Modern MBA

To outsiders, luxury fashion is a curious industry where consumers seem to irrationally shell out hundreds and thousands of dollars for sneakers, handbags, wallets, or T-shirts. But take a step inside, and you’ll find the world of high fashion is more like Game of Thrones with Italian, English, and French houses like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, YSL, and Balenciaga fighting to be the king. For the houses that get to sit on the throne, they don’t last for long. A brand who only sells its products to a carefully curated list of only its highest spending customers, takes no preorders, refuses to expand inventory, or scale production. A brand whose products are so elusive that they appreciate thousands of dollars and are often resold for profit. A brand that does not allow returns, refunds, or exchanges. A brand who has remained independent, manufactures by hand, spends the least on marketing, and yet grosses close to what Gucci makes every year. That brand is Hermès and they are th

This year, everything is changing. Facebook stock dropped by 26% in a single day, wiping out 230B in its valuation after its 4Q earnings announcement. The company goes through a new crisis every month. Employees are stepping out as whistleblowers, political pressures are growing, but most damning of all - consumers are now spending significantly less time on Facebook. For the first time ever, Facebook announced weaker ad impressions, fewer daily active users, slowing spending by advertisers. And while the world is still very much stuck in COVID, there are enough signals to suggest that it’s not just you and me - lots of other people are simply getting tired of Facebook. The golden era of seemingly endless growth is now over. Facebook in a single month has gone through a complete rebranding and is now pounding the drum for a flashy new vision about metaverses, digital frontiers, and innovation - things that companies only do when they feel they have no other choice. So what is

From the outside, Dollar Tree is a fun, harmless store to buy random, gimmicky, short-lived products for a buck. But go inside, and Dollar Tree is a ruthless business empire who knows that its best customers are low income Americans. The company will do everything it can to suffocate the competition and be the only store physically available in low income communities, small towns, and rural America. So poor Americans keep buying Dollar Tree no matter how flimsy or low quality its products are, because there’s no other store that they can afford or is available in their neighborhood. Retail, at the most abstract, is the heartbeat that fuels daily domestic consumption which in turn drives the American economy. But what happens when that consumption, spending, and money printing finally catches up? 15% inflation. The highest increase in prices since the 1980s. $8 a gallon for gas. Shipping delays. Supply chain problems. Labor shortages. There is one Fortune 500 corporation t

Cost is the biggest barrier to scale in the hotel industry. It takes on average 2-3 years to build a hotel. The upfront cost for design, permits, and construction can range from $30M to $130M, depending on location and category. These estimates don’t even include the cost of the land. Since these numbers are publicly shared by nearly every hotel giant, it’s no secret how cost prohibitive it is to grow market share in the hotel industry. Airbnb’s innovation is on the supply side. Anyone can list and monetize their room, apartment, or house with a few steps on Airbnb. The company’s business value is to serve as a trusted platform between travelers and hosts. Discovery, communication, and transactions between both parties all occur on Airbnb. Hosts set their own prices for their listings, provide service, and accept travelers in whatever way they see fit. So why aren’t hotel executives scared of Airbnb? Are Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt executives all just pretending not to care publi

Soda consumption has substantially declined in the past two decades. Consumers worldwide have become more conscious about what they eat, what they drink, and the consequences of those choices on their health. By 2017, soda consumption had plummeted to a 30-year low. If soda wasn’t selling anymore, juice was out of fashion, bottled water was commoditized, and premium water was never able to outgrow its niche, the beverage industry was faced with a big question. Who would be the successor to Big Soda? What drink could directly replace soda? What company could take over Coke and Pepsi’s multi-billion dollar market share? In 2016, a small beverage company that had been under the radar since 1991 suddenly exploded in mainstream popularity and record sales. The Chosen One had seemingly arrived, boasting growth rates, unit volume, revenue, virality, consumer excitement that the beverage industry had not seen in decades. La Croix, a fruit-flavored sparkling water brand, owned by

The funeral industry in the United States is worth $20 billion dollars annually with 2.4 million funerals taking place every year. With death and taxation being the two certainties in life, funeral homes have a long-standing reputation for highly resilient and stable businesses. Everyone dies. If there’s any business that should stand the test of time, it would be funeral homes and cemeteries. But when we look at the numbers, the surprising reality is that it’s not actually true. For 2 decades, average funeral home revenue has been declining every year. The number of funeral homes has been shrinking every year with more and more closing their doors. Today, the American funeral industry is significantly fragmented, seemingly unscathed by the M&A of corporate America. There are roughly 18,800 funeral homes in the United States. There are about 1,000 crematoriums and 115,000 cemeteries. Service Corporation International is the largest public funeral home corporation today, op

Modern software is about rapid continuous improvement. Speed is the priority even at the expense of stability. Updates are constant and features are regularly introduced. You can see software as a service in nearly every facet of modern life with Netflix, Spotify, and many more. But what most people missing is that while SaaS is becoming more popular, the standards and quality of software itself has been declining. The “ship fast, fail fast” attitude has meant that SaaS products often launch way before they’re ready with severe bugs and broken functionality. There is one particular industry that has taken advantage of the declining standards to deliver aggressively monetized yet progressively worse, unfinished, buggy SaaS products (also known as "live services') for maximum profit year after year after year. That is the gaming industry. This episode dives into the traditional video game business model and 3 very different gaming companies (CD Projekt Red, Square Enix, Take-Tw

The world runs on cardboard. Produce, snacks, electronics, beverages, merchandise, household goods, everything is shipped in cardboard. Cardboard can be made into different properties, strengths, and shapes - everything from heavy-duty bins that can hold watermelons or merchandise, trays for fresh produce, food-safe boxes for pizzas, candy boxes that double as in-store displays, to Amazon boxes tough enough to survive the back of a Fedex truck. International Paper and WestRock are two biggest players who have taken a lion’s share of the American cardboard market in the past decade. The next time you come across a cardboard box, take a second to flip it over and look for a logo at the bottom, and you’ll likely find that it came from 1 of these 2 companies. International Paper and WestRock are massive business empires hidden in plain sight whose products not only enable American commerce, but also extend into the political landscape and shape foreign countries. In this episode, w

It’s 2014 and Adidas is struggling. The once-dominant sportswear company is now lost and directionless suffering through declining revenue and profits three years in a row. Outside of football, consumers don’t care for the brand, retailers are giving their most valuable shelf space to Nike, new products are flopping, and activists are threatening a hostile takeover if the CEO is not replaced within the year. In this episode, we’ll cover Adidas, the fatal mistakes that its former CEO made which toppled the German brand to a distant third behind Nike and UnderArmour, sparked an investor battle, and ultimately cost him his job. We’ll also cover the winning strategy that revolutionized Adidas and the new CEO’s moves which have since taken the company to new heights.

Food delivery is a simple business. While the market today is dominated by DoorDash, Uber Eats, Delivery Hero, and a few others, back in 2014, food delivery and the gig economy were just emerging in Silicon Valley. Back then, the barriers to entry were so low that anyone could open up their own food delivery business in a matter of weeks with just a few thousand dollars and a website. Food delivery seemed such an obvious million dollar business that as a starry-eyed 20 year old at the time, I left college to start a food delivery company, joining many others in the gold rush. The market in 2014 was wide open for the taking. DoorDash had not yet become a household name, UberEats was just spinning up, and GrubHub was used for looking up restaurant menus online. 6 years after my startup, it’s been interesting to see the continued hype of food delivery companies around the world even though everyone knows that the unit economics just don’t work. When you have to rely on tips to pa

In 2014, there was one Silicon Valley startup that was widely applauded for its ambition to revolutionize a massive high-stakes industry as old as the Middle Ages. That company was called Opendoor and their idea was to make it possible to buy or sell a home in just a few clicks. OpenDoor in 2014 was the perfect mix of all the hottest Silicon Valley trends from the 2010s - online to offline platform businesses, data science, machine learning, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and automation applied to the old-fashioned world of real estate. OpenDoor was not flipping homes, instead, in their own words, they were a once-in-a-lifetime quote on quote market maker that could transform the American residential real estate. As OpenDoor built up hype, industry giants like Zillow and Redfin started to worry that they were missing out. This ushered in the “Instant Buying” or iBuying phenomenon, where Zillow, Redfin, and OpenDoor burnt millions of dollars flipping thousands of homes across

Avocados have become one of the world's most popular foods in the past two decades. Americans these days eat 9 pounds of avocados annually and that’s a huge leap compared to 2001, when the average American only ate 1 pound a year. As domestic consumption and global interest have soared, so have production and prices. Yet as prices have reached to all-time-highs, demand has not stopped. Whether it’s avocado toast or guacamole in a Chipotle bowl, consumers continue to pay the premium for this fruit in the name of taste and nutrition. These twenty years of appreciation have turned avocados into a multi-billion-dollar industry where farmers nickname the fruit “green gold”. The avocado industry is so lucrative that it’s become a target for organized crime, leading people to label avocados as modern day blood diamonds. In this episode, we’ll cover the business of avocados, the major players, and how this simple fruit is at the heart of the political and economic relationship between th

Balding is a personal and emotional process that 85% of men will experience in their lives. 70% of men suffer hair loss by 35. Male pattern baldness accounts for 95% of cases worldwide and is the most common form of hair loss. Like Thanos, male pattern baldness is inevitable. For some men, male pattern baldness starts as early as the teens. For me, I started balding in my early twenties. And it sucked. With so many possible treatments with different degrees of effectiveness and cost, hair loss is a global billion dollar market with ties not just into big pharmaceuticals, but also the medical tourism of developed countries like South Korea - the cosmetic surgery capital of the world. In this episode, we’ll navigate the business of balding, the different treatments available, the companies behind those solutions, all through my own personal experience / transformation from medication to hair transplant at a prestigious clinic in South Korea. If you're interested in Dr. Kim Kyong-

Affirm, Klarna, and Afterpay - in just 5 years, these 3 companies have popularized a new form of consumer spending called Buy Now Pay Later. BNPL is a type of short-term unsecured personal loan where instead of paying the full price upfront at checkout, you can defer the cost of any item by splitting the payment into smaller installments over time. If you want to spread payments out over a longer period of time to make the installments even smaller, you’ll have to pay interest. And if you miss a payment using BNPL, there are penalties with late fees, collections, and lowered credit score. What Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay have done is they’ve broadened the purpose of short-term unsecured personal loans from large one-time essentials into everyday, impulse, and splurge purchases. They’ve made it easy for anyone to borrow money, simplifying a historically opaque, time-consuming process of applications and manual underwriting into a scalable UX that provides instant credit in just

Kentucky Fried Chicken has long dominated fried chicken around the world with legacy and scale, but its relevance and popularity in America has been declining for years. As the Colonel has weakened, longtime rivals in Popeyes, Chick Fil-A, Bojangle's, Jollibee, Bonchon, and and others have all laid claims to the chicken throne. The popular narrative amongst Americans is that KFC’s drop in quality over the years is the result of cost cutting from out-of-touch executives who wouldn’t know good fried chicken if it hit them in the face. When you look at KFC in America, it’s an outdated, run-down, uncreative chain with a boring menu and terrible food. But around the world in South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Middle East, KFC is a star brand known for quality chicken, great service, and unique offerings. So how is it that the same company can be so great internationally and so poor in its own home country? In this episode, we’ll cover the fried chicken wars, the strategy and mis

Dating is an activity where people around the world have enthusiastically adopted technology, embraced software over traditional face-to-face methods, and where venture capital and subsidies have played a small role in its mainstream acceptance. No longer are you constrained to the people you meet at school, on your commute, at work, at the grocery store, coffee shop, or on a night out. With dating apps, you expand your options from a handful of static possibilities to a dynamic pool that spans hundreds of miles at the tap of a button anywhere you go. Dating apps eliminate the risky, emotionally-intensive, in-person cold approach of traditional dating in favor of a casual and detached game of swipes. Through photos and bio, you create a digital representation of yourself on dating apps. You get to showcase yourself, your personality, hobbies, interests, finest moments, and physical attributes so that potential partners are always seeing you at your best. Dating apps are more le

Twitter has a new owner and his presence is sinking in. Regardless of whether or not you think Elon Musk can save Twitter, the reality is that Twitter as a private company under Elon can’t get any worse than the Twitter that has existed for the past 9 years. Twitter has struggled with declining users, engagement, turnover, innovation, infighting, losses, and vision. Twitter burned through 4 CEOs and 5 billion dollars in 10 years - regressing further away from being a viable business or attractive product. Twitter is not just a case study of business mismanagement and poor strategy, but also a story of betrayal, ego, and greed. Since its founding, the company has been like Game of Thrones, plagued with politics and schemes. At the center of Twitter’s story, there is a founder, whose desire to be seen as a spiritual, futuristic genius was so important that he would do everything to achieve this recognition - even if it meant backstabbing friends and undermining his own company to

Football is the beautiful game that brings in billions of dollars every year as the world’s most popular sport. There’s been no shortage of controversy with the World Cup in Qatar. Yet most people learn and follow football through leading clubs like Liverpool and Manchester City in England, Juventus and AC Milan in Italy or Barcelona and Real Madrid in Spain. It is these clubs that make the spectacle of football possible. On the outside, the biggest football clubs seem successful - they win trophies, pay high salaries, play on the biggest stages, and sign the best players. As these clubs achieve success on the field, their brands get stronger, which grows the fanbase, and fuels revenue. The business seems simple enough. And with so many famous clubs all over Europe, this flywheel must work. But in reality, football clubs are businesses that are barely cash flow positive and bankrupt themselves to sustain on-the-field success. They say that if they keep winning, money will mater