Metropolis
How to solve America’s homelessness crisis
Homelessness is an artificially created problem. Though it’s a dire reality faced by hundreds of thousands of people daily, it’s a reality that need not exist. This isn’t just idealistic posturing.
The primary challenge faced by any homeless person, definitionally, is that they do not have a permanent home to…
Before winner-take-all became the name of the game, a bookseller called Ingram showed a better way
Note: This is a republication of an article that I published last week on LinkedIn Pulse exploring the limits of Amazon’s vaunted “customer obsession” when pursued at the expense of suppliers, and contrasting it with the philosophy of Ingram, the book wholesaling platform that gave Amazon its start.
After Covid-19, big retailers now own 90% of the online pet food market. Can a new organization help small pet shops hang on?
As the cold darkness of winter set in and the calendar flipped to a second year of Covid life, Kaite Giordano, a fourth-grade teacher in New York City and the mother of seven-year-old James, made a major decision. To break free from the doldrums, their Brooklyn household needed to expand.
And it’s going to be total chaos
When the stage lights rose before the show on March 14, 2020, at Saint Vitus, a cramped New York City heavy metal bar, the venue felt a little more on edge than normal. In its near decade of shows, dance parties, and drinking, the intimate, dimly lit bar and concert…
The private club chain was saddled with debt. Now it’s prepping for a hedonism boom—and plans to IPO
When Nick Jones, the founder of Soho House, the chain of swank private member clubs, began plotting his invasion of Hong Kong more than a decade ago, he never could have predicted how bad the timing of its actual debut would be. The city, a former colony of the British…
Where did these strange viral videos come from and who is making tens of millions of dollars a year from them?
I’m glued to YouTube, watching one of the most ridiculous life hacks imaginable from 5-Minute Crafts. A young woman has put clear soap cubes in a bowl and liquified them. She adds green food coloring to the mix, then pours it into a latex glove. She puts a suction cup…
Why are massive brands and startups selling Tesla shorts, McDonald’s chicken nugget pillows, and Stouffer’s hoodies?
In May 2020, confronting a raging pandemic, fierce competition from a slew of new entrants in the alternative-beverage category, and a limited marketing budget to support the launch of three new drink flavors, Ben Witte, CEO and founder of Recess, a maker of CBD-infused sparkling water, did what the head…
Who needs threats of antitrust when Zuckerberg and Cook are heading towards their own Shakespearean ending
There seems no end to the fury of Epic Games against Apple. On three continents, the megahit maker of Fortnite is claiming that Apple is leveraging its outsized technological power to strangle companies that refuse to bow to its control over millions of apps-based businesses. …
Nick Huber is leading a growing entrepreneurial movement that’s anti-unicorn—and pro-plumbing
It’s early evening in Athens, Georgia, and Nick Huber, entrepreneur and recently crowned startup expert, is about to record a podcast. Huber and his followers aren’t your typical founders. They don’t want to divine the next unicorn, launch a SPAC, raise a wad of eight-figure VC funding, or even break…
Inside the brave new world of data-driven, search-optimized virtual restaurants that exist only on DoorDash and GrubHub
For a small town of 4,000 people in New York’s Hudson Valley, Highland Falls punches well above its cultural weight. In more normal years, tens of thousands of tourists would descend upon the town to tour the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and nearby Revolutionary War sites. Billy Joel…
Marker
Pop business for the intelligent reader. A publication from Medium.
