Modularity and Integration: Fit Against Flexibility
Control every part and tune the fit, or accept a standard interface and gain interchangeability. Which one wins turns on a single question — and the answer changes as a market matures.
Concept
Commoditize Your Complement
Vertical Integration: Owning the Step That Decides the Product
Buying from specialists is usually cheaper, and sometimes it means you cannot be better than anyone else. The right boundary moves as an industry matures — and rarely gets revisited.
Commoditize Your Complement: Why Companies Give Things Away
Profitable companies spend years building things and then hand them out for free. There's a clean piece of economics behind it — and it tells you where you sit in someone else's plan.
Two-Sided Markets: The Shopping Centre With No Shops
Retailers won't join without shoppers; shoppers won't come without retailers. Both are right to wait — and how you break that deadlock defines every marketplace business ever built.
Aggregation Theory: How Free Distribution Rewrote the Rules of Monopoly
A newspaper needed presses and trucks to control its market. An aggregator controls a bigger one with neither — because the internet moved the choke point from distribution to attention.
Artificial Intelligence: Follow the Cost Curve, Not the Benchmarks
The interesting number in AI is not what a model can do. It is what a unit of machine reasoning costs — because when that falls tenfold, whole categories of product become possible.
Cloud and Infrastructure: Renting Instead of Guessing
Before the cloud you bought servers for your busiest hour and let them idle the rest of the year. The change was financial rather than technical — and that is why it mattered so much.
Business Models: What Would You Give Up to Earn More?
How the money arrives is the least interesting part. Every model has a lever for growing revenue and a cost attached to pulling it — and where that cost falls predicts behaviour under pressure.
India Tech: Reach Is Abundant, Revenue Per User Is Not
The market is usually described by its size, which leads to the wrong conclusion. Its shape matters more — and a product built for high willingness to pay does not become an India product by discounting it.