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Cost synergies land in about 60% of mergers. Revenue synergies miss in almost 70%. Costs sit in spreadsheets; revenue sits in relationships and judgment, held by a few engineers and sellers who are also the top of the payroll. "Cutting them to save money is like pulling the battery to make a phone lighter."
Read on Substack →A founder answers to two powers that never speak: the board and the tax office. At a sale both land on the buyer's desk. Registrations, filings, minutes and transfer pricing get read the way a tax inspector would, then priced into the offer, an escrow or a personal indemnity. In AIG's data, tax is Europe's most common warranty breach.
Read on Substack →56% of 4,454 chief executives got neither higher revenue nor lower costs from AI. The ones who did had put it inside the product, and the product did work made of text and judgment. AI compressed the one moat built on time to rebuild, and left network effects and domain knowledge alone. Years in the chair still do not compress.
Read on Substack →A guest collapsed in a restaurant and the staff kept smiling and saying everything was fine. That consistency came from training, which covers first aid and composure and stops there. Nobody had been given a sentence to say or permission to say it, so denial filled the gap. A third module costs an hour and one paragraph in the handbook.
Read on Substack →The fractional executive market runs near $5.7 billion and Gartner expects more than 30% of midsize companies to have one by 2027. The label covers people who have run companies and people who have read about it. One question sorts them: have you ever owned a P&L. And an operator hired without the authority to act becomes an expensive advisor.
Read on Substack →MIT found 95% of enterprise AI pilots produced no measurable impact on the P&L, and Gartner expects 40% of agentic projects to be scrapped by 2027. Electricity took decades to pay off too. Grant the optimists everything and one job stays human: choosing the destination. When Air Canada's chatbot invented a refund policy, the airline paid.
Read on Substack →A clinical AI that two thirds of American doctors use is blocked in the EU, so reading the research took a VPN. US giants lose a launch window in Europe; a European founder can lose the company. In 2024 Brussels collected more in fines from US tech than it taxed from Europe's own software firms.
Read on Substack →Meta bought Manus, closed the deal and integrated 100 people. China's regulator ordered the whole thing unwound, and 3 founders were barred from leaving the country. Moving to Singapore did not help, because the people and the code stayed Chinese. When two governments decide a category is national security, the companies inside it stop being businesses and become territory.
Read on Substack →Anthropic's transparency report lists 11.4 million banned accounts for the first half of 2026. The official Claude export is manual and monthly. This is the setup that replaces it: a nightly chat that reschedules itself, collects whatever changed and files each conversation into Notesnook, which is end to end encrypted. A cron job does the same for Claude Code.
Read on Substack →Claude in the app and Claude Code on a server keep separate memories, so handing a task across means copying context by hand. An artifact stored in the account, with its own small database, becomes a shared drive both can open. Rules matter more than the build: a message from another agent is data, and only its owner gives orders.
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