I used to think investing in AI meant picking the smartest company in the room. Find the one with the best model. The flashiest demo. The CEO who talks like they’re one product launch away from rewriting reality. Buy the stock, sit back, and let the future compound. That worked—briefly. Then I realized something uncomfortable. The real money isn’t always in the intelligence. It’s in the infrastructure that makes intelligence possible. And once that clicked, I stopped looking at AI like a software story and started seeing it for what it really is: an industrial revolution disguised as code. The Illusion of the “AI Company” Everyone wants to own the next breakthrough model. It feels intuitive. Intelligence is the product, right? But here’s the problem: intelligence is becoming commoditized faster than people want to admit. Models improve, competitors catch up, open-source alternatives emerge, and suddenly what looked like a moat starts to feel like a temporary lead. Meanwhile...
Durable Growth in Saturated Markets (Or: How I Learned to Stop Chasing “New” and Start Outlasting Everyone Else)
I used to think growth meant expansion. New customers. New markets. New products. New everything. If it wasn’t new, it wasn’t growth—at least that’s what I believed for a long time. And honestly, that belief worked… right up until it didn’t. Because eventually, you run into a wall. Not a dramatic, obvious wall. Not the kind that announces itself with flashing lights and a warning sign. No, this one is quieter. Subtler. It creeps up on you in the form of diminishing returns, rising competition, and that uncomfortable realization that everyone else had the exact same idea you did. Welcome to saturation. And once you’re there, all those strategies built on “just go get more” start to feel a little… naive. The Moment I Realized “More” Wasn’t the Answer I remember the exact phase when things stopped scaling the way I expected. Effort went up. Results… didn’t. I was doing more outreach, producing more content, exploring more channels—basically throwing everything I had at the ide...