Good reads #226- 20th August 2026

Dear Reader,
Welcome to the 226th edition of the Good reads newsletter by Malpani Ventures. Sharing your weekly dose of articles for this week’s reading!

• The Radio Era: 1910s to 1920s

• The Piracy Era: 1999 to 2000s

• What About the Little Guy?

In 1999, Napster was born. They gained 80 million users almost overnight⁵, and created a public uproar from the music industry. The major labels sued Napster into the depths of hell, and within a few years, Steve Jobs personally convinced every major label to license their catalogs to a paid version that he called iTunes. Spotify eventually emerged as the fully licensed butterfly that still dominates the music consumption market today.

• Return of Horizontal SaaS?

Horizontal software businesses did some of the best work in the IGV software ETF over the past 30 trading days (although they’ve given back some of those gains from the date this data was collected).

In general, fundamental performance has held up, and Atlassian especially has defied expectations for an AI-driven demise. The productivity software pulled off a “double-beat and raise,” with its cloud business growing 31% YoY (and the revenue backlog growing even more). But the key was perhaps some evidence of AI as an accelerant rather than a headwind. The company flagged widespread adoption of Rovo, the Atlassian AI assistant, and noted that Rovo-users were growing their spend at nearly double the rate of non-users.

Good for Atlassian, good for Rovo, good for horizontal saas. It remains the case, however, that horizontal saas is valued slightly less than other software

• Energy is an enormous industry, and arguably the world’s most important. It sits at the base of everything.

• Manufacturing the Core

The world’s largest energy company today, Saudi Aramco, is worth $1.7 trillion. Exxon Mobil is second at $650 billion, a cool trillion dollars less. What is remarkable about the energy industry, though, is that there are 18 energy companies worth more than $100 billion, and 55 worth more than $50 billion. At its current $13 billion valuation, Base would rank 182nd among publicly traded energy companies, between China’s COSCO Shipping Energy and Norway’s Vår Energi.

Until next time!