Practical thinking on business strategy, finance, marketing, and AI; focused on what works and where it breaks. Less buzzwords, more reality. Yiğitalp ...
For a while, AI has been discussed mainly as a product story. Who has the best model? Who has the best assistant? Who has the best demo? Q1 2026 results suggest the discussion is shifting. In that quarter, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon spent over $100 billion on capital expenditures, while Apple and Netflix barely registered on the same scale. AI is no longer just a product story. It is becoming a…
Palantir's gross margin is 81%. Super Micro's is 11%. Both are "AI companies." The difference is not execution. It is where they sit in the stack. Where you sit in the stack determines the economics of your business. Plot a dozen public AI companies by stack position: hardware, platform, application . A staircase appears. Each layer up adds about 20 points of gross margin.Stack position alone…
Last week, Moltbook launched. It’s a Reddit-style platform where AI agents post and interact while humans watch. In just a few days, it had over a million AI agent “users,” making it one of the fastest-growing platforms ever if you include non-human participants. Reactions were predictable. Some people called it an early sign of the singularity. Others pointed out security flaws and said anyone…
In Part 1, I argued that AI breaks the traditional SaaS finance model by flipping a core assumption: infrastructure now comes before revenue, not after. Once you see this shift, the main question is: If capital is committed upfront, where does the cash actually go — and who ends up carrying the risk? To answer that, you have to follow the cash. Today, in the AI era, money leaves the system faster…
Over the past year, I’ve noticed something odd: most AI discussions barely mention depreciation or CapEx planning, even though AI has sparked the biggest capital spending cycle in recent corporate history, with yearly spending expected to top $300 billion. This gap caught my attention because CapEx discipline used to be very important. Early in my career, while working as a management consultant…
LinkedIn has (unfortunately?) become the world’s biggest AI-powered social platform. Most of the posts and comments on my feed sound smart, but they feel artificial. It’s usually either a theory that never connects to real life or polished Miro and Figma screenshots that only look like progress. And I’m not saying this from the sidelines. For the past two years, I’ve been an independent consultant…