All Posts

Two years ago, a pipe burst in my basement. What followed should have been a simple home improvement project, but what it turned into was an elaborate saga with one central theme: finding the contractors to do the job. The work itself was not complicated, but since every qualified subcontractor in a 50-mile radius was already booked solid – from electricians to HVAC techs, to a decent tile guy – none of them were particularly interested in a residential basement when commerci

If you're writing a blog on any kind of regular cadence you know that the summer months might give you an opportunity to relax a bit, write about a less demanding topic, muse about something, or "clear out your notebook" (looking at you, Dan Primack of Axios). This was supposed to be that kind of post. I certainly did not expect to be writing about FIFA in the context of private equity again for another four years. Life, however, had other plans, as FIFA spent five days in la

Sometimes the next blog post just writes itself for you – by you, 6 years ago – and updated by reality. In May 2020, I published a piece arguing that the pandemic was about to generate millions of solopreneurs — individuals pushed out of traditional employment by unemployment rates nearing 15% and 30 million jobless claims who would convert latent skills into micro-businesses and never fully return to corporate life. At the time, I was writing it with regional bank executives

Pre-Game What can I say, for the entirety of my childhood and teenage years I could not fully get behind soccer (ahem… football to most of the rest of the world). Don’t get me wrong, I played sports (not particularly well, I might add), soccer just didn’t make the cut onto my adult weekly schedule. But once every four years, even I have to make an exception to the rule and become, at least for a few short weeks, a soccer fan. The FIFA World Cup — what the French call simply l

$4.79 per gallon. I left the gas station shaking my head. The war in Iran has had an undoubted effect on oil prices around the world and the price we pay at the pump, but it also surfaced one very interesting question about the impact of a country's ideological regime on its economic output: what could Iran's economy look like "under new management"? Back in 2011, Mary Meeker — then at Kleiner Perkins, now one of the most influential technology investors alive — published USA

On a Sunday night in late February, a Substack essay landed in hedge fund managers’ inboxes like a letter from a future nobody wanted. By Monday morning, it had erased roughly $300 billion in market value. Blackstone dropped 6.2% in a single session. KKR fell nearly 9%. IBM logged its worst day since 2000. DataDog, CrowdStrike, and Zscaler each shed more than 9%. The piece was "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" by Citrini Research. The authors had the courtesy to frame it