Dear #onStrategy reader,
Here is what youāll find in this edition:
Financial Times: āPrivate market funds lag US stocks over short and long termā
Chat GPT: from hype curve to smile curve
Physics > Politics: Central Banks agree
The Economist: āThe rise of the lone consumerā
Do we really need a camera on an iPad?
ā¦and more
Onto the update:
Financial Times: āPrivate market funds lag US stocks over short and long termā
Turns out all those private equity pitch decks about āuncorrelated alphaā and āsuperior long-term returnsā might have just beenā¦ powerpoints. This chart shows that the S&P 500 outperformed private equity across every time horizon: 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years. Which is another way of saying: you couldāve bought SPY, gone to the beach, and still beat the Harvard Business School guys running around in Patagonia vests trying to buy plumbing companies in Ohio.
And just to twist the knife, even the Russell 2000 (ie, Americaās favorite underperforming small-cap mascot) put up better numbers than private equity for much of the ride. So all those lockups, waterfalls, clawbacks, and quarterly investor letters with phrases like āvalue creation roadmapā have effectively generatedā¦ less money, more fees, and the occasional catered LP summit. But hey, at least private markets are āless volatile.ā You know, because no one marks things to market until someone asks too many questions. [Financial Times]
Chat GPT: from hype curve to smile curve
ChatGPTās retention chart looks like it was hand-drawn by a product manager mid-manic episode: a perfect āsmile curveā where users actually come back after theyāve ghosted you for a few months. Itās like the SaaS version of an ex texting at 2am, not because theyāre bored, but because they realized youāre still the smartest thing theyāve ever talked to š. One-month retention closing in on 90% puts it ahead of Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok, which means ChatGPT is now the one app people are using and pretending theyāre being productive while doing it.
And it gets more ridiculous: six-month retention is trending toward 80%. Thatās not a curve, thatās gravity failing. Compare that to other AI-first apps like Lensa or Remini, which basically fall off a cliff once the novelty of āturn me into an anime wizardā wears off. Even Microsoft Copilot and Claude canāt hold attention like this, and theyāre built into your workday. What weāre looking at isnāt just product-market fit. Itās product-market clinginess. The kind of numbers that get PMs promoted, investors frothy, and entire content moderation teams nervous. Because when an LLM retains better than your social life, itās no longer a feature, itās infrastructure.
Physics > Politics: Central Banks agree
Well, this is awkward. After two decades of European technocrats politely insisting that the euro is the future of global finance, itās now been overtaken in official reserves byā¦ a shiny rock. Thatās right: gold, the monetary equivalent of a doomsday bunker, now commands a 20% share of global official reserves, beating the euroās 16%. Which means more central banks would rather hoard metal dug out of the earth than hold paper backed by Brussels bureaucracy and Italian bond spreads.
And sure, some of that is price action; goldās had a nice run lately. But the symbolism is hard to miss. In a world of debt ceilings, sanctions, and weaponized finance, central banks are quietly saying: āWe trust physics more than politics.ā Gold doesnāt default, it doesnāt get sanctioned, and it doesnāt tweet. It just sits there, gleaming, while the euro writes memos and the dollar runs the empire. So congratulations to gold: the worldās oldest central bank hedge is now officially more credible than the worldās second most ambitious currency experiment. LINK
The Economist: āThe rise of the lone consumerā
The loner consumer is here, and theyāre not splitting the check. According to The Economist, the pandemic may be over, but the social habits it rewired are very much alive. The old āhermit economyā of sourdough kits and Peloton bikes has quietly evolved into something stranger: an out-and-about economy of people going everywhere...alone (!). Theyāre flying solo (literally), booking single tables, and ghosting public transport in favor of private rides. This is a redefinition of consumption itself. You donāt need friends to drive GDP. You just need a credit card and a deep aversion to other humans.
Brands are now optimizing for consumers who donāt need coordination, consensus, or conversation. Airbnb says solo travel is booming. Premium airline cabins are growing faster than coach. Uberās quiet, judgment-free rides now have a stronger product-market fit than half of Silicon Valleyās social startups.
You donāt need someone to come with you. You just need the UI to get out of your way. And if youāre a business built on groups, friends, or āsharingā.... congrats, youāre the new fax machine. LINK
On the tipping culture in the USA
Ah yes, tipping culture in the šŗšø USA, the only economic system where your cappuccino now comes with a built-in moral dilemma. This meme (taken from Threads) feels like satire, except itās about 15 minutes away from becoming real.
I visited the US in February and found myself tipping someone for handing me a muffin from a glass case, no eye contact involved. The touchscreen asked for 20%, like it had done me a personal favor. And everyone in line just nodded, clicked āCustom,ā and chose 18% out of guilt.
This it's a service economy duct-taped together by unspoken shame and broken wage models, where suddenly everyone is eligible for a tip: the barista, the cashier, the personnel in the museums (!), the self-checkout machine.
Welcome to America....home of free refills and involuntary gratuity.
Do we really need a camera on an iPad?
š§ Owning an iPad for over a decade and never using the camera is basically the tech equivalent of buying a Swiss Army knife and refusing to use anything but the toothpick. And honestly? Totally valid. Because the iPad camera is one of those things that exists not because anyone asked for it, but because Apple needed something to upgrade every year. Itās there, looking confused and slightly embarrassed, like a tourist who wandered into the wrong keynote. Nobody wants to be that person holding up a dinner-plate-sized tablet to take a picture of a sunset. Itās less photography, more public performance art.
And yet, Apple keeps putting better cameras in these things, like itās chasing some imaginary use case where people shoot wedding videos on a 12.9ā piece of glass. Meanwhile, actual iPad owners are out here using it for Netflix, note-taking, and the occasional guilt-ridden Duolingo session. The rear camera is just there, collecting fingerprints and shame.
Deep down, even the iPad knows: it was never meant to be a camera. It was meant to be a rectangle with ambitions.
šŗ Nobody younger than me is watching linear TV (!)
Paramount Global is laying off 3.5% of its US workforce because, shocker, no one is watching cable TV anymore. Not even out of nostalgia. Not even my Bachelor students, who treat linear TV the same way they treat fax machines: with a mix of curiosity and disbelief. This is what a structural collapse looks like. The business model built on bundling ads with content you didnāt ask for and forcing people to watch it on someone elseās schedule isā¦ dead. Buried. Disinterred occasionally for reruns and congressional hearings.
Meanwhile, Paramountās leadership seems stunned that a network designed for prime-time soap operas is losing to infinite-scroll TikTok chaos and Netflixās personalized dystopia. What did they expect? That Gen Z would sit through detergent commercials to maybe catch five minutes of NCIS: Des Moines?
This itās about reality finally catching up to a media model thatās been hollowed out for years. You canāt patch this with another reorg. You either become a tech company or become a trivia question. LINK
The strange death of the š©šŖ German auto industry
š©šŖ Germany just got hit with a 100,000-job industrial reality check, and if you look closely, you can almost hear the electric motors whirring past the bodies. According to the latest EY data, nearly half of those job losses came from the auto industry, a sector once so proudly German it basically was the economy. But now, between Chinese EV imports, flatlining European demand, and the logistical nightmare of remaking Wolfsburg into Shenzhen-with-sausage, the wheels are literally coming off.
Itās the kind of transformation thatās less about innovation and more about entropy. And the brutal irony? While companies like Waymo are rewriting the rules of transport (e.g., with no drivers, no unions, no 4 a.m. shifts) Germany is still arguing over bureaucratic reform and the price of electricity. Meanwhile, the entire logic of industrial policy is collapsing like an overengineered, undercharged sedan. Because the future doesnāt wait for regulatory clarity or the next auto expo in Frankfurt. It arrives quietly, autonomously, and with no one in the driverās seat.
The future isnāt something we enter. Itās something we build. But only if weāre willing to let go of the comfort of the familiar and ship something new. The German auto industry isnāt suffering from a lack of engineers, but itās suffering from a lack of nerve.
Because in the end, itās not the technology thatās missing. Itās the courage to change before youāre forced to. LINK
p.s. This is a warning for all countries interconnected to Germany in the automotive supply chain.
šŖšŗ EU vs. šøš»El Salvador
You know Europeās geopolitical relevance is slipping when the Brussels bureaucracy starts beefing with a Bitcoin president on X (Twitter). The EU issued a stern, vaguely condescending statement about El Salvadorās new Foreign Agents Law. And Nayib Bukele, who once governed a country known mostly for remittances and headlines from the 1980s, responded by body-slamming the entire European project in 280 characters: overregulated, aging, unelected, and still obsessed with telling everyone else what to do.
And honestly? Heās not wrong. The EU is like the guy who walks into the startup demo day to offer governance advice from a desk job heās held since 1997. Itās a bloc running on bureaucratic fumes: tech-lagging, energy-fragile, and somehow still convinced itās the global conscience. But El Salvador wasnāt even in the room five years ago. Now itās issuing monetary experiments, cleaning up crime, and apparently annoying the Foreign Affairs Office in Brussels enough to warrant an official memo.
If Europeās trying to hold Bukele back, itās not because heās failing. Itās because, awkwardly, he might be succeeding and doing it without their permission.
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