be subject to far more in-depth investigation and scrutiny. The grand strategy that Bezos chooses to pursue will largely set the agenda on Wall Street and Main Street and may well impose more tangible effects on many Americans than what happens at the polls.

Going beyond the scattershot headlines, here are the five Amazon stories that are really worth following, each with existential consequences for the U.S. economy and society.

1. Amazon Versus Google in Product Searches 

At its core, Amazon is simply a search engine with a gargantuan fulfillment center attached to it. While the exact number varies depending on the survey, nearly every major U.S. media outlet has gone on record stating that 50 to 55 percent of product searches begin on Amazon. The subtext is that Amazon, amid its myriad other competitive advantages, has displaced Google as the world’s most valuable search engine.

However, the studies that support Amazon’s dominance in product searches omit a key detail: Not all product searches are created equal. Amazon currently owns transactional searches but has struggled to displace Google when consumers are still researching what they want to buy. (But don’t expect Amazon to live with that status quo for much longer.)

In understanding who will win the future of commerce, no single metric is more important than the genesis of product search. In Forbes, former Target executive Chris Walton says that product searches will be the “leading indicators that will predict who will thrive in the new era of retail. First product search trends, not quarterly store or digital sales performance, over time, will better highlight true staying power.”

Longer term, Google has an existential decision to make: Should it continue to be the conduit for other retailers to compete against Amazon, or should it invest heavily in transforming its business to become an e-commerce fulfillment engine of its own? While there are strong arguments for each, Google so far has focused on the former, a win for Fortune 500 retailers and small e-commerce shops alike. But with billions in cash on hand, Google is just an Instacart or Shopify acquisition away from rapidly altering the paradigm of e-commerce and taking on Amazon more aggressively.

More than any other head-to-head clash among tech titans, the battle for product search supremacy will have far-reaching implications across how Americans spend their money. Buckle up for the great search wars to come.

This reads like something out of a bygone era. When I wrote this, Shein was unkown in the US, Bytedance was just beginning to buy ads promoting TikTok and Temu didn’t exist. Ultimately, Google and Amazon never really became a direct heavyweight fight. Google never went near deeply touching eCommerce fulfillment and ultiamtely its fate was never tied to commerce.

Interestingly enough, TikTok is one of the largest beneficiaries of this decision— with one less American tech titan in the mix, TikTok has taken on the Herculean task of tackling fulfillment with TikTok Shop, a far juicier geopolitical narrative than Google coming after Amazon.

2. Amazon Versus Typing 

The reason Apple became the first company with a trillion-dollar valuation is painstakingly simple; they owned the millennium’s first trillion-dollar innovation. And Amazon is best positioned to own the next.

Reports that only 2 percent of customers had made a purchase via Alexa have caused the market to sleep on the pending revolution in how we interact with our devices. At its essence, voice is a more natural medium for humans than typing, particularly on a five-inch interface, which is a learned action. The iPhone essentially has reprogrammed human behavior, driving trillions of dollars in market shifts in the process. Voice can take us back to a more natural state and cause similarly seismic shifts.

While it’s hardly the aesthetic or tactile experience that many love about shopping, voice commands could set a new standard for convenience.

The caveat is that unlike Apple and the iPhone, Amazon doesn’t have to wait for the traditional adoption curve; it can force the issue by subtly inserting voice technology into our daily lives. Amazon is beginning to embed Alexa into everyday devices, starting with the prodigal microwave. While many consumers have chosen not to invite Alexa into their homes, they may now do so unknowingly when they use Amazon to buy a simple household appliance. Across the U.S., 13 million microwaves are sold every year—a bounty of opportunity for Big Brother.

Think again about product searches. In 10 years, the dominant medium for them will be instructing your Alexa or Google Home, “Buy me the best headphones for running.” In response, your device will output a highly curated result full of expert recommendations, consumer reviews, and the most competitive price. While it’s hardly the aesthetic or tactile experience that many love about shopping, voice commands could set a new standard for convenience. Without the visual interface to shop around and compare prices, the voice medium is inherently susceptible to dominance by one platform.

Whether that platform is one that directly sells you goods (Amazon) or directs you to other merchants (Google) will determine the overall competitiveness of the retail ecosystem of the 2020s.

Woof. As you laugh at me here, its important to remember this was a pretty vanilla and hardly contrairan take five years ago. Since then, Amazon has cut hundreds of Alexa jobs as voice faded in the AI boom.

I suppose this one should have been obvious— long before they discovered the metaverse, McKinsey had a raging hard-on for voice technology. We should all be thankful voice led shopping never really panned out— it’s a dreary and joyless experience and ultimately no more convenient than the status quo.

3. Amazon Versus the Great American Brand 

By the end of the year, Amazon will have brought in $10 billion in annual advertising revenue. For context, the (thriving) New York Times makes about $200 million per year off digital ads, meaning that the retailer makes 50 times as much money selling ads as our nation’s premier newspaper.

But with its advertising business, Amazon is collecting something far more valuable than just immediate cash payoff: data. The moment brands choose to sell on the Amazon marketplace, they begin handing Amazon the blueprint for how to put them out of business. Listing products on Amazon leads to a plethora of information on exactly what sells, and paying Amazon to sponsor a given product tosses kerosene on the data inferno.

By being obsessively customer-centric for two decades, Amazon can now sacrifice UX for new buckets of money because it’s too powerful to stop.

For example, Levi’s is one of many iconic brands aggressively ramping up its spending on Amazon. But will Americans still value Levi’s 150 years of brand equity when Amazon launches its own label of blue jeans that also make your butt look great and cost half the price? The $64,000 question is how Amazon will choose to use all this data. Will they try to move us toward a brandless society, building hundreds of thousands of AmazonBasics and Amazon Essentials? Or will Amazon decide that its long-term best interest is not to displace too many of the merchants that sell products on its platform?

Despite the deluge of merchandising data it is collecting, Amazon’s ardent embrace of advertising looks a bit murky amid its overall grand strategy. It’s the classic platform play—once you control consumer attention, monetize it by any means possible. Put another way, by being obsessively customer-centric for two decades, Amazon can now sacrifice UX for new buckets of money because it’s too powerful to stop.

About 17 percent of search results presented to the user on Amazon are sponsored by the brand, allowing the company to directly monetize one in six products shown to shoppers on its website. For comparison, roughly 1 to 2 percent of search results on Target, Walmart, and other large multi-brand retailers are sponsored. While this strategy adds high-margin revenue for Amazon, it is billion-dollar wise and trillion-dollar foolish. Amazon made it this far by relentlessly focusing on customers and pursuing long-term customer-centricity over short-term profit opportunity. A feed in which one in five products is an ad is a direct rebuke of that ethos.

So this one is interesting. As a meta narrative, Amazon’s private label push and data mining its 3P brands was somewhat overhyped. Amazon Basics and Essentials are still a key part of the retailer’s strategy but less so than many would have imagined in late 2018.

Ironically, a big part of the reason for that is the meteoric growth of its ad business. Ads have grown from $10 to $50B and we’re still here asking the same questions about what the inflection point is when the harm to the customer experience outweights the reward. Hell, I wrote the same shit I said here in the newsletter two weeks ago in 2018 and didn’t even remember it! While tech moves fast, many of the big picture narratives in this space are stubbornly persistent and take years, even decades to play out.

4. Amazon Versus Online Journalism as We Know It 

In the next decade, Amazon will transform online media by displacing Facebook as the primary aggregator of content. Amazon already has such an affinity for content that in the early 2000s, the company was paying writers to create reviews of products it didn’t even carry yet, realizing that investing in quality content would make the website a destination. In a nutshell, an e-commerce company conceptually saw the power in hosting content online before media companies did.

In a similar vein, 65 percent of all affiliate links on outlets such as Wirecutter, CNET, Best Products, and BuzzFeed direct to Amazon. These are relationships that Amazon has cultivated since the genesis of these sites that effectively turn prestigious publishers into content marketers for our largest retailer. But Amazon won’t stop there. It’s only a matter of time before Amazon cuts out the middleman (Google) and decides to host publisher content about products directly on its platform. Doing so would make Amazon’s search experience far more compelling while also providing additional revenue for commerce publishers. Some publications will hold out on tying their fate to another large technology platform, but the vast majority will welcome the additional distribution.

And if Amazon succeeds at hosting commerce content on its platform, why not take a crack at hosting all publisher content on Amazon? While its traffic is dwarfed by Facebook, Amazon receives more monthly visits than the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN combined. Right now, a few companies’ algorithms pick and choose exactly what consumers see, and they’re frankly doing an awful job of it. Why shouldn’t Bezos think he can do better? Five years ago, he bought a venerable newspaper that had just laid off more than 40 reporters. This week, that same paper announced 13 new reporting roles, including perhaps the most ironic job in the U.S.

Pivoting to subscriptions is the name of the game in media, and Amazon is already running a very successful subscription business.

From a content-serving perspective, Amazon has already built the most sophisticated recommendation algorithms for commerce—IP that can be repurposed for content personalization. First teased by Nicholas Negroponte in the mid-1980s, the personalized newspaper is an idea that bubbles up as a possible savior of journalism every five years or so only to crash spectacularly. But despite its repeated failures in practice, the concept has unrealized commercial appeal if done correctly. Bytedance, a company best known for building a news aggregator and content personalization engine, is valued at $75 billion, making it the most valuable startup in the world.

From a monetization perspective, pivoting to subscriptions is the name of the game in media, and Amazon is already running a successful subscription business. If anyone can convince you to pay for news, it is probably Amazon. Or it could choose to make any local newspaper free for Prime members, absorbing the losses as a pure philanthropic service to democracy. Making $1 million in profit every hour affords a lot of creative flexibility. Imagine it’s 2025, and folding local news into Amazon Prime has become the lifeline that bailed out hundreds of daily newspapers.

If this all sounds hyperbolic and apocalyptic, it is. But benevolent billionaires may prove to be the best of so many bad options for supporting local and investigative journalism. No billionaire is better equipped to pick up the mantle than the man who redefined publishing, saved the Washington Post, and has generally mastered any business built around the art of the written word.

This was something of a nothingburger but is indicative of a certain period in time. In 2018, Amazon has just rolled out Onsite Associates, subscription-based media was thriving amidst mass layoffs of ad supported publications and the Washington Post was a banner success story in media.

Fast forward five years and Onsite Associates is dead, Substack is bleeding writers largely due to their domgatic hatred of ads and The Washington Post lost $100M in 2023. Media is hard and Amazon intelligently, only wants the parts that make money.

5. Amazon Versus the Ghosts of Rough Rider 

It’s not every day that a paper somebody wrote in law school earns them cult-hero status. Yet, that’s precisely what happened when Lina Khan published “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” in the Yale Law Journal, earning her a profile in the New York Times and sending off a wave of salon chatter about the peril of modern monopolies.

However, despite the rise of “hipster antitrust,” there is still no real political groundswell that Bezos should lose sleep over. Believing that Amazon should be checked with antitrust has yet to cross from Silicon Valley intelligentsia to mainstream zeitgeist. For all the compelling arguments about Amazon’s market power, nobody has yet answered a simple question: How the hell do you break up a firm that most consumers love? Just this week, Amazon effectively made Santa Claus real by announcing free delivery for holiday shoppers. That this ultimately falls on the backs of mail and delivery people is of little concern to most shoppers.

In the most significant midterm election in decades, there isn’t a single political hopeful making antitrust a core tenet of their platform. Rather than creating political pressure from both sides, the ideological alignment between Donald Trump and liberals on this has created an uneasy gridlock that makes it hard to fathom any meaningful action being taken against Amazon under the current administration.

In time, this will change. When Sears ruled the retail world, the entire Sears workforce reaped the bounty of its success, greatly bolstering the middle class. The Amazon era, however, has more enriched an exclusive club of executives and large shareholders. I may be insanely naïve, but I think the political scene will normalize a bit after 2020, and someone (likely unknown to the American public at the moment) will rise on the left to combine modern progressivism with old-school Democratic flair. Imagine the personification of Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball album combining shameless support for unions with marked disdain for uber-wealth. Breaking up big tech on behalf of workers—more so than for consumers—would be an anchor point of this platform.

There are signs that Amazon can no longer control its own shadow. Last month, the retailer increased its minimum wage to $15, a move widely regarded as a net benefit to society. But it comes with massive externalities and unanswered questions. What happens to the fabric of a city when it’s suddenly more lucrative to be an Amazon warehouse worker than a paramedic? Expect questions like this to enter the mainstream as Amazon swallows more and more of the country’s enterprise and becomes one of the defining political stories of the next decade.

While Lina Khan’s star continued to rise, we’re still two years away from the start of an FTC trial in the US and Amazon is a more powerful entity than they were when this was first penned. Joe Biden’s election could be viewed as the best our political scene could normalize in the wake of COVID and he certainly has a touch of old school, pro union Democratic flair. But the idea of serious calls to break up Amazon on behalf of labor were a bit far fetched.

So too was the idea of somebody new rising on the left — John Fetterman may have kinda fit the bill for what I was picturing here but its hard to imagine him making any sort of a larger national run.

Add all this up, and there really is only one Amazon story. Amazon is a company beyond the reach of the invisible hand, unthreatened by people who buy their ink by the barrel, and no longer held accountable to the public. Amazon is the consummate triumph of U.S. capitalism, ultimately bound to become the case study for the danger of the system’s unchecked excess.

This was an obnoxious last paragraph that read back a lot better to me at 26 than it does now at 31. Cool attempt at being profound bro.

Happy New Year! A quick housekeeping note to kick us off. This project is starting to gain some real momentum so I’ll be publishing weekly on Tuesdays throughout 2024. That means I’ll be tweaking the format to do more quick-hitter takes that I can bang out in an hour on the week’s news with the goal of one monthly longread to keep you all honest.

Noticing quite a few new email addresses come through each day so if we don’t know each other personally, please please reply to say hi. I do this primarily to have a virtual barroom conversation with good people so I’d love to learn who you all are.

OK, we’ve got good vibes going so let’s ruin it all with a nice politics post 🙂 

A portrait of drunk uncle Sam by DALL-E

One of the greatest privileges to living in a functional state is that most citizens can give precisely zero fucks about politics with minimal adverse impact on their day to day quality of life. It’s also the ultimate double edged sword for a mature democracy. Hard times create civically minded men and women who give a damn. Men who give a damn create create good times. Good times create apatehtic men. And apathetic men create hard times.

American society has a weird dichotomy of people who choose to make being politically active their entire identity and those who trip over themselves to make sure you know that anything that they say or do isn’t political in nature. This is of course, mostly bullshit. Politics is simply the dirty elbow grease of democracy. If you do business in a democracy, to fundamentally opt out of politics is an unserious position, even when it is a privilege you are afforded. Giving a shit about the trajectory of your nation is a competitive advantage. 

In 2024, avoiding politics as a commerce operator will be a near impossible task. From the moment the Iowa caucus kicks off, every single major business news story will be framed with a political subtext. For better or worse, no country makes an absolute soap opera of its political process more than we do. Every election season feels longer than the entire anthology of the Walking Dead. Its a system almost designed to make citizens resentful of the political process.

But like it or not, politics matters and this is the most important political year of our lifetime both at home and abroad.

Around The World 

In eight days, Taiwan heads to the polls in a criminally under-covered and wildly vital parliamentary election which will go a long way towards determining whether the nation takes a conciliatory or pro-independence stance towards its large shadow. China is straight up framing the election as a struggle between war and peace and urging citizens to make the “correct” choice. 

All this comes against the backdrop of President Xi’s rare admission that the Chinese economy is in serious trouble. This paragraph from CNN sums it up nicely: 

Two days after Xi hit the airwaves, TikTok Shop suddenly announced that it has to actually make money, something we’ll dig into a lot more next week. Look, to a hammer who writes a newsletter called United States of Amazon, everything is a nail but it’s hard to see this as pure coincidence. If the Jan 13 elections swing against Xi, who knows what best laid plans of Chinese and American business operations will be caught in the crosshairs. 

Elsewhere, Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world, has an unpredictable election upcoming. India has a parliamentary election that will serve as a de facto referendum on Modi. The EU parliamentary vote in June will be an interesting canary in the coal mine for measuring global anti-immigration sentiment and Mexico’s election a few days before promises to whip up the migrant narrative on the US campaign trail. Finally, in South Africa (where the ruling party selects the president), the African National Congress risks falling below 50% of the vote just 25 years after Thabo Mbeki succeeded Mandela in a landslide that made one-party rule seem near perpetually inevitable.  

This is an email delivered to busy professionals so these are almost comically reductionist summaries– I urge you to read more about each of these races. But suffice to say, with most of the world’s largest economies either directly or indirectly charting their macro political course, this is a historically significant geopolitical year for the world. 

Murica’s 2024 Election 

OK, I’ve bored you with the vegetables of foreign affairs. Let’s eat a little candy and call the U.S. presidential race. 

There’s no way around it–  as of today, things look absolutely awful for Biden. As the S & P rips near historic highs, inflation trickles back down and the Fed looks poised to pull off the mocked soft landing, Biden’s approval split sits at 38/55. Biden was elected to turn the page on COVID and make politics boring again. He’s done just that and look where it has him. 

In general, the macro vibe is perhaps historically bad for any incumbent president as 73% of Americans believe the nation is on the wrong track, a historic high riding a 20 year trend.

I like Reuben Rodriguez’s explanation for this best– we live in a time of unprecedented change which brings about deeply intense nostalgia. If this dynamic continues, we’ll be trapped in a weird doom loop of one-term presidents. But here’s why I think it won’t happen. 

In a reversal of 2016, Biden defeats Trump after trailing in all of the meaningful polls after Trump’s official confirmation as the GOP nominee. It will go down like this:  

Going into Election night, Trump will hold an aggregate 2-3 point lead in the polls, akin to Clinton’s 2016 edge. He’ll absolutely wipe the floor with Biden in Florida early, winning by 8+ points by dinnertime and sending the punditry into an absolute frenzy. In a stunner, Trump will lose New York by only 10 points, make major inroads in a number of blue states and permanently destroy any notion of Democrats turning Texas even the slightest shade of purple.   

But like daddy’s steady 1964 Oldsmobile, Grandpa Joe will chug on holding Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Nevada, New Hampshire & Minnesota. Georgia and Arizona swing back to Trump but it’s no matter. The president wins with 279 electoral votes. In the end, Biden wins the popular vote by about 2 million votes as well. 

Here’s my logic for why the zeitgeist will undervalue Biden leading up to Election Day. With Trump somewhat sidelined over the past few months, the right has refound its core playbook of drumming up a litany of manufactured controversies.  Like a lamb to the slaughter, several center-left pundits and mainstream media have gotten right in line. As a result, the president of Harvard bombing in front of Congress becomes some sprwaling rebuke of liberal politics writ large.

While all this kind of stuff plays really well with the comically small sample size of voters who actually respond to polls, it’s a funhouse mirror way of sampling public opinion. While it all hurts Biden’s approval rating now, it will largely be irrelevant by the fall when Trump owns the spotlight.

The president’s greatest political trait is that he isn’t on Twitter and with a gun to his head, probably couldn’t tell you who Claudine Gay is. In short, Biden lives in a magical world that is blissfully devoid of any online manufactured culture war bullshit. And thankfully, so too do tens of millions of Americans who will hit the polls.

In the months leading up to the election, all the GOP’s narrative manipulation nuance will wither as Trump goes to eleven, alienating just enough swing voters to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

2024’s silent majority will be people who simply want to vibe in peace. It’ll be just enough to carry the president to a second term. 

A portrait of Santa questioning the commercial nature of Christmas by DALL-E

If time proves Canadian philosoper Marshall McLuhan right and the medium is truly the message, commerce directly becoming the dominant distribution channel for advertising is the logical endgame of American capitalism. For now, it’s simply called retail media.

Always eager to reach their grubby appendages into emerging pools of money, large consulting firms have taken notice of this space. Boston Consulting Group predicts that retail media will reach $110B in revenue in 2026, with $75B coming to retailers as pure profit.  Not to be outdone, McKinsey pontificates that retail media will drive a $1.3T domino effect, whatever the hell that means. No word yet on how much of that will be spent in the $5T metaverse. 

Consultants have a poetic way of making everything more confusing than it really is, because well, that’s the business model. So allow me to explain what is actually happening here. Today the abstract concept of retail media is, by and large, sponsored products in searches on Amazon. Amazon’s ads business will end the year somewhere around $50B and is still growing at ~25% YoY. While they have a nascent DSP product and ramping up offsite partnership activations, the vast majority of these dollars come from little boxes in search results that your favorite brand or Chinese factory operation is paying for. 

In a very distant second, Walmart Connect will likely net out in the $4B range, with the vast majority coming from onsite sponsored products. The longtail of retail media products is a who’s who of pretty much any big retailer in the game. Target (Roundel), Home Depot, Best Buy, Lowe’s, Kroger, Instacart, Albertson’s, Nordstrom, Walgreens, CVS, Ulta, Macy’s, Chewy, Dollar General and even Michael’s Crafts have media divisions of various complexities. Sponsored listings in search are the bellwether product for pretty much all of the retail media networks but the greatest hits of ad tech— primarily in the form of offsite retargeting— are starting to creep into the picture. First party data businesses such as Walmart Luminate are the new old thing and have the potential to add billions of incremental dollars as well by the end of the decade.  

As an aside, being a sales rep in an emerging new advertising marketplace is an absolutely great gig. I joined LinkedIn’s marketing solutions team in 2015, about a year after almost every advertising sales rep seemed to bank enough money to buy a swanky house in the East Bay. I left because I was 23 years old, stupid, and too high on my horse to just sling some ads. I’ve had an eclectic mix of startup experiences in the decade since and I wouldn’t trade it for the world but if I’d have just worked my way up the LinkedIn ad sales ladder, banked a quarter mil a year and put 20% of that back into Microsoft stock which has casually 8x’d since 2015, I’d be a wealthier boy. If you have the chance to get in on the ground floor of one of these operations, do it. 

As much as it pains me to see it, the consultants are on to something here with their gaudy market size predictions. On a five and ten year horizon, retail media is going to get a hell of a lot bigger and more complex. So what does it all mean for well, retail and the media?  

Product search and the innovator’s dilemma 

Earlier this year, Amazon shuttered the Onsite Associates program, ending a five-year experiment to embed expert review content from media publishers in their product search experience. In and of itself, this was not particularly big news outside of the hardcore Amazon ecosystem. The Onsite Associates program was highly opaque, quietly powered by a network of third-parties, and lived in a weird sort of strategic limbo at Amazon. While an estimated 25% of product searches were served editorial recommendations, Amazon never seemed truly sure what to do with the program.

As with every strategic decision Amazon makes, the company tried to spin it as a move grounded in customer centricity. Here’s what spokesperson Keri Bertolino told Modern Retail about the change:

Let’s not kid about what happened here. Amazon effectively removed a cost center to their business and replaced it with more juicy ads real estate.

For their part, Amazon sellers largely welcomed the change. To many, Onsite Associates felt like a who do you know black box while at least with ad inventory, you can always win the real estate if you’re willing to pay the piper for it. And who knows, maybe Amazon shoppers both clicked and converted at a higher rate on ads vs. independent editorial recommendations, especially when Amazon effectively stripped the publisher’s branding.  

Onsite Associates, we hardly knew thee

But even if this is all true, Amazon dialed down evolving its product search experience in the service of driving more dollars tomorrow in favor of making more ad money today. In this way, retail media is the perfect example of the innovator’s dilemma in action. In Bezos terms, it’s a bit of a day two business. 

Ultimately, any retailer’s long term success depends on providing either the most convenient or delightful experience to their shoppers. If you ask any Amazon, Walmart or Target shopper what an ideal product search interface looks like, few will tell you that they’d like to see more ads pushing the boundary of relevance. But here’s the thing–when a product has 70%+ EBITDA margins, you’re gonna see companies max the everloving shit out of it.    

Amazon will tell you that there’s no inherent reason why ads can’t be value additive to the shopper experience because, well, they have shareholders and narratives to tell Wall Street and such. But I prefer this explanation from Marketplace Pulse. 

As half-hearted as it was, one could easily argue that Amazon’s inclusion of publisher results in search was their boldest experiment in changing the core customer facing product discovery interface. It was an attempt to overcome the paradox of choice by presenting shoppers with a curated list of recommendations. But crucially, it was fundamentally at odds with a company that makes the bulk of its current profit selling ads.  

Cui bono?

Retail media is not a zero sum game enterprise. The creation of massive swaths of new, highly performant ad inventory on Amazon and other retailers increases the total addressable market of commerce and creates incremental opportunity for new brands to quickly come to market. The fact that more and more of them are direct from China operations notwithstanding, this is an overall net positive for American industry. 

However, most of the dollars aren’t manufactured out of thin air. And lord knows, Facebook and Google (does anyone trust any nerd that calls these companies Alphabet and Meta?) seem to be doing fine so the big loser in the retail media evolution is once again, conventional media. 

Today, Amazon is an existentially important partner to many of the nation’s largest media conglomerates who refer billions of dollars in sales every year via the Associates program. So Amazon is simultaneously one of the biggest supporters and among the greatest threats to what’s left of the legacy mass media business model. 

Procter and Gamble is under no civic obligation to buy shitty display ads from legacy publishers that don’t convert in the nebulous service of American journalism. If there’s more money to be made on Amazon, that’s where they owe it to their shareholders to invest. But when a large CPG brand does a seven figure advertising and affiliate deal with Conde Nast, in some way it supports months long New Yorker investigations into the impunity of the rich and powerful. 

When that money goes to Amazon, some guy gets an even bigger boat. 

Buon’ Natale

I kid you not, 12 (!) different subscribers to this newsletter have texted me over the last two weeks asking me for my opinion on Giants QB Tommy “Cutlets” Devito and his agent, recent Italian-American Sports Hall of Fame inductee Sean Stellato.

I don’t know man, all I can say is these look like guys that will give you a ten minute monologue on where to find the best gabagool in North Jersey but would have blank stares if you asked them to pass the capocollo. Also the absolute disrespect shown for Marsala in this video and the ranking of penne ala vodka over linguine with clams and bolognese has me ready to go to the mattresses.

Everyone loves a good Christmas conspiracy so here’s mine. Three generations ago the Devito and Stellato families were bored WASPs named Clarke and Turner who thought it would be funny to do a bit as the most aggressive caricature of Italian-Americans possible. Somewhere along the way, they realized it was just a superior lifestyle and forgot to drop the act. We had them at sambucca and espresso.

Merry Christmas from my little cutlets. I’ll catch you in the new year!

We’re trying a new format this week!  

So in lieu of making you read a long, slightly pompous essay before getting to the news part of the newsletter, we’re rolling with a running list of Matt Levine style ramblings on the stories of the last week.  

Drop me a note to let me know what you think of this style! 

A portrait of Beijing in the aesthetic of Grand Theft Auto by DALL-E. Maybe not AI’s finest work but I dig it

Branded In China 

Here’s an absolutely bonkers stat buried deep in the advertising nerd annals of the internet in Brian Wieser’s outstanding newsletter, Madison & Wall.  An estimated $7B in Facebook spend is originating at Chinese addresses and running in the United States. Made, sold, and marketed by China, baby! 

First off, a massive hat tip to Wieser for even thinking to note the difference between revenue apportioned by user and revenue apportioned by billing address which requires cross-referencing earnings call information with 10-Q and 10-K filings. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between a full-time analyst and some guy balancing writing a newsletter around drinking four of his homemade bathtub limoncellos and a day job.  

The real question this evokes for me is how much bigger is that delta for Amazon? Said another way, how much of Amazon’s $50B media empire is just one firm (Amazon) directly capturing value from China that used to first get split across a wealth of American middleman businesses? 

I’d venture that a number of savvy tech and service providers in the Amazon software ecosystem are asking this very question. Even if it’s a race to the bottom on price, selling picks and shovels that enable sophisticated Chinese operators to efficiently spend ad dollars on Amazon is a whole new world of opportunity. 

I’d imagine that it is also on the mind of more than a few people in Washington. Here’’s a big part of the case that David Zapolsky is trying to make against the FTC: 

If Amazon, directly or indirectly, is courting more easy China ad money to bypass the indie American seller, it doesn’t exactly bode well for its positioning as a purveyor of egalitarian American supremacy. Of course, US brands spending a fortune in ads on Amazon could be framed just as cynically. The big, bad behemoth is essentially imposing a massive tax on mom and pop operations. So far, Amazon has taken a mostly defensive position in its response to the FTC, highlighting the usual points of customer convenience, third party seller supremacy and the fact that 80% of sales still happen in physical stores.  

For the drama, I’d love to see Zapolsky go dark mode and really go on offense, positioning Amazon’s embrace of Chinese sellers as a grand patriotic gesture to take that value capture away from Chinese firms. Hey Lina, you want those dollars in the hands of Tiktok or Temu? Didn’t think so. Even if I wouldn’t fully buy it, some administrations might. 

I get the sense Amazon is trying to feel out the 2024 political climate and which way the winds tilt before really settling on its ultimate plan of attack. For all of Trump’s America First bluster, this is a man who fawned over Xi in a manner that makes Taylor’s glances at Travis look platonic. Put “the look, the brain, the whole thing” on my tombstone. 

Suffice to say, I don’t envy the tightrope Zapolsky has to walk here. But he gets paid roughly as much as every United States senator combined to walk it and has seen a cool >50X gain in Amazon stock over his 24-year tenure to boot. Not bad!  

The Lawyers Always Get Paid 

Speaking of making a few clams, here’s a spreadsheet courtesy of Cal professor Owin Kerr showing that big law associates make a whole damn clams casino: 

It’s made me question some things, mainly why my wife eschewed big law overtures to…checks notes.. spend more time with ME? It also brings to mind a quote by famous sociologist Chris Rock: 

In all seriousness, while I wouldn’t wish corporate big law on Joe Douglas as his next gig, here’s another (directional) payscale worth looking at, courtesy of Levels.

Among the big tech shops, Amazon is known as a bit of a meat grinder but it’s Italy in August compared to big law. And thousands of Amazon employees make a hell of a lot more than anyone who works in public service. Hell, a mid level Amazon ad sales rep makes more than a United States senator or federal judge. If you manage a book of say, large CPG brands on the platform, the gig consists of occasionally listening to empty threats from CMOs and media planners and responding:  “C’mon bro, are ya really gonna not advertise on Amazon?” and then cashing your $300K/yr. That’s a great job! 

One of the reasons that Packy McCormick is right on the money when he says that big tech is going to get a hell of a lot bigger is that it offers far and away the best utilitarian outcomes of any sector for employees and thus will continue to gobble up top talent. You make good money, have generally reasonable hours and do prestigious work that most folks still have a net positive sentiment about. Beats being a lawyer. 

Shein! Shein! (She Go Crazy Cause She Look Like A Flower But Sting Like A Bee)  

Wanna feel old? This spring, William Hung’s iconic American Idol audition will turn 20. Bet you can’t name two people that actually won American Idol (Carrie Underwood I think? Kelly Clarkson maybe?) but you sang this headline in Hung’s voice. #legend

Shein’s IPO is upcoming and folks, this story has everything but the popcorn. We’ve got a reclusive and mysterious CEO, allegations of forced labor, a quiet lobbying push and a major test for a US government that is increasingly viewed as asleep at the wheel on Chinese tech. Are you there Washington? It’s me Andy. 

To understand Shein's broader history and business model, I once again urge you to read this incredible analysis from Not Boring.  In McCormick’s typical cool dude techie utopian style, it’s an unabashedly uncritical look for such a controversial entity but worth your time. For my part, I’m most interested in how Amazon responds and they’ve fired a pretty large shot in lowering seller fees from 17% to 5% for apparel items that sell for less than $15. 

As much as selling <$15 apparel that is bound for landfills after a few months isn’t really a great business, Amazon had to do this. It’s pretty simple– Amazon existentially cannot afford to lose the price conscious gen Z shopper, especially when cheap clothes may prove to be Shein’s books. Shein (and Temu for that matter) is giving the vibe that it doesn’t come for Amazon’s crops and villages but to destory its hegemony, down to the last novella. If you got that reference without clicking the hyperlink, I truly love you.

Amazon’s response will also provide a fascinating data point around whether Shein is winning because of their unique(ish) shopping experience or simply because they sell a decent assortment of unfathomably cheap clothes.  I tend to think it’s the latter. Prognostications of China-esque livestream shopping taking hold in the West have been around in the decade and we still love our search bars, boxes and Facebook ads. And what Americans really love is cheap shit. If you keep selling us a dollar for ninety cents, we’ll take that deal. 

Love is A Long Road 

Leave it to the folks at Rockstar to dig deep onto the B-side of Free Fallin’ to unearth a reasonably obscure Tom Petty tune that absolutely perfectly matches the aesthetic of GTA VI’s trailer. As of this writing, we’re at 130M views and counting.  

Since GTA V was released, there have been TWENTY-FIVE fuckin’ Marvel Cinematic Universe movies added to humanity’s artistic archive. In a world where pretty much every financial incentive rewards consistent, predictable mediocrity, Rockstar left billions of dollars on the table in pursuit of perfection.  

I was 21 when GTA V came out. I ended an internship I was working a week early to shack up and power through the game, then got in a buddy’s heinous 1996 Corolla and rode down from Chicago to Gulf Shores, Alabama where I spent ten days on a rainy spring break perennially blasted and neck deep in crawfish. When GTA VI comes out, I’ll be 32 with a child, mortgage and zero regrets.  

Somehow, one woman stuck with me through it all. God bless America. Love is a long road.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to one person who looks like a flower but stings like a bee. Idk man, this is what the newsletter growth people told me to do.

Wall Street in the style of Salvador DALL-E

Almost exactly six years ago, the research firm CB Insights ran a cute little March Madness style poll that asked clients and followers one simple question: “which company’s shares are best to buy and hold on to for 10 years?” The resulting infographic below is a beautiful little Silicon Valley time capsule. 

March Madness…but make it even dorkier

In the final, Alibaba triumphed over Amazon with 63% of the vote. And how could it not? Between meteoric growth in China’s GDP, a burgeoning Chinese middle class, a shockingly laissez faire CCP (lol) and Baba’s entrenched status as 3D printer for the world, this was a Secretariat in the 1973 Belmont level safe bet. 

My dear reader, if you did the sensible and obvious thing and bought 1,000 shares of Alibaba stock in late November 2017 for $191,900, you’d have…..$74,120 as of the time of this writing.  That’s good for a cool 61.3% loss, not factoring in pesky inflation.   

Albaba even took down the recently departed legend. At a time when many investors were selling off in Q3 2021 as Beijing turned on Jack Ma, Charlie Munger quadrupled his holding, seduced by the growing Chinese internet narrative. Reflecting on what he deemed his worst investment, Munger declared that he “didn’t stop to realize they’re still a gawd damned retailer.” 

Zoom out even further and the story gets even weirder. Hat tip to Trevor Scott for the pithy analysis. 

In a time when Alibab’s revenue ballooned more than 20X, its share price fell.  Baba’s market cap now sits at $180B…or one-sixth of a NVIDIA. To provide a little context, this all went down during an era where China’s GDP grew ~7% YOY on average compared to ~2.5% for the USA. 

It gets worse for Alibaba. Credit to Joe at Marketplace Pulse for shouting out the seismic moment in Chinese business history when Pinduoduo flipped Alibaba.  But Pinduoduo is still fundamentally a god damned retailer, branding itself as a virtual bazaar in its English about us video. So what gives? 

Lotto tickets and grand strategies 

Of course, stock prices reflect underlying business fundamentals in more or less the same way porn does with sex. I’ve always liked Buffett’s famous quip that in the short term, the market is a voting machine while in the long term, it’s a weighing machine. 

My less capitalistically correct take is that in aggregate, the stock market is an effective tool to align the interest of Americans with capital rather than labor and serves that purpose well. However, buying any individual stock is just buying a scratch off lotto ticket minus the convenience of being steps from a fridge full of Four Loko. Buying Chinese stocks which exist at the mercy of Beijing is like liquidating your kid’s 529 to buy every Win For Life in the bodega. 

All this is to say, the #1 driver of stock price is narrative. And in the past few years, conventional wisdom says that being perceived as a retailer is a pretty damn bad narrative. 

Both Alibaba and Amazon were two of our largest advertisers at Protocol, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to essentially run psyop campaigns directed at a small handful of leaders in Washington and Wall Street. Alibaba– the consummate Chinese retailer–had one goal. To convince you that it was neither Chinese nor really a retailer. Through a series of sponsored posts, events and ads, Alibaba tried to position itself as a sort of amorphous global tech company that sells not widgets, but innovation and services to American companies.  

I get why both Wall Street and Silicon Valley kinda hate traditional retail. It’s a comically low margin, high infrastructure business that requires hiring a ton of people to scale. To date, almost every grandiose attempt to existentially replace humans with tech has made shopping worse.  For all of the hype around its automation and AI capabilities, Amazon employs more than 1.5 MILLION people. It’s a stubbornly old school business that visionaries and financiers alike want to leave behind. 

When the FTC cracks down on Amazon Basics and other monopolistic practices in Amazon’s core retail operation, they mostly miss the point. Amazon wants out of the retail business more than anybody. Amazon’s grand strategy has been to pivot their core business from something of a conventional retail operation to a marketplace. 

In Jeff Bezos 2018 letter to shareholders he said that “third party sellers are kicking our first party butt, badly.” He went on to say: 

I’ll let my readers who sell 3P on Amazon’s marketplace weigh in on the work “best” is doing in this sentence but suffice to say, this was always the plan. Your margin is my opportunity has always been Amazon’s guiding principle and the margins are hell of a lot juicier as a services provider with ad inventory for third party brands. 

But here’s the problem. America needs god damned retailers. Wall street suits and Cupertino cool guys may want retail middlemen to be a thing of the past but by and large, the American consumer does not.  

Retail is 6% of America’s GDP, an employer of tens of millions of people and perhaps most importantly, an anti ephemeral business. As the pure play direct to consumer model becomes exposed as an unsustainable wrinkle in time, good old first party retail is back en vogue as a preferred distribution channel. And maybe being a god-damned retailer ain’t such a bad business after all.

Narrative Violation

We’ll end this newsletter with a little game. Below are the stock prices for four conventional retailers over the past five years, all of which have outperformed Amazon stock. 

While some of these companies have small media operations and private-label brands, they are by and large, companies that distribute other brand’s products, largely in a brick and mortar setting.  They are the damndest of god-damned retailers.

Retailer #1 

Retailer #2:  

Retailer #3: 

Retailer #4 

 Reply to this email with your guesses! There may be prizes for the winners.

Amazonia
A collection of the week’s top stories in and around Amazon 

Mixing it up this week and sharing a few people I find particularly interesting follows in the Amazon ecosystem. Highly recommend checking these folks out as intellectual and spiritual complements to this newsletter:

• Molson Hart: Best known for shitting his pants and writing a viral tweetstorm about it, Molson’s the ultimate wildcard of the Amazon ecosystem. But many of his musings have proven prescient and his 2018 Medium post on Amazon’s business practices hurting consumers has placed his squarely at the center of the government’s case. In any event, dude is never boring.

• Jon Derkits (Best At Amazon): Mostly a tactical guide for sellers operating on Amazon, the bearded egg ocasionally branches out and provides some of the most astute analysis on the FTC’s case against Amazon, drawing on his extensive following of proceedings in Europe.

• Jon Elder: (Amazon Insiders): The most pro-Amazon voice on this list, Jon’s newsletter is another top tier spot for tips, tricks and news in the space.

• Matt Stoller (BIG): The foremost anti-monopolist voice going, Stoller’s opinions on Amazon are about what you’d expect. But his quiver of historical and legal precedent arrows is unmatched and his writing style has a great flair for the pompously dramatic. His book, Goliath has proably shaped my thinking more than any other I’ve read. Here’s a nice ironic link to buy it on Amazon

• Amy Nelson (Amy & The Oligarch): I reached out to Amy after realizing I unknowingly named this newsletter after her wild Medium blog post. I won’t spoil her wild story. Read it, subscribe to her newsletter and follow her on TikTok.

Dispatches from America
A potpurri of vibes from across the land

Just one story to highlight this week which is currently the main character on Twitter. If you haven’t yet, read Rachel Cohen’s outstanding feature in Vox on how millennials learned to dread motherhood.  

As Cohen points out in the piece, I’ve noticed a sort of Abilene Paradox in play in my life where people who are unequivocally happy as parents cosplay up the exhausting side of parenthood because they think it is how others feel. So all these people who love being parents make it seem shitty to their frends who are on the fence. What they see as harmless faux cynicism has a real effect on their peers.

I largely blame our parents for this one. One day, some boomer by the watercooler decided complaining about your wife and kids was the only viable humor trope and two generations behind just kinda got in line and went with the joke. Well, the joke fucking sucks.

For my part, when anyone asks about parenthood, I do my best to avoid answering in a dumb or cynical cliche and try to speak as honestly as possible. Everyone’s situation is different but I’ll just say this. I got married relatively young for a Brooklyn dude at 27 and had my daughter at 30. I sure as shit didn’t do either too soon.

Thanks for reading— one more piece coming next week before we break for Christmas.

If you’re still here, please please indulge me with your guesses and any feedback on this story. It’s my personal favorite of the newsletter pieces so far so curious to see how it lands.

The main section here also clocks in at 1,048 words— goal will be to stay about this length going forward. Keep me honest!

A realist portrait of a bulldog as Ridley Scott’s Napoleon by DALL-E

On the surface, there are many disparate meta narratives currently swirling around the Amazon ecosystem. Amazon is increasingly squeezing third-party vendors to a near existential breaking point. The largest aggregator of Amazon brands is bankrupt. Temu basically bought out Google Shopping in continuation of China’s mission to cut out the middleman in getting goods from its factories to your doorstep. 

But dig deeper and it’s all one tale. The arbitrage era in commerce is ending and we don’t really know what comes next. 

Hell, the entire American economy just went through a decade of arbitrage where fortunes were made drafting off the coattails of technologies invented in the 2000s. Gradually, it got weirder and weirder until ultimately the most powerful man in tech was a soon to be felon who made his “legitimate” fortune exploiting the kimchi premium, a difference in price between what a series of digital sudoku puzzles were worth in Korea and Japan vs. the rest of the world. 

In commerce, the Amazon marketplace originally launched in 2000 while Shopify’s API hit the scene in 2009. Both were among the most egalitarian value creators in tech, enabling thousands of people to become millionaires and creating millions of jobs. But they made for a counterintuitive profile of who was best suited to build commerce brands. The most important skill for making it as an eCommerce entrepreneur wasn't crafting great products or making grown men cry from nostalgia. It was being a little better than the next guy at finding arbitrage opportunities in nascent ad tech ecosystems. CPG, long the domain of the pitch man, temporarily went to the hackers. 

There were also plenty of hilarious get rich quick schemes. My personal favorite was the period of a few months in 2017 where Instagram was flooded with ads to skeleton Shopify storefronts for hyper patriotic brands like “Faded Glory.” Many of them were such lazy Chinese drop-shipping schemes that they never even changed the tags on the products. I fell for one and paid $100 for a  jacket that was “made in Detroit” whose only label reads “Yi Jian Mei.” Truly the wild, wild east.     

But to truly understand the last decade of commerce, I implore you to consider the bulldog.  

Disrupting The Bulldog:

While I love bulldogs, they are an absolute affront to natural law. Every time a new bulldog puppy is born (almost always as the result of artificial insemination), we stray further from God. 

As a bulldog dad, there are two substances I regularly abuse. The first is zinc oxide, a magic elixir most commonly used to treat diaper rash that also prevents a bulldog’s face wrinkles from serving as a greenhouse for yeast. The second is glucosamine, a hip and joint supplement that makes it possible for 50+ pounds of love to balance on a wobbly foundation designed to support considerably less weight.  

Both of these substances offer the perfect lens through which to view the last decade of commerce as each spawned a litany of seven and eight figure Amazon and Shopify businesses. Prior to the rise of FBA, each of these products was a near monopoly for the incumbent brand. 

To treat diaper rash or yeasty folds, you used Desitin, a J & J brand. For dog joint supplements, you used Dasuquin or Cosequin, both products made by a lab in South Carolina called Nutramax for more than three decades. 

Once Amazon entered the picture, a host of savvy entrepreneurs realized that each of these products could be essentially white labeled, given a fresh coat of packaging panache and blasted out through FBA. The formula was simple: 

• Find a high gross margin category that could support multiple winners, currently dominated by an incumbent slow to embrace digital 

• Launch a direct competitor and go hard as hell on Amazon or Facebook ads

Hip and joint supplements in particular were the perfect arbitrage product. From a unit economics perspective, they were the closest you could come to playing the eCommerce game on easy mode: 

• Daily use, naturally recurring product ->  ideal for a subscription model  

• Small & light product -> lower Amazon storage and 3PL fees 

• Macro trend of consumers willing to spend far more on their pets -> demand capture vs. demand creation business

By and large, this era belonged to operators who were absolutely world class at what I’d affectionately call growth hacky shit. You could launch a highly generic product with a mediocre brand and a few static product images and win if you were first in category and early in spending big on Facebook or Amazon PPC. Today, Zesty Paws is a world-class operation purchased for $610M in 2021 with a plethora of product lines for dogs and cats. In 2015, they launched two SKUs: salmon oil and “mobility bites.” They are one of many brands in the space that came from nothing to be worth nine figures in less than a decade on the back of FBA mastery. Today, a search for hip and joint supplements on Amazon contains dozens of brands, with Amazon Basics even getting in on the action. 

Wuffes followed a similar growth trajectory, just DTC vs. Amazon first. They began as essentially a white-labeled hip and joint supplement built on Facebook ad mastery. As competitors flooded the market, they invested in building best in class creative capabilities.  Finally, they poured their profits from the arbitrage era into building owned formulations and unique upmarket products like laser therapy.  

Among the Desitin disruptors, Wrinkle Paste is my personal favorite. Created by a company called Squishface, Wrinkle Paste is simply zinc oxide with a slight repackaging of inactive ingredients, specifically marketed towards snub nosed dog owners. A super simple, highly elegant positioning spin on a tried and true product that is now a multimillion dollar brand. 

The queen and her wrinkle cream. Don’t tell Squishface she’s still primarily a Desitin girl

This era was a wrinkle in time. At this point, the window for launching a new brand that is essentially a wrapper around white-labeled glucosamine or any other legacy pet supplement is slammed shut. The category is so crowded on Amazon that CPCs can approach $10 for an item that retails in the $40-50 range. Anything that needs a 25% conversion rate just to topline breakeven ain’t gonna be long for this world.  

There’s a near consensus view in the commerce ecosystem that with iOS 14.5, Apple cynically obliterated billions of dollars in market cap in the name of nebulous privacy. Make no mistake, Apple is a ruthless despot acting partially in its own self interest and partially just because Tim Cook thinks Zuck has weird energy. But in a decade, I think we’ll look back and realize Cook did the whole commerce ecosystem a favor. At the moment when commerce was getting dangerously stale, templatized and hyper-dependent on optimizing pixels, Apple dared us to be weird again. 

Artisans and Raconteurs

As Amazon and Meta become perfectly competitive platforms, everything gets commoditized except crafting great products and telling resonant stories around them. Since few can do this well, there will be far fewer winners. But those winners will be far larger than the DTC darlings of the 2010s. Ironically, the best eCommerce brands founded today will have venture sized outcomes, right as venture capital flees the space. For a taste of what this looks like, check out Spoiled Child. That sure as hell ain’t no Shopify template

All that said, my somewhat lame prediction is that the next decade won’t see a platform shift in commerce akin to that which AI brings about in other industries. In 2030, the majority of Americans won’t shop via livestreams, personalized chatbots or creator storefronts. We’ll continue to buy things largely by entering text based searches onto giant marketplaces and clicking buttons next to digital rectangles. And even more than today, we’ll do it on Amazon. 

But as standing out on Amazon gets tougher, growth hackers and financiers will cede power to artisans and raconteurs. Break out the carousel. 

Amazonia 

A collection of the week’s top stories in and around Amazon

Amazon Aggregator Thrasio Prepares for Bankruptcy (WSJ Pro): Highlighting just one story this week as it’s one quite close to me. 

The entire history of Thrasio would be different if they never publicly broadcasted that they were the fastest company ever to profitably reach $1B in valuation. OpenAI’s blog removing Sam Altman notwithstanding, this might go down as the most damaging press release in American corporate history.

If your business is essentially a novel form of arbitrage, the worst thing you can do is publicly broadcast exactly how that arbitrage works and how obscenely rich it is making you. With a single stupid press release, Thrasio sent the going rate for high growth Amazon businesses from 2-3X EBITDA to >5X, basically breaking its own business model. 

It is a huge misconception that Thrasio didn’t have capable operators at the controls. While many aggregators plugged in MBAs with no knowledge of Amazon’s idiosyncrasies, Thrasio hired many world-class Amazon operators and trained an entire generation more. Many Thrasio employees built 7 and 8 figure Amazon businesses of their own or were best in class in the esoteric corners of the business that they managed. But  Amazon is fundamentally a mature ecosystem and Thrasio by and large bought brands towards the maturity stage of their growth cycle. Even the absolute best optimizers at the margin can’t salvage wildly overpaying for assets with variable rate debt.  

This is why I find the gravedancing against Thrasio so insufferable. The company gave 200 small business operators life changing money, brought a ton of fresh talent and interest into the Amazon space and took a huge swing for the fences. Our space is better for it. 

Dispatches from America

A potpurri of vibes from across the land

Black Friday Fakeout: Amidst a rush of complaints that Black Friday sales ain’t what they used to be, Americans spend a record $9.7B, further continuing the trend that everyone says the economy sucks but is spending like sailors on their tenth shot of Bacardi. Suffice to say, I don’t envy Biden’s re-election campaign right about now.

Mary Magdalene of Congress: If the George Santos saga does truly end with his third expulsion vote, pour one out for your favorite fake Division three volleyball player. After all, it is easier to spend your campaign money on having your junk rated on OnlyFans than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

Sweet Home Chicago: Mike Ditka’s condo in the heart of downtown Chicago recently sold for only $575K (!). Only plausible explanation I can think of is that the smell of kielbasa is so deeply permeated in the joint that it’s a home only fit for a true sausage king.

Thanks again for reading! There are a couple hundred of y’all subscribed to this little ditty now and while this thing is a long way from even funding the beer I need to write it, I can feel some early momentum and plan on picking up the pace.

Back in your inbox next Tuesday!

Ever thine, ever mine, ever ours,

Mike

A money printer spewing $100 bills in the style of a Dr. Seuss drawing as rendred by DALL-E

I had a plan for how the first few pieces in this newsletter would go. But I think it was Mike Tyson who said, “everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth by Gen Z’s newest pyramid scheme.” And by god, these damn kids may have just shown me the future of commerce. You could say I got FLIP turned upside down. 

So, what the hell is Flip? The comapny bills itself as the “shopping social network” but the vibe is much more TikTok than Facebook. The core product is essentially short form shoppable videos with a major focus on authenticity and rating other Flippers’ reviews. It’s all wrapped with an in-app marketplace that hooks into a brand’s Shopify account for slick fulfillment. 

For brands, the offering is basically a no-brainer. For a slightly higher than average marketplace take rate (~20%), you get a net new distribution channel full of high intent shopping zealots and a little bonus free UGC as the cherry on top.

Flip was founded in 2019 and launched somewhat stealthily in 2021 in beauty and skincare. In 2022, Flip closed a $60M Series B and began to get a bit of public love but still flew mostly under the radar. That is until someone cranked the Daddy Yankee record and turned on a growth hack that would make Travis Kalanick foam at the mouth. The company built a scaled bonus model where the value of referral cash you can send to a contact in your phone is directly proportional to how many of their friends were early Flip adopters. Damme mas gasolina! 

Let’s get one thing straight– I’m too old for this shit. My first thought when I saw Flip’s GTM in action was to wonder what kind of juicy yield someone got for referring Fred Wilpon to Bernie Madoff. I joked earlier this year that I wasn’t sure if I wanted Tiktok banned because I’m an ardent patriot or just a crusty 31 year-old in CPG who doesn’t want to learn another social media platform. So when I say I don’t get a lot about Flip, keep that in mind.

But…. I don’t get a lot of what they are doing. First and foremost, the cash you get to spend on Flip from watching videos isn’t at all noticeably correlated with how you engage with the content. Said simply, the easiest way to rack up cash on Flip is to just Sonic the Hedgehog your thumb across the screen until the occasional interstitial stops you. I was able to hit >$50 in about 12 minutes of thumbing. 

Unlike the friend referral cash, the credits earned by “watching” videos are only redeemable for 30% off purchases. But if Flip is only taking 20% and footing the bill for the full 30% coupon, the unit economics there are….not ideal. On the surface, this has all the makings of a little economic redistribution from VCs to up and coming consumer brands. Lord knows we can use it right now. 

The most obnoxiously midwit take about any bold new technology is that myopically speaking, the numbers don’t work. It’s easy to be a cynical dickhead and does nobody any good. Flip CEO Noor Agha promises that the true magic of Flip is many layers deeper and I believe him. 

I think I know where he’s headed. Read on, my child. 

Audacity is SO Back

Credit where it’s due–-Flip is going balls to the wall when it’s beyond contrarian to do so. And it couldn’t come at a better time. For all of the hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap added by Amazon in the last decade, the basic architecture of its shopping experience is kinda the same. Ditto for most of your favorite retailers who were serving up static boxes of products for five and fifteen inch screens in 2013 and are doing it today. Etsy, Instagram and Pinterest have all tweaked their aesthetic but they essentially function the same as product discovery engines. Something new is longing to come to pass. 

In the year of our lord 2023, we worship at the altar of almighty EBITDA and audacity is no longer in vogue. Look, I’m a simple man. I like businesses that make money more than those that lose it. But the pendulum has swung too dangerously far towards sure things in VC broadly, but especially in retail tech. This tweet in particular from Eniac partner Hadley Harris really got me.  

My brother in christ, if you will only look at a SaaS company doing >$2M ARR and 2x growth for an A, you ain’t venture, you’re just capital. Maybe it’s not quite a slam dunk but it’s basically Victor Wembenyama shooting an uncontested layup.   

I get it– investors are burned from the ZIRP madness. They’ve heard crazy pitches from charismatic geniuses promising to rewrite the payments layer of the internet that ended in something called love.com and an SEC subpoena. It feels like a lifetime ago but we’re less than two years removed from Bolt raising at a $14B valuation. 

Ultimately, the problem with hundreds of millions of dollars being thrown at companies like Bolt and Fast specifically is that they were effectively solutions seeking a problem. Tossing aside the existence of Google, Amazon and Shop Pay for a second, it’s worth asking the fundamental question of how much of a pain point entering your payment information manually when making a purchase really is. 

But the basic idea of a billion dollars of capital being used to build to use fundamentally new experiences in spaces where incumbents have massive distribution and network effect advantages is the right aspiration. 

And lord knows, there’s a certain Chinese entity (or several) that isn’t about to live with our current status quo.  

Tick….tock.. It’s regulation o’clock.

Despite the near impossible challenge of going up against Amazon in logistics, TikTok is starting to fire up the growth machine against Shop with a vigor not seen since Gretchen tried to make fetch happen. 

To understand why TikTok is so wildly hot for Shop, remember that the company’s existential threat is regulatory. Thus, the near-term grand strategy is simple: ensure that Grandpa Joe says that we can keep on Tiktokin in the free world. From there, it only gets trickier.

TikTok is in a tough political position as the 2024 campaign heats up, with neither candidate a great bedfellow. Shou Chew’s testimony was perhaps the high water mark for bi-partisanship in Congress in my adult lifetime as Democrats and Republicans united against a common enemy.   

But it’s a bit harder to be seen as a psyop if more of your business moves from media to commerce. Investment in Shop is a lobbying expense. Starting to get what United States of Amazon is about yet? 

Tiktok loves to fashion itself as the last sunny corner of the internet and some kind of whimsical success story but the reality is that this thing was brute forced into supremacy.  Bytedance was Snapchat’s biggest advertiser in 2019 (whoops!), spending as much as $1M per day to hack the teenage consciousness. They are beginning to run the same playbook with Shop and while the initial rollout has been chaotic to say the least, 

Tiktok has a massive team, gargantuan war chest, and damn near existential need to pull Shop off. All this says nothing of Temu who we’ll talk plenty about in time. For better or worse, new operating systems for online shopping are headed our way. 

Amazon and other large US companies are besieged by the innovator’s dilemma here and will counter with smart, but ultimately incremental moves like embedding Buy With Prime into Facebook ads. For all the hoopla about Project Nile, it’s hard to see Amazon taking on the risk associated with fundamentally changing its search experience, especially when it has the chance to be the most profitable ads business ever. 

It’s up to startups like Flip and free-wheeling capital backers to take the paradigm changing swings.  

The Product Graph

So what is Flip’s radical endgame?   

There are a few possibilities. The most obvious based on Flip’s branding is that the company is trying to build a new sort of verticalized social network geared around shopping. Flip could be the 47th gallant attempt at trying to make the digital QVC style of shopping prevalent in China take hold in the West (the company’s Series A feature in TechCrunch hints at that direction). Or perhaps the lofty positioning is just crafty smoke and mirrors behind trying to effectively build an ads-based, shopping ads business, loosely in the model of Snapchat and Pinterest. 

I believe Flip aims to build a product graph as a means to create a search engine for commerce. Flip hinted as much in a 2022 blog post describing a world where “instead of landing on a page with an overwhelming sea of products, you’d land on a page with videos of people talking about these products, sharing their own experiences, and adding context around each product, while the platform delivers the best post-purchase experience.”

Building a product graph is an insanely hard technical problem but beyond that, it’s a non-starter unless you have access to the most uniquely valuable data source. So how the hell could Flip possibly win here against Google and Amazon?

Google has access to a treasure trove of written product recommendations and reviews, though not necessarily a great system for ascertaining which affiliate articles are sacriscent and which are stealthily pay to play. Amazon has all the purchase and conversion data in the world alongside billions of reviews. To bet on Flip is to bet on the idea that a reasonably small number of high-quality reviews, delivered primarily as short-term videos is the core dataset needed to reimagine discovery.

The company is not being particularly selective about the early brands that it brings on the platform but it has built its incentive structure to bring on the right shoppers/UGC creators to ensure each product is indexed with authentic, high-quality content. In other words, Flip cares a lot more about the people and what they have to say about the products than the initial products currently on their marketplace. And they’re willing to bet the house and raise a fuckton of cash to build a moat based on content. You only do that if you’re aiming to build a graph that an rejigger the whole notion of online product search.

So…….amirite Noor and team?  

Amazonia
A collection of the week’s top stories in and around Amazon 

Amazon Inks Partnership with Facebook and Instagram (Marketplace Pulse): Lots of hot takes on this hitting the web, namely that it’s a win-win for both companies and American rivals saying that the enemy of my enemy is my friend with regards to China. I agree with both takes and would also add that this is perhaps final proof that the decade of single channel arbitrage via Facebook or Amazon PPC is effectively over.  Also huge credit to Joe @ Marketplace Pulse for being the first to break this news.

Amazon allegedly welcomed defect ads. What does that mean for retail media? (Retail Dive): The FTC’s antitrust case got a little more juice as a recently unredacted portion shows that Amazon knowingly pushed junk ads that were irrelevant to the customer. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this story is that this happened under Bezos’s watch. Feels a bit day 2ish, no? 

Amazon advertising’s hiring freeze is over and it’s staffing up like crazy (Business Insider): If you want to know where a company is headed, look at its careers page. 

Shopify’s marketplace expands to the web (Marketplace Pulse): For a long time, one of the meta stories in commerce was if/when Shopify would build a marketplace of rebels to challenge Amazon. Well now, they essentially have done just that and……nobody really cares? 

Dispatches from America
A potpurri of vibes from across the land

History Books: New Jersey Americana band extraordinaire The Gaslight Anthem is back with a new album titled History Books. It’s perfectly unfussy, good, clean rock and roll with the band finally embracing and bringing on Bruce Springsteen to feature on the title track duet.

There’s even almost a Taylor Swift level cheekiness to some of the lyrics. “I’ll love you forever ‘til the day that I don’t” deserves particular consideration for best quip of the year 

The God Damn Jets: The Jets lost arguably the Jetsiest game of my lifetime Sunday Night. Zach Wilson finally got to make the stupid, fucking throw from his pro day that set our franchise back a decade in a live game…only for a game-winning hail mary to be broken up by his own teammate. 

There’s only one theory to explain the Jets prolonged ineptitude. Jets ownership, coaches, players and fans are in a collective, unspoken pact to maintain our current state of pain and ennui as it is the only life we’ve ever known.  

Our identity as Jets faithful is so tied to just enduring the suffering that we might lose our fundamental sense of self if we start to win. We’ve become institutionalized in losing and we’re terrified of life on the outside. 

American Justice: “Yes Warden, I would like to tell the family of the victim that I could never figure out the words to fix what I have broken. I just want you to know that this 53 year old is not the same reckless 19 year old from kid from 1990. I hope you find peace. Thank you Warden.”

The final words of Brent Brewer, the 7th man executed in Texas this year and 21st in America. I implore you to read a bit about his case here.  

If you’ve made it this far, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’ll use this bottom section to be a little meta and break the fourth wall on building this newsletter. Today I’m coming right out with a couple of asks.

1. If you’re using gmail, go ahead and slide me into that primary inbox. We’ve made it this far, might as well kick our relationship up a notch.

2. If you enjoyed, please share this newsletter with at least one friend who will dig it too. I love every second I spend writing these pieces and hate every moment I have to try to growth hack an audience. Your generosity in spreading these pieces will be the fuel that keeps me keepin’ on!
   

I love you all,

Mike