Good reads #219- 29th June 2026

Dear Reader,
Welcome to the 219th edition of the Good reads newsletter by Malpani Ventures. Sharing your weekly dose of articles for this week’s reading!

• The Numbers Behind The Deal

• The New Luxury Is Identity, Not Inventory

• Why The Format Is The Moat

The Puma x Hyrox sponsorship has turned a brand that had spent years drifting between performance and tacky into the uniform of an emerging community, with affiliated gyms now full of Puma gear nobody had to be paid to wear. It is the kind of brand revival most CMOs spend tens of millions trying to engineer through advertising, and Puma got it by showing up to a category nobody else thought was worth dressing.

• OpenAI Unveils Its First Custom Inference Chip

• Meta Spends $900M to Fix WhatsApp Pay

On June 25, General Intuition raised $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation, led by Khosla Ventures, with General Catalyst, Jeff Bezos, and Eric Schmidt participating. General Intuition trains AI to understand and act in the physical world by learning from video-game recordings.

Most videos teach a model what the world looks like. To interact with the physical world, robots also need to learn how their actions change it. Gameplay clips also record what the player did, the exact button pressed, and the instant it happened. That pairing of image and action is the dataset an agent or a robot needs to learn cause and effect, and it barely exists outside games.

The company was spun out of Medal, a clip-sharing app with 17 million monthly users and hundreds of millions of hours of recorded gameplay. That library served as the initial dataset for training General Intuition’s model.

• Experience Economy

• Theaters and Live Entertainment

Case in point: It’s turning out to be a strong summer at the movies, with this year’s domestic box office on pace to earn $10 billion — the highest total since the pandemic, and only 10% off the pre-pandemic peak. Inflation is one factor, but the bigger driver is increased attendance: The average ticket price rose 3% YoY, while total ticket sales rose 7% YoY. It helps that Hollywood has produced a strong slate, including two acclaimed low-budget horror films — Backrooms and Obsession — directed by YouTubers. According to a Fandango report, young people view moviegoing as an affordable social experience. In 2025, Zoomers and millennials saw an average of seven movies in theaters — more than any other generational cohort. For young people the “social experience really outweighs the movie itself,” an AMC executive told CNBC, adding that Zoomers are becoming the most important audience segment for exhibitors.

Until next time!