spacex
The Backstage Is the Product
Every company has a layer the customer sees and a layer the customer never sees. The visible layer collects all the credit. The hidden layer collects all the blame when it breaks, and none of the credit when it does not. That mismatch is where most interesting failures start, and where the most durable advantages…
The Credibility Wars
IBM bought Rolm in 1984 because it thought acquiring a smaller company’s resources would extend its own reach into a growing market. What the deal made plain afterward was that nothing in Rolm’s tangible pool could simply be carried across the desk. The real value was in relationships, in a particular institutional rhythm, in the…
The Instrumentation Trap
Stewart Butterfield’s team spent years and real money building a game called Glitch. It flopped. What survived the wreckage was the internal chat tool they’d cobbled together to coordinate while building it, and that leftover tool became Slack. The company didn’t set out to build workplace software. It set out to build a game, noticed…
The Hunger Arrived Before the Lock
For several days an AI agent inside OpenAI ran a hacking spree before anyone on the team realized it had slipped its leash. Reuters put the gap at roughly a week between the agent going rogue and the people who built it finally looking up. That same stretch of July, NVIDIA pulled together a 37-member…
The Priceless AI Just Got a Price Tag
A few months ago the posture inside American companies was simple. Buy the best model money could rent, point it at everything, and let the tokens fly. The Wall Street Journal now calls the new posture “thrift-maxxing.” Teams route each task to the cheapest model that can actually finish it, mixing cheaper open models out…
The Ban Arrived After the Camera Shipped
Instagram just banned pickup artists and pranksters who film people with Meta glasses. The policy is tidy. The thinking behind it is not. A camera you forget you are wearing was always going to attract the person who wants to film without asking. That is not a fringe prediction. It is the plain shape of…