Insights

Every serious seller knows the take rate. Amazon charges referral fees of roughly 8-15%, depending on the product category, plus Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) fulfillment costs if you use their logistics network. These figures are clearly displayed in every seller dashboard, quoted in onboarding documentation, and incorporated into the initial spreadsheets built before launching a marketplace business. While referral fees have remained relatively stable over the past decade, su

Germany's 3.5 million Mittelstand companies employ 60% of the private workforce by prioritising patient capital and operational mastery over growth-at-all-costs scaling.

The Same Four Stages, Every Time The first paid celebrity endorsement in American commercial history is generally traced to the 1870s, when patent medicine companies began printing the names and portraits of politicians, sports figures, and society women on their product labels. The pitch had an economical logic. Someone credible vouched for this, so you should buy it. The mechanism would be immediately legible to any brand manager briefing a creator today, right down to what

Most PE rollup failures stem from execution gaps, not flawed deal thesis. Five critical failure modes consistently derail buy-and-build strategies post-closing.

Reset Sequencing: Platforms Follow Process Getting the sequence right costs almost nothing. Getting it wrong costs eighteen months and whatever the platform contract is worth. The difference between the two is three conditions, and most organizations skip all of them. Quick orientation if this is your entry point: Part 1  covers why operational intelligence platforms stall when the process foundation is not ready. Part 2  is the 90-day reset that builds it. This piece is wher

Operational processes fail not from poor visibility, but from inability to act on information within the same cycle. The 90-day reset targets single broken flows rather than enterprise-wide transformation.

Enterprise AI agents fail consistently at human handoffs, not algorithmic execution. Value drains when outputs meet organizational reality.

The Perimeter Has Moved The network perimeter that most security teams spent the 2010s defending stopped being the primary defensive line somewhere around 2020. Firewalls and VPNs didn't disappear; they just got demoted. What rose to replace them? Identity. The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2024  put stolen or compromised credentials at the top of the confirmed breach vector rankings. The Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024  sharpened that picture: identity-base

When Brands Stand By Controversial Creators When e.l.f. Cosmetics pulled its Matt Rife campaign  within days of launch in August 2025, and the brand issued a swift apology. The beauty company had partnered with the comedian despite his history of controversial jokes, and the backlash was immediate. Campaign over, apology issued, case closed. Except it's not that simple. While e.l.f. stepped away, other brands doubled down on partnerships with creators facing similar scrutiny.

The Pattern Everyone Recognizes But Few Understand TikTok launches Creator Rewards. Instagram tests subscription badges. YouTube adjusts revenue share. Each announcement generates headlines and brief creator celebration, yet the needle barely moves for most creators. Sound familiar? 71% of independent creators make less than $30,000 a year , with only 9% exceeding $100,000. These numbers haven't meaningfully improved despite billions invested in monetization infrastructure. W

A logistics operator invests in an operational intelligence platform that streams live truck locations, predicted delays, and warehouse bottlenecks. The dashboard is impressive. Two quarters later, dispatchers still coordinate reroutes in WhatsApp groups. The vendor pitch focuses on visibility, but it doesn't change how decisions get made. The key number that determines ROI is how quickly a signal translates into a decision. Many analytics products optimize for data visibilit

The Detection Problem No One Is Framing Correctly In August 2025, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 blocked a phishing campaign where attackers had used AI to generate obfuscated SVG files disguised as PDFs. The code was unusual. Overly descriptive function names with random suffixes. Verbose logic that served no functional purpose. Redundant structures that increased file size without improving performance. As Microsoft noted in their post-incident analysis, this was not ho