Sears, Roebuck and Co., commonly known as Sears (/sɪərz/ SEERZ),[7] is an American chain of department stores and online retailer. The company was founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald. The company began as a mail-order catalog company and opened its first retail locations in 1925.[8] Through the 1980s, Sears was the largest retailer in the United States.[9] In 2005, Eddie Lampert took control of the company through Kmart.[10][11] The merger resulted in Sears Holdings. Sears' parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 15, 2018.[12] After the bankruptcy, Transformco focuses on managing and selling the remaining real estate assets. From 2705 stores at its peak in 2011,[15][16] only 5 stores are still open as of 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears

Went to the Chicago CTO Summit, run by Peter Bell (more)

investment advisor https://www.yesigiveafig.com/about

the % of order-flow that a marketplace operator (app store, streaming provider, etc.) keeps as fees.

Instacart is the Best and Worst Grocery Business Imaginable (grocery store). Growth investors are rarely excited to underwrite a business that hires 600,000 people to perform a repetitive task like picking items off grocery store shelves and delivering them (more)

designing a new product category

*The most powerful companies and leaders in the world don’t win by being “better.” (more)

cluster of products which are "similar" (to the customer? JTBD) (more)

Cedric Chin cluster on the Market. ‘Market’ is a shorthand for ‘factors influencing the market’, which is one of the three legs of triad mental model of business expertise. (more)

Book by Geoffrey Moore on Marketing of high-tech products (or you could just consider it to be Business Strategy) - basically dealing with the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. Specifically, how to make your product, which is already accepted by Innovator and Early Adopter buyers, acceptable/attractive to the Pragmatist Consumer. ISBN:0060517123 (more)

Positioning book by April Dunford ISBN:1999023005 https://www.aprildunford.com/obviously-awesome (more)

business strategy book by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne (more)

Mistral AI SAS (French: [mistʁal]) is a French artificial intelligence (AI) company, headquartered in Paris. Founded in 2023, it has open-weight large language models (LLMs), with both open-source and proprietary AI models.[2][3][4] As of 2025 the company has a valuation of more than US$14 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistral_AI

Zvi Mowshowitz: DeepSeek: Lemon, It's Wednesday. It’s been another checks notes two days, so it’s time for all the latest DeepSeek news. You can also see my previous coverage of the r1 model and, from Monday various reactions including the Panic at the App Store. (more)

Hi, my name is Charity, and I am professionally caremad about computers. I am an operations and database engineer and sometimes engineering manager. Right now I am the CEO and cofounder of Honeycomb, where we build observability for distributed systems. (server “Monitoring” doesn’t have to be a dirty word; give us a try.) https://charity.wtf/ (more)

Nikhil Suresh: Brainwash An Executive Today! I. A few years ago, I had an annual one-on-one with the Chief Technology Officer of an employer with more than ten thousand staff. (more)

CategoryPirates: Category Superpower: Why Your Greatest Strength Depends On Making A Difference For Others. The personal development market is worth over $40 billion and is growing. There’s a ton of content out there about how to be a great employee, manager, entrepreneur, partner, and communicator. Books like Damn Good Advice, Think And Grow Rich, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. (more)

CategoryPirates: Open Letter From Pirate Katrina: On To Another Chapter. ..already seen Pirate Bri’s name pop up. She’s running the latest Category Design Academy cohort and making fast connections with the crew. (more)

CategoryPirates: Identity At Scale: How We Built The Pirate Eddie Bot, And How To Create Your Own. In 2023, product expert, writer, and Substack superstar Lenny Rachitsky launched something different. (more)

CategoryPirates: The Pirate's Guide To AI: How To Build With AI Like It's The Greatest Co-Founder You’ve Ever Had [Part 1]. We’re entrepreneurs, writers, strategists, and Category Designers. We’re Pirates from the future helping you succeed now. And into the future. AI is a big part of how you’ll create a new and different future. (more)