The Diff

Inflections in Finance and Tech

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The latest theses, insights, and blog posts from The Diff

Longreads + Open Thread

December 10, 2022

Hot Potatoes

December 06, 2022

The Uses of Friction

December 05, 2022

GitLab, Tools, and Strategy

December 02, 2022

Transformative Transactions

November 29, 2022

Is AI a Product or a Feature?

November 18, 2022

Startup as War Economy

November 17, 2022

The iMessage Strategy

November 15, 2022

Money, Credit, Trust, and FTX

November 14, 2022

The Instacart Equation

November 10, 2022

FTX, RIP

November 08, 2022

Snowflake, Revisited

October 24, 2022

Single Points of Failure

October 20, 2022

Newsletter Economics in 2022

October 10, 2022

Compartmentalizing Complexity

September 30, 2022

Search Comes Back to Indexing

September 29, 2022

Fun With Float

September 23, 2022

How Does Upwork Work?

September 19, 2022

Nexstar: Quiet Compounder

September 13, 2022

The Other "MoviePass Economy"

September 12, 2022

Meet the New Index Orphans

September 08, 2022

A Taxonomy of Drawdowns

September 06, 2022

Inventing Demand

August 15, 2022

Auctioning Information

August 11, 2022

Understanding Jane Street

August 01, 2022

The History Problem

July 29, 2022

Apple's Ads Business

July 28, 2022

How Amazon Does Strategy

July 21, 2022

Two Kinds of Search

June 10, 2022

YouTube's Flywheels

June 09, 2022

Buy Now, Pain Later?

May 09, 2022

Refactoring Restaurants

April 29, 2022

What Flavors Sell?

April 28, 2022

Longreads +Open Thread

April 02, 2022

The Stickiest Software

March 31, 2022

One-Shot Sanctions

March 08, 2022

Adding Up Emissions

March 03, 2022

Can Subscription Travel Work?

February 22, 2022

Understanding Netflix

February 17, 2022

The Factorio Mindset

February 11, 2022

Xbox: The Misfit

February 10, 2022

Every Channel, Every Model

February 08, 2022

AppLovin's Double-Pivot

February 07, 2022

Pod People

February 01, 2022

HashiCorp: The Markup on Free

December 21, 2021

Danaher has a System

December 13, 2021

Peloton Doesn't Pattern-Match

November 23, 2021

Defensive Monopolies

November 19, 2021

Splitting Up

November 16, 2021

On Jargon

November 15, 2021

iBuying is as Hard as it Looks

November 04, 2021

Gamestop Remains a Mystery

October 19, 2021

The Business of Micro Rental

October 14, 2021

Discourses on Big Tech

October 08, 2021

De-Globalizing Luxury

September 30, 2021

The Other Box

September 23, 2021

Gitlab: Remote-First, First

September 21, 2021

Fanatics Inc.: The Spoiler

September 13, 2021

Central Banks Monetize Land

September 08, 2021

Freshworks' Efficient Frontiers

September 02, 2021

Insurgency Economics

August 24, 2021

Hybrid How Long?

August 23, 2021

LinkedIn: Survivor

August 12, 2021

The Superhuman Formula

August 05, 2021

The Importance of Duration

August 02, 2021

Twilio’s Second Act

July 29, 2021

Reshaping Competition

July 12, 2021

Robinhood's Challenge

July 06, 2021

AWS. Scale.AI. Lego.

June 24, 2021

Invisible Media Models

June 21, 2021

A Normal Country?

June 11, 2021

Made in USA 2025?

June 10, 2021

Email Underload

May 20, 2021

SVB: Bank of Convexity

May 03, 2021

The 2x2 Inflation Debate

April 30, 2021

Who Amazon Grows With

April 29, 2021

Understanding Squarespace

April 22, 2021

Truncating the Tails

April 19, 2021

Understanding Archegos

April 01, 2021

Valve's Recursive Model

March 29, 2021

Electrocloud!

March 26, 2021

Where Zoom Goes Next

March 25, 2021

Understanding Coinbase

March 11, 2021

Two Privacy Stacks

March 09, 2021

GE: Surfeit of Synergy

March 01, 2021

What Happened in Texas

February 26, 2021

Disney's Pivot

February 25, 2021

Three Bull Cases for Starlink

February 19, 2021

Cricut and Hardware Economics

February 18, 2021

Four Refoundings

February 05, 2021

The Diff Reading List

January 31, 2021

The Technocrats' Recovery

January 15, 2021

Plaid's Strategic Non-Merger

January 14, 2021

SoFi’s Hedge

January 11, 2021

Homesteading Mental Models

January 08, 2021

Poshmark: The Low-Gini Nike

January 07, 2021

Patent Platforms

January 04, 2021

American Exceptionalism

December 23, 2020

What's Happening in Logistics

December 18, 2020

Beyond GAAP, Or Not

December 17, 2020

DoNotPay: The API for IRL

December 16, 2020

Stagnationism

December 15, 2020

Sharing and Owning Standards

December 11, 2020

Understanding Flag Carriers

December 10, 2020

Winner-Take-Some Platforms

December 08, 2020

Building an Incomplete Graph

December 01, 2020

Covid Baby Bust or Baby Boom?

November 25, 2020

What’s Gold for?

November 20, 2020

Understanding Affirm

November 19, 2020