Modern MBA

The movie industry is dominated by the “Big Five” of Paramount Studios, Universal, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers, and Walt Disney Pictures - who eat up over 80% of the box office. But in a era where awards are meaningless, streaming has replaced DVDs, and talent no longer moves the box office - the Big 5 movie studios have become conservative. Hollywood has devolved into non-stop superhero movies, nostalgia-centric remakes, and formulaic sequels of existing franchises where the ROI is safer and risk is much lower than any real original endeavor. This gap has enabled smaller studios like MGM, Lionsgate, A24 and streaming services like Apple and Netflix to thrive with independent titles in this ever-competitive landscape. As consumers, we see the trailers, suffer through terrible movies, and are now being funneled to streaming services. Yet the industry has rarely, if ever, been covered from the perspective of the studio. Instead of covering one of the Big 5 major film studios

Taco Bell is an extraordinary outlier by every measure. It’s a fast food chain that boasts a deeply passionate fanbase, enjoys a reputation for reliability, speed, and accuracy, and when it comes to business - Taco Bell has grown at such a breakneck pace over the past 20 years that it outperforms giants like McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC in per-store earnings. The Mexican chain is so popular that it’s one of the few companies whose per-store earnings have stayed ahead of inflation. Remarkably, Taco Bell boasts some of the highest ever profit margins ever reported in not just fast food, but also in the restaurant industry. Taco Bell’s renaissance is a miracle in an era where fast food chains all follow the same cookie-cutter playbook of cost-cutting and international expansion to cover up domestic decline like KFC, McDonald’s, and Starbucks. Business is a zero-sum game where every decision is connected, every action has a cause and effect, and the rise of one brand contribute

If you’ve watched any American sports game recently, there’s a good chance you were blasted with an ad from FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, WynnBET, Caesars Online, and various online casinos promising free money and million dollar jackpots upon signup. Historically, sports betting and gambling in the US had been heavily restricted where you could only legally play offline at isolated places around the country like Las Vegas and Atlantic City. But in the past 5 years, the landscape has evolved dramatically as venture capitalists have invested billions into mobile-first gambling startups like FanDuel and DraftKings. But despite the relentless advertisements and celebrity endorsements, online gambling and sports betting is nothing more than a wild west where everyone claims to be a hero and no one is telling the truth. It’s a market so new that everyones boasts that they have the greatest market share, the best apps, the most users, and the fastest growth.

Every city has nightclubs - social venues where people can mingle with strangers, dance with friends, and escape the monotony of life in an environment of darkness, music, and chaos. As businesses, all nightclubs face the same challenge every week. If you’re a club owner, how do you make your nightclub desirable? How can you make your nightclub pop on a regular Thursday, Friday, or Saturday without headliners? The answer is promoters. Promoters are the invisible men and women who work tirelessly to turn clubs from slow, empty venues into packed, exciting destinations every week. Cities are defined by their nightlife and Chicago is home to some of the best clubs in the world.

Donuts are a multi-billion dollar industry fueled by insatiable demand. The United States is the battleground between chains and mom-and-pops. It’s on the West Coast where the market has gone through the greatest evolution - donuts here are a canvas for gourmet ingredients, unorthodox flavors, and elegant decorations. In this Modern MBA exclusive, we’ll break down the business of donuts from the lens of the biggest chains in the world in Dunkin’ and Krispy Kreme. We'll then dive behind-the-scenes of 2 West Coast shops looking to disrupt this status quo.

Tech is a sector unlike any other - it’s an industry where individuals can turn into billionaires overnight, ideas supersede fundamentals, and leaders are rewarded for showmanship. In today’s Silicon Valley, innovation is crowned and not earned. Venture capitalists and founders are symbiotic. Unprofitable companies are kept alive with injections of capital, gamed valuations, and manufactured hype with the goal of surviving long enough to IPO. Starting in the early 2010s, Silicon Valley had championed big data as a revolutionary technology that could unearth deep insights, hidden patterns, and innovation from massive amounts of data. Yet the market started to question in the early 2020s if any of these promises had even been real as nearly all consumer and SaaS startups were still bleeding nearly a decade later. Out of nowhere, ChatGPT was released and AI became Silicon Valley’s next big thing. Every tech company is now an “AI company”, every Fortune 500 needs an “AI strategy”,

Los Angeles is one of the most competitive markets in the world as home to over 7,500 restaurants and 4,000 street vendors. When measured by volume, the city is second only to NYC. But of the many concepts and cuisines within the LA restaurant scene, Mexican is the most competitive. On every corner, in every neighborhood - you’ll see a taqueria or a truck or a stand. The LA taco scene is unlike any market in the world where despite the saturation and overwhelming supply - the competition is always increasing, demand never wanes, and concentration of alternatives means that no business can really corner the market. The only way to compete is through innovation or territory. In this Modern MBA exclusive, we’re going on the ground to see this market from the perspective of 3 owners who have each carved out their own niche with 3 different strategies. One is a humble family man who serves his neighborhood, one is a serial businessman looking to upset the status quo, and one is a

The American airline industry is a highly competitive yet heavily regulated battlefield No airline has greater than a 18% market share in the U.S and any M&A deal that would bring that number to 20% or higher is automatically blocked by the Justice Department. All this made the emergence of low-cost airlines like Southwest, JetBlue, Spirit, Frontier, and Alaska in the 2010s all the more impressive - as they consistently outperformed the old-school legacy carriers in profitability and loyalty with fewer planes and marketing spend. Across universities and the private sector, these low-cost carriers were celebrated as leaders in strategy, innovation, and culture. But fast forward to the 2020s and this low-cost future has not materialized. The low-cost carriers are all struggling, some on the doorstep of bankruptcy, and the legacy carriers are back on top both in earnings and valuations. Is the airline industry really rigged? How exactly did the legacy carriers reclaim market s

5 years ago, Nike and Adidas were at their peak. These legacy brands had evolved from low-margin apparel into high-margin footwear. Sneakers became assets with unprecedented appreciation and resale value. Brands earned record profits as stores were crowded, social media went wild over the latest drop, and pairs sold out within minutes. There was no rhyme or reason behind this craze. With so much money at stake, low interest rates, and insatiable demand, no one stopped to question why. That was, until people stopped buying. Media dinosaurs and content farms have attempted to explain the fall of Nike and Adidas through age-old business tropes and boomer interviews for easy clicks. They push low-effort analysis that it’s because Jordans and Yeezys are unfashionable or that Nike simply made too many shoes. What these amateurs get wrong is that revenue is a lagging indicator - not a leading one.

Esports sold itself as the sport of the future - a world where video game tournaments would surpass the NBA and NFL, where anyone could grind from amateur to superstar, where gaming would be a viable profession, and stadiums would be packed with thousands of fans. All this value in theory would be captured by new teams and leagues who could monetize these eyeballs through tickets, merchandise, and media rights - the same way that the NBA, NFL, and Premier League have each used viewership to rake in billions over decades. There was so much hype that everyone expected the economics to solve itself over time. Brands jumped in to sponsor. Even the billionaire owners of traditional sports joined in, enticed by the prospect of owning the next Dallas Cowboys or Manchester United. With the media and Wall Street all heralding esports as the next big thing, this future seemed certain. Fast forward to 2024 and esports has fallen apart.

Bubble tea is the hottest food & beverage category of the modern age and has been growing non-stop across the West since the early 2010s. Unlike past fads, bubble tea has established its staying power as both a product and business. Bubble tea was introduced in the U.S in the 90s by Quickly and Tapioca Express. Starbucks, Dunkin, and Jamba Juice had shown how to snowball momentum from a single store into a franchise empire. New brands like Gong Cha and Happy Lemon emerged across Asia, looking to replicate that success in boba. By the 2010s, competition had intensified across China and Taiwan with each new entrant adding their own spin. But as legacy coffee giants have stagnated and Asian-American culture has grown, bubble tea in the United States has become a gold rush. What was once a low-margin, niche business in the 1990s is now a high-margin, high-cash-flow business.

Losing weight is mental as much as it is physical. But now, with a single injection, anyone can drop weight without having to change what they eat or how they live. With seemingly minimal side effects and impressive testimonials, weight loss drugs like Ozempic, Zepbound, Wegovy, and Mounjaro have become all the rage. Just like how tech startups have hitched their wagon to AI, drug manufacturers have hitched their valuations on obesity. But despite their altruistic missions and manufactured nobility, Big Pharma through history have demonstrated that they’re not to be trusted. As the opioid epidemic showed, if you give pharmaceutical companies an inch and they’ll take a mile. In their world, drugs are the hammer and everything is a nail. Their goal is to get as many people on as many drugs at as high of a dose and frequency as possible to keep profits up.

Halloween is a multi-billion-dollar holiday. Beyond candy and costumes, haunted houses are an overlooked, emerging $300M industry that’s in a league of its own. There are more haunted houses in Ohio than anywhere in the country. Haunted houses here boast incredible scale and are built with production value that surpass even Hollywood films. Haunted houses are seasonal businesses that can only operate during Halloween when people want to be scared. They only have these 4-6 weekends in October to make money. And there are no shortcuts to a good scare. Every prop has to be custom, every costume has to be unique, and great actors are necessary to bring the place to life. Yet the payoff can be tremendous as the best haunted houses can gross over seven figures during Halloween. With such a tiny window to make money, massive overhead, and no IP protection, haunted houses are a high-stakes business. Yet Ohio is not a destination. These attractions serve locals, not tourists.

Ice cream is a multi-billion dollar market dominated by legacy brands like Ben & Jerry’s, Blue Bell, and Breyers. Ice cream on paper should be a worthwhile business. It’s a frozen perishable product with decades of proven unit economics, business plans, and can be scaled into massive quantities. The global appeal has made the industry a target for private equity who have invested millions into Van Leeuwen, Salt & Straw, and Jeni’s under the bet they can one day become the Haagen-Dazs for the next generation. Yet ice cream is a strange business. It’s so low margin that the owners of Haagen Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s not only engage in shrinkflation to squeeze out profit from each pint, but have been actively offloading their ventures. These conglomerates also own other brands from Klondike, Breyer’s, and Talenti to Good Humor, Magnum, Drumstick, and Dreyer’s. Despite having the leading brands and economies of scale, Nestle, Unilever, and Kroger have each concluded..

Emboldened by the low interest rates and mainstream tech hype in 2010s, VCs crowed that dockless scooter sharing would disrupt walking. Scooter startups like Bird and Lime took a page right out of Uber and Airbnb's playbook - move fast, break things, and ask for forgiveness, not permission. Overnight, scooters were dumped onto the streets of every major city. They piled up on sidewalks, blocked traffic, and caused deaths around the world as people flew down bike lanes, walkways, and roads without helmets. There was no real moat in the software or hardware. Yet while municipalities all around the world were still trying to figure out regulation, VCs had already come up with a grand name for this new market.

The barber shop is a unique industry that private equity has been unable to penetrate despite investing millions every year for the past 40 years. Over 80% of barber shops remain independent and chains like SuperCuts have been falling behind. The corporations have been unable to find footing despite brand recognition, unprecedented scale, and even first-mover advantage. They slash prices and offer loyalty programs but still can’t match local rates. They renovate and advertise but still can’t pull in high-end clientele. The industry continues to be led by the independents as new upscale concepts coexist alongside the established old-school traditionalists. In this Modern MBA Original, we go from the macro-lens to micro-lens to understand this business from the chains to the independents. We'll cover the rise and fall of Regis - the largest PE-backed owner-and-operator of barber shops in the world behind the once-dominant SuperCuts from the 80s to present.

The 1980s was the golden age of arcades as games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man captured the attention of millions in the U.S. But since the 2000s, arcades have been disappearing across the U.S. Customers have shifted their spend to home and handheld consoles which outclass arcades in convenience, value, and entertainment. Through the 90s, arcades were essential establishments for children and adults alike. Nowadays, the few still hanging on rely on alcohol and nostalgia to make ends meet. On paper, the broader physical entertainment industry seems doomed. Retail has been trending down since 2010 and the only sustainable businesses are big-name roller coasters and theme parks. But if we look beyond the numbers, arcades aren’t going extinct. Market transformation takes time and what’s happening now is a changing of the guard.

Every decade has its dessert trends. In the 2000s, it was cupcakes and frozen yogurt. Then in the 2010s, it was unicorn drinks, monster milkshakes, and donuts. Now in the 2020s, cookies are the latest obsession. When frozen yogurt took off in the 2000s, opportunists quickly flooded the market, selling the same product to capture whatever Pinkberry couldn’t. Supply rushed in to fill demand to the point of saturation and consumer fatigue. Every dessert fad is a short-lived market that seems unstoppable at its peak and then crashes over time. This boom-and-bust cycle is the norm - and it’s happening right now with cookies. Crumbl is the market-maker - going from a single store to a franchise empire of over 1,000 locations in 4 years. Copycats have popped up, each hoping to cash in while the trend lasts. But cookies have been around for centuries. Before Crumbl, there was Mrs. Fields, Famous Amos, David's Cookies, Insomnia, and Levain.

Owning an exotic car like a Lamborghini, Ferrari, or Porsche is impractical and has been for generations. The aggressive design and tight interiors translate to tiny storage with trunks that are even smaller than that of a Toyota Prius. Ironically, the engines are wasted on public roads where speed limits and traffic prevent these cars from ever achieving the performance that make them so special in the first place. Yet these vehicles have become the ultimate status symbol for artists, athletes, international students, and clout-chasers - and that exclusivity is as much a liability as it is the foundation to their appeal. Luxury cars must be babied and cannot be daily drivers. There’s only so many people who have the pockets and the lifestyle to afford and work around this impracticality - and they're not buying a new car every year. It’s a departure from the traditional auto industry where manufacturers compete to deliver the most cars.

Credit cards in the modern day have become a game where casual consumers obsess over earnings points, spend hours researching their next card, and fixate on getting the best rewards possible. In the past decade, publications and influencers have emerged, promising to help people navigate this ever-growing complexity of products and perks - and banks have paid them millions to keep up this frenzy on top of the usual TV, direct-mail, and online ads. All this gamification exists for a reason - credit cards are a highly profitable business. Getting people to project their vacations, lifestyle, and social status onto these tiny pieces of plastic and metal is all part of the plan. If people care so much that they’ll even spend their free time thinking about their next card, the money will keep flowing.

Only local news stations and publications with their boots-on-the-ground coverage can provide the facts on what’s happening in your neighborhood beyond national headlines and weather forecasts. That’s why millions of people still tune in every day to the morning news. Yet viewership has declined for traditional news media and in turn, so have profits - and local stations having been hit the hardest. Whatever budget left is invested in the daytime news cycle. But newsworthy incidents also happen at night. And since the usual anchors, reporters, journalists, and cameramen all need to sleep, who’s covering these breaking stories at night? The answer is nightcrawlers. While news stations capture the stories of the day, nightcrawlers hunt for the stories of the night. You see their footage on broadcast and social media, but never their faces, voices or names. Beyond a tiny watermark, they get no credit or recognition.