When businesses decide how to allocate their capital, they essentially have four options: reinvest, return capital to shareholders through dividends or repurchases, take on mergers and acquisitions, or build the balance sheet. Historically, tech companies have favored reinvesting: hiring more engineers, entering new markets, and building new products. But as tech profits and cash flow has grown, companies are increasingly turning to M&A and capital returns. One tech company that has fueled its expansion through M&A in the last few years is the e-commerce marketplace Etsy, that was founded in 2005 and went public in 2015.

Building a House of Brands

When Josh Silverman and…

“When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.” — Warren Buffett

Music streaming is a business with bad economics. The industry’s byzantine licensing structure has many mouths to feed. For each dollar that Spotify earns streaming music, over $0.60 goes to artists, labels, and publishers. This doesn’t leave it much to build a reputation on.

Smart Pipes Become Dumb Pipes

Before the internet, buying music meant going to a store to buy a digital file on a plastic CD. Napster changed this by launching (illegal) peer-to-peer…

The use of metaphor in business is nothing new. Metaphors have been harnessed for decades to guide a company’s mission, shape its storytelling, and create a culture. As companies battle for attention from customers, employees, and investors, an effective metaphor can help a company craft a narrative that distinguishes itself from others.

Businesses often talk about a “company voice,” a unique lexicon and tone that infuses its marketing, investor relations documents, and internal emails. Metaphors are key to the company voice because they are easily remembered and manipulated to suit different contexts and audiences. …

“If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume. Your goal should be to create value for everyone you interact with. Any business that doesn’t create value for those it touches, even if it appears successful on the surface, isn’t long for this world. It’s on the way out.” So wrote Jeff Bezos in his final letter to shareholders, released last week. It’s a great sentiment, one I heartily agree with and wish that more companies embraced. But how well does he practice what he preaches? …

In 2007, when BlackBerry was still the leader in the enterprise mobile space, a new competitor launched an irresistibly sleek touch-screen smartphone that epitomized the marriage of art and science. (Yes, we’re talking about the iPhone’s debut). BlackBerry executives scoffed at the seemingly pretentious device, which they thought would only appeal to consumers seeking mindless escape on YouTube and who possibly couldn’t care less about BlackBerry’s inner beauty — its relentless focus on security and its efficient, almost miserly, use of network bandwidth. BlackBerry’s bet was on what it called the “prosumer,” or the professional consumer.

Apple, however, changed the…

GASTRO-NOMICS

Earlier this month, like Simba returning from exile, Taco Bell’s potatoes were officially restored to the company’s menu board — Spicy Potato Soft Taco and all. This wasn’t a small-fry development guided by a simple seasonal shift or some limited-time promotion; it was the result of a several-month fusillade by the brand’s starch and vegetarian loyalists, who had been furious at the company for removing potatoes last summer.

Ever since its controversial “menu simplification,” Taco Bell quite literally couldn’t post on social media without encountering some grief about bygone potatoes. …

Perhaps the most basic political fact about the Covid relief bill Congress just passed —and that I wrote about a couple of days ago — is that its provisions are, for the most part, widely popular and largely uncontroversial. As a result, it’s a great example of Democrats doing something that seems politically obvious, but which they’ve often struggled to do: focusing on policies that are popular with voters, and avoiding policies that aren’t.

One of the main voices in recent years emphasizing the need for Democrats to pursue this strategy has been David Shor, who’s head of data science…

Oh, Burger King, you can’t “Have it your way,” when it comes to Twitter etiquette.

By now you’ve likely seen Burger King U.K.’s tweet (it’s since been removed) that said, “Women belong in the kitchen.” On any normal day, this tweet would’ve been considered a huge miss. On International Women’s Day, well, you can imagine the reaction.

But wait. Hold up. Burger King U.K. had a plan, one their marketing team must’ve thought was brilliant.

The tweet was a setup for two more tweets that would explain the scarcity of female chefs and that Burger King U.K. …