Writing about go-to-market strategy, AI, Bitcoin, and what changes when technology outruns the market around it.
On July 9, S&P Global Ratings cut Oracle to BBB-/A-3 from BBB/A-2, one notch above junk. The reason the agency gave was not a product or a quarter or a balance sheet. It was a customer. In its rationale, as relayed through secondary reporting, S&P treated OpenAI as a central credit risk and warned that if OpenAI couldn’t meet its payment obligations, Oracle would be left holding long-term…
When AT&T stopped selling unlimited data in 2010, the customers who still had the old $30 plan would not let go. They turned down phone upgrades to keep it. They stopped calling customer service in case it flagged their account for a switch. Most of them never came close to using the unlimited part. That was never what they were holding. They were holding the one thing the plan still guaranteed:…
On July 1, Cross River Bank announced an expanded partnership with Stripe to power card issuing for agentic commerce. The mechanism is precise. When an AI agent makes a purchase, Link’s agent wallet issues a restricted, single-use virtual card scoped to that specific transaction, limited in amount and tied to a single merchant and context. The system verifies the end user. It also verifies…
Between April 22 and June 5, 2026, Alibaba ran 25,000 fraudulent accounts through Claude. In six weeks those accounts generated 28.8 million conversations, systematically targeting advanced software engineering capabilities and multi-step agentic reasoning. Anthropic detected the operation and disclosed it on June 26.
In the early 1990s, any manufacturer could build an IBM-compatible machine, and dozens did, from Compaq and Dell on down. Microsoft licensed DOS and Windows to all of them, so the software platform was available to the whole industry. But Microsoft owned that software and Intel owned the chip underneath it, and together they spent the next two decades quietly collecting the economics of an…
In the 1990s I owned a munition. It was a t-shirt—a few lines of Perl printed across the chest, an implementation of RSA compact enough to wear. And under the arms-export rules of the time, carrying it across a border was a federal offense.
On June 10, 2026, Mastercard and Visa each announced credentialing infrastructure for AI agents. Same day. Neither mentioned the other. The mainstream coverage treated it as parallel payment news—two incumbents adapting to AI.
For forty years, Apple’s competitive theory was control. Control the chip, the operating system, the app store, the hardware design. Own every layer from silicon to screen. The margin and the moat were the same thing: no seam where a competitor could insert itself.
I run agents constantly. One is working in another window while I write this; others ran overnight while I slept. Between them they go through more tokens in a day than I used to spend in months of asking a chatbot questions, and the bill is small enough that I keep forgetting to look at it.
April 20, 2024. The block reward drops from 6.25 bitcoin to 3.125. Overnight, the economics of Bitcoin mining get cut in half again. For operators running old hardware on expensive grid power, it was a termination notice.
The companies that build the layer value migrates through don’t usually see it coming. I was an executive at Exodus Communications from 1999 to 2001 (world’s largest web hosting provider, 46 data centers, $32 billion at peak). We sold rack space and connectivity to the companies running the internet. When our customers started going bankrupt, we went bankrupt too. When WorldCom and…
In October 2025, researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 demonstrated what they called agent session smuggling. A malicious agent exploited an established A2A protocol session to inject instructions into a legitimate peer. The victim agent complied, executing unauthorized stock trades on behalf of the attacker, because, in the researchers’ words, agents are “designed to trust…
A procurement agent runs a sourcing task. It needs commodity pricing data. Dozens of APIs exist for this. It queries one, the one hardcoded into its config by the developer who built it. The others don’t exist as far as it’s concerned. It can connect to anything. It just doesn’t know anything else is there.
Ask an AI agent to book a restaurant, check your calendar, pull a competitor’s pricing, or file an expense. If the developer who built it didn’t wire up that specific service in advance, the agent can’t do it. Not because it lacks the intelligence. Because it was never introduced.
Neal Stephenson once argued that the GUI was built to save users from the command line—an interface that, in Stephenson’s words, “cruelly punished laziness and imprecision.” Billions were spent on that project. It worked. Now, agents have arrived: software that’s never lazy, never imprecise about syntax, and doesn’t need protecting from demanding interfaces.