ENTREPRENUER BREAKS
Breaking business barriers, on a Coffee Break.
The Two-for-One Is a Loan
American Eagle Outfitters reported second-quarter earnings of $0.79 a share against a consensus of about $0.22. Revenue rose eight percent to $1.38 billion, ahead of estimates. Comparable sales were up six percent. Operating income more than doubled to $211 million. The shares fell over eleven percent. Two numbers explain the gap, and both of them are about where the money came from. The first is a net benefit of $161 million in tariff refunds...
Nobody Wrote Down the Shift
Stefan Kalb has launched a company called Latch in Seattle, with an $8 million seed round led by FUSE and co-founder Jared Kofron, a University of Washington physics alum and former principal engineer at Pioneer Square Labs. It began life as Super Labs and rebranded this year. The stated mission is to liberate humanity from doing work that owns us, which is the kind of sentence that usually means nothing and in this case means something quite...
Own the Van, Not the Bottle
C&C Group agreed on Friday to acquire Asahi UK's wholesale interests, including Nectar Imports and Asahi UK's direct distribution business, for nominal consideration. The shares closed up 13.45 percent at 101.2p, adding roughly £44 million of equity value against a market capitalisation of about £373 million. Nominal consideration. Effectively, the assets changed hands for a token, and the buyer's market value went up by more than forty...
Everybody Wants to Slow Down Together
Sam Altman told OpenAI staff this week that the company is considering slowing down development of cutting-edge artificial intelligence, and that he hopes other companies will do the same. The reported condition attached to it is the part worth reading twice: if the government confirms that coordinating on pace is not an antitrust problem. The week around that remark was loud. An Anthropic researcher resigned publicly over concerns that AI labs...
Twenty-One Bars Sell Coffee And Not One Of Them Is Verified
Twenty-one bars sell coffee, run owned email at 61.9% against the coffee shops' 48.8%, sit on a lower median audience of 1,459, and not one of them is verified. If you run an all-day room and your morning is quiet, that line is a diagnosis. You built better infrastructure than the cafes and told a smaller story than any of them. The plumbing is ahead of the plot. Start with what the numbers actually say, because they are flattering before they...