Short, curious reads on overlooked market shifts. Each one traces a signal to a real startup opportunity. Delivered before breakfast.
In 1975, Ellen Langer discovered something unexpected: people who chose their own lottery tickets demanded higher prices to give them up than those who were simply handed one. The probabilities were identical. The sense of control wasn't.
In 1950, MIT psychologists discovered your closest friends weren't chosen by shared interests—they were chosen by your doorway's location. Today, singles-focused run clubs are rebuilding that proximity effect outdoors, one route at a time.
On Toyota's factory floor, the cheapest person in the building could halt millions of dollars of machinery. With a piece of string. At most companies, that's a firing offense. At Toyota, it was the entire job. Live commerce runs on the opposite religion.
Those little end caps take up maybe 5–10% of the floor. But they move a disproportionate chunk of the goods. Business isn't fair. It's spatial. What if you owned a fleet of end caps?
In the 1980s, male jewel beetles started mating with beer bottles until they died. The bottles were bigger and shinier than real females. A perfect trap. AI just did the same thing to 3D art. Everyone has assets. No one owns the look. That's the opening.
Psychologists found people fear being seen alone more than being alone. Now solo dining is surging 271%, but restaurants still treat the solo guest as an accident. This briefing breaks down the data—and the opportunity to build the solo-first infrastructure layer.
In 1984, researchers gave novice chess players a computer assistant. The novices got slaughtered. The machine amplified their bad instincts. Masters didn't need it—they had taste. Now a $5B legal AI proves the point: generic intelligence is a trap. The opportunity? Taste engines for the obsessed.
Ambient content is exploding, but the infrastructure behind 24/7 AI worlds doesn’t exist yet. From Nothing, Forever to Lofi Girl to DogPack’s WME deal, the pattern is clear: persistence is the new content—and someone is about to build its Shopify.
In 1770, a chess robot defeated Napoleon. Plot twist: there was a guy inside. First we built machines pretending to be human. Then humans pretending to be machines. Now we need the inverse—proof the human isn't the machine. Jack Dorsey just bet $20B says that's the next platform war.
Nabisco built a flavor skunkworks. Hired lunatics. Shipped wasabi Oreos. The boardroom panicked. Twitter went nuclear. Sales exploded. Because novelty isn't a tactic — it's the entire strategy.
A 1928 lighting experiment revealed a simple truth: people don’t change in private — they change when someone’s watching. TikTok’s Winter Arc is rediscovering that insight at scale, unlocking a $7.3B accountability market hiding in plain sight.
FEMA measures disaster severity by whether Waffle House stays open. Their secret? Knowing exactly what everything costs to replace. Most restaurants don't. With 21 chains bankrupt in 2024, someone's about to build the stock exchange for kitchen gear.
A forgotten petri dish led to penicillin—because someone finally looked closely. Most companies sit on the same kind of hidden insight today, buried inside their video libraries. Vimeo just cracked open the door. The race to build the revenue layer starts now.
A hidden market is opening: OnlyFans is quietly building a clean, SFW funnel while regulation crushes creators. The real play isn’t content—it’s compliance. Build the white-label stack that removes friction, and you unlock a billion-dollar migration overnight.
Coca-Cola didn’t just market Santa—they built him. Today, brands are repeating the pattern with AI-native talent: owned characters, controlled narratives, measurable influence. The next wave isn’t human. It’s infrastructure.
The next $10M CPG brand won’t come from flavor labs or influencer hype. It’ll come from scanner data revealing what shoppers can’t find. FlavCity proved it: own the rulebook, own the shelf.
TikTok operators turned sensory physics into a six-figure arbitrage window. The chocolate is just the vehicle. The real play is distribution.
