Napkin Math

Profit and power in technology.

Nov 24, 2021

How Do You Compete with Free?

Notion: The Embattled Artist

Nov 19, 2021

iBuy, iRent, iLose My Investors Money

The Murky Future of American Housing

Nov 13, 2021

Top 12 Creator Platforms—Ranked

Who has the brawn to capture creator’s profit?

Oct 28, 2021

The Creator Power Scale: A Formula to Determine if Platforms are Ripping You Off

An examination of the Twitch Hack data

Oct 14, 2021

Who is Making Money in Space?

Exploring the SPAC Frontier

Oct 7, 2021

The End of Software, Again

The impending doom of horizontal SaaS

Sep 30, 2021

NFT Projects are just MLMs for Tech Elites

A somewhat impartial review of current NFT business models

Sep 23, 2021

Toast—a Vision of Software’s Future

Hints to why their shares popped 60% in their first day

Sep 9, 2021

Tech stocks’ favorite lie to investors

How the LTV/CAC ratio is manipulated to take advantage of retail investors

Sep 2, 2021

Content Moderation Double-Bind Theory

The market failures damning content to ever increasing sensationalism

Aug 20, 2021

How a Climate Tech Startup Closed 5+ Enterprise Deals Before Even Launching

Remora, The Bureaucracy Buster

Aug 15, 2021

The Rise of the Content Capitalist

In Practice Beta V2

Aug 13, 2021

Is Facebook Fixable

A Review of An Ugly Truth

Jul 28, 2021

Twilio’s Second Act

Twilio rode its API to a $66B valuation. Now it’s trying to become the Universal Switchboard for the internet.

Jul 22, 2021

Snowflake: How a Revenue Retention Behemoth was Built

TL;DRThis is the second post on a deep dive in GTM metrics with a focus today on Revenue RetentionSnowflake is a software Dracula. It latche

Jul 16, 2021

How Free to Play Video Games are Forced to Make Addicts

A Case Study on Market Structures and Harm

Jul 9, 2021

Pricing Strategy is Product Strategy

How Technology Enables Companies to Charge More

Jul 2, 2021

In Practice: My Newest Beta Product

Come take an early peak at the future

Jun 17, 2021

Finance is Broken But Don’t Worry, This Has Happened Before

Net Income and the Refactoring of Our Financial Ideology

Jun 3, 2021

Product-Led Growth’s Failure

How a Scrappy Utah Software Company Ignored Every Silicon Valley Heuristic and Won Anyway

May 28, 2021

ITDA: The Gamification of Financial Statements

How governments and companies are engaged in mutual manipulation

May 20, 2021

You Probably Shouldn’t Work at a Startup

It’s overrated—both financially and emotionally

May 13, 2021

In Defense of WeWork’s Community-Adjusted EBITDA

Clarifying the murky middle ground between Gross Profits and Net Income

Apr 29, 2021

Gross Margin: An Indicator of Market Power

What America's Oldest Jeweler Can Teach Us About the Value of Bling