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Two-Sided Markets

Metcalfe's Law: Why Second Place Is So Much Worse Than Second

July 25, 2026·8 min read

Ten times the users gives roughly a hundred times the possible connections. The exact formula overstates things — the underlying point about compounding leads does not.

Commoditize Your Complement: Why Companies Give Things Away

July 25, 2026·9 min read

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

July 25, 2026·9 min read

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.

Big Tech: The Companies That Own the Starting Point

July 24, 2026·9 min read

None of these companies owns most of what it sells. They own the place people begin — and that turned out to be the most valuable position in the economy.

Business Models: What Would You Give Up to Earn More?

July 24, 2026·9 min read

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.

Social Media: A Feed Is a Decision, Not a Pipe

July 24, 2026·9 min read

Early networks showed you what your contacts posted, in order. A modern feed is a ranked selection made on your behalf — and what it optimises for explains most of the arguments about it.

Antitrust: The Test Was Built for Prices That Never Rose

July 24, 2026·8 min read

A century of competition law detects monopoly by watching consumer prices. When the service is free, the test finds nothing — and the power sits somewhere it was never designed to look.

India Tech: Reach Is Abundant, Revenue Per User Is Not

July 24, 2026·9 min read

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.