Avsnitt

  • The Wall Street Journal covers companies. Pirate Street Journal cover categories.

    Each week, we pick three headlines worth paying attention to and break down the category underneath. Live every Tuesday at 7 am PST / 10 am EST. See the news through a different lens.

    Tesla dropped a 216-page report this week, and we could not wait for Tuesday to break it down. Paid subscribers get the Breaking News today. It will unlock for free subscribers in a week. Don’t wait a week to listen.

    Here’s what we covered in this episode:

    1. Privacy is Crucial For Any AI Category King

    Tesla published three privacy promises in its 2025 impact report: give customers choices, stay transparent, and safeguard the data. The thing making those promises has eight exterior cameras, an interior camera, microphones, GPS, and a cellular link that has been phoning home on every car built since 2012.

    This is trust plus experience as a category multiplier.

    Apple spent a decade turning privacy into a moat, and it was never the feature. It was the belief that when something goes wrong, Apple takes care of you. Tesla is running the same move, except its product does not sit in a drawer. It watches the road, the cabin, and your location every mile.

    Trust is the Achilles heel for OpenAI and Anthropic.

    Why can Tesla even make the promise? Follow the incentive. Show us the incentive, and we will show you the outcome.

    As Pirate Joe Pine says, “If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product.”

    It’s hard to trust a company when you are the product.

    That’s like asking a chicken to trust Tyson.

    2. Category Kings Must Create New Metrics

    Tesla reports its fleet helped customers avoid 37 million metric tons of CO2 in 2025.

    Does this help their P&L?

    Not immediately. But they are designing the rules of engagement in a way legacy car markers can’t compete with.

    New categories require new metrics.

    The category king does not inherit the old scoreboard, it invents one. “Avoided emissions” is a metric Tesla essentially created, for a scoreboard Tesla built, and then crowned itself on. Own the scoreboard and the score takes care of itself.

    3. Category Kings 10x Human Flourishing

    We’re stealing another Joe Pine idea, which is the true purpose of a company is to help humans flourish.

    Tesla’s airbag can deploy up to 70 milliseconds before impact.

    Why is that important?

    A normal airbag fires about 50 milliseconds after you hit something. At highway speed 70 milliseconds is roughly six feet, the difference between the bag being full when your head arrives and still unfolding when it does.

    6.2 million crashes a year in the US, 36,000 of them fatal.

    30% involve speeding, call it 11,000 fatal.

    A 0.12-second head start cuts force by about 25%, or 2,700 fewer deaths.

    But this isn’t just about saving lives.

    Tesla is playing chess by building trust from their missionary stance to save lives.

    Because the end game for Tesla is Robotaxi and Full Self Driving software.

    And they key problem is humans don’t yet trust the robot to drive.

    Every safety proof point Tesla ships closes that perception gap, and the day self-driving is provably safer than human driving, the category tips.

    3 conversations to have about the news with the Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot

    Every move above is portable. The Pirate Eddie Bot and the Pirate Christopher Bot help you run these plays on YOUR category, they come with the founding tier, and they jam 24/7.

    Audit your give-to-get. Hand the bots your business model and ask where your customer is paying with data instead of dollars. Tesla can promise privacy because it makes margin on the car, not on your information. Where is your incentive pointed?

    Invent the metric before you claim the crown. Ask the bots what “avoided emissions” is for your category, the number only you can report and everyone else has to react to. Old metrics do not work in new categories.

    Find the reframe blocking your growth. Ask the bots to name the trust gap standing between your product and mass adoption. For driverless it is “I don’t trust the robot.” What is yours, and what proof point closes it?

    The through-line: everyone waited for Tesla to win on the product, and Tesla won on the company and the category. The magic triangle is product, company, and category, and the two most people forget are the two doing the work.

    Not a founding member yet? You can join here.

    What’s coming up on Pirate Street Journal

    New episodes drop every Tuesday: three topics, thirty minutes, a couple of bongos. Mini-books and DDRs land every other Friday. Founding Members get the full DDR start to finish, everyone else gets the preview. Breaking News reports go to all paying subscribers, monthly and founding, in full.

    Two ways to climb aboard now:

    Monthly: $20/month. You’ve done dumber things with $20. You get the Tuesday episodes, every DDR preview, every mini-book, and every Breaking News report in full.

    Founding: $375/year. About a dollar a day for every future DDR start to finish the day it drops, plus:

    The Pirate Eddie Bot and the Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners

    Every mini-book we have ever written (300+)

    Our entire audiobook library (30+)

    All seven of our full-size books

    Want the whole thing every time? Become a Founding Member.

    Recorded Wednesday, July 8th. Every number above is as of that morning.

    Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

    We’ll be back on Tuesday at 7 am PST / 10 am EST.

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe
  • The Wall Street Journal covers companies. Pirate Street Journal cover categories.

    Each week, we pick three headlines worth paying attention to and break down the category underneath. Live every Tuesday at 7 am PST / 10 am EST. See the news through a different lens.

    Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,

    Here’s what we covered in this episode:

    1. Micron and Gwen Shotwell didn’t give money away. They ended charity as a category.

    Invest America accounts are live. Every kid born between 2025 and 2028 gets one, seeded with $1,000 in an S&P 500 index fund.

    Then the checks started clearing.

    * Gwen Shotwell, president of SpaceX. Gifting SpaceX stock into more than 2 million accounts for kids in less affluent areas, a sixth of a stake worth roughly $2 billion.

    * Micron. $250 million, the biggest corporate commitment of its kind, seeding up to a million kids and matching its own employees a thousand dollars a child.

    The press filed it under philanthropy. Wrong category.

    Charitable giving is broken at the root. It treats the dollar as an expense, not an asset. The charity sells the stock, spends it down, GNA skims the middle, and you hand out fish instead of teaching anyone to catch one.

    Charitable investing is a different category.

    Nobody spends the dollar. It compounds for 18 years, and every incentive aligns: when Micron’s CEO donates $250 million of Micron stock, every child in America now wants Micron stock to go up.

    And it is peer-to-peer. No NGO takes a VIG on the way through.

    The Wall Street Journal covered a tax-friendly headline. It missed that a hundred-year-old category just started shrinking, and the one replacing it turns a million kids into millionaires by their early thirties.

    2. Everyone is counting the World Cup’s $17 billion. The number that matters is $2.6 trillion.

    FIFA projects $17 billion in US GDP and 185,000 jobs across 11 host cities. Economists fire back that it is less than one-tenth of one percent of the economy, a rounding error.

    Both sides are counting the same tickets, hotels, and hot dogs over 30 days.

    Brand Finance values brand America at $37.3 trillion, the most valuable nation brand on earth. Last year it fell 7 percent, about $2.6 trillion gone, the steepest drop of any of the 193 nations they track.

    America is a new category of country, and the repair job is running on peer-to-peer citizen journalism. Europeans and Asians are here filming Buc-ee’s, Waffle House, and free refills, then telling the folks back home the warnings were a lie.

    What’s ordinary to you is extraordinary to others.

    Countries that get this play it on purpose. Korea exports kimchi, K-pop, and K-dramas, not just its technology. FIFA runs brand collaborations down to a co-branded deodorant. The Olympics are next, and America’s move is to keep raising its hand to host.

    3. Black Rifle Coffee sells coffee. Its best ad of the year didn’t have any in it.

    Founded in 2014 by a Green Beret, Evan Hafer, Black Rifle does around $390 million a year and went public at a $1.7 billion valuation. It got there by pulling money out of paid ads and pouring it into its own content and a quarter-million coffee club subscribers.

    For America’s 250th it towed the largest American flag ever, wrapped it in sasquatch, guns, and freedom, and released a 16-minute behind-the-scenes film.

    No beans, mug, or product shot.

    Black Rifle’s category design is a super, not a product.

    Its customer is a self-described patriot, and the super of one is the super of nine.

    This is marketing the problem, not the product. Market the product and you say “I want your money.” Make something for your super and they hear “they want to help me.”

    That is what missionaries do, and it travels on word of mouth. Half a dozen people texted us that video the day it dropped.

    Dude Wipes does it. Sarah Blakely does it with Spanx. Old Navy has done it with a Fourth of July tee for twenty years.

    3 conversations to have about the news with the Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot

    Every move above is portable to you. The Pirate Eddie Bot and the Pirate Christopher Bot help you run these plays on YOUR category, they come with the founding tier, and they jam 24/7.

    Take this to them this week:

    * Turn your giving into investing. Ask the bots where your business hands out fish when it could teach people to fish. Micron turned a $250 million donation into a million aligned shareholders instead of a spent-down grant. Where is your dollar going to die, and where could it compound?

    * Count the brand, not the receipts. Have the bots find the $2.6 trillion number hiding behind your $17 billion one, the asset you are building or bleeding while everyone argues about the 30-day cash. The World Cup is buying back a nation brand nobody put on the P&L.

    * Make something for your super, not your product. Work with the bots to design your version of the coffee ad with no coffee, a gift to your super consumer that never mentions what you sell. Black Rifle skipped the bean and claimed the country.

    The through-line: everyone reported the transaction, and the category was underneath. The NGO, the ad network, the anger industrial complex. Each middleman got bypassed, and the value went straight to the people who care.

    Not a founding member yet? You can join here.

    What’s coming up on Pirate Street Journal

    New episodes drop every Tuesday: three topics, thirty minutes, a couple of bongos. Mini-books and DDRs land every other Friday. Founding Members get the full DDR start to finish, everyone else gets the preview. Breaking News reports go to all paying subscribers, monthly and founding, in full.

    The first two Deep Dive Reports have already earned their keep:

    * Volume 1 (May 22, 2026): we said AI hardware was about to re-rate. Micron is up 61% and just posted the best quarter in its history.

    * Volume 2 (June 10, 2026): we said more than one thing can be true about the SpaceX IPO, strong for the long run and volatile near term. It IPO’d at $135, ran to $202, and sat at $153 as of June 25, 2026.

    Two ways to climb aboard now:

    Monthly: $20/month. You’ve done dumber things with $20. You get the Tuesday episodes, every mini-book, every DDR preview, and every Breaking News report in full.

    Founding: $375/year. About a dollar a day for every future DDR start to finish the day it drops, plus:

    * The Pirate Eddie Bot and the Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners

    * Every mini-book we have ever written (300+)

    * Our entire audiobook library (30+)

    * All seven of our full-size books

    Want the whole thing every time? Become a Founding Member.

    Recorded Wednesday, July 8th. Every number above is as of that morning.

    Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

    Stay tuned for next week’s episode.

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe
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  • This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe

    The world keeps betting against America. For 250 years, that's been the losing bet.

    Louis the Fourteenth ruled France for fifty-four years from a palace with seven hundred rooms and zero bathrooms.

    He commanded armies. He also lived in constant fear of smallpox, rarely bathed, and died in pain in a world where the average person lived to twenty-eight.

    Today, a low-income American earning $25,000 a year has antibiotics, air conditioning, a car, and a phone holding more knowledge than every book in the library at Versailles. They will live nearly three times longer than the Sun King’s subjects. They would not trade places with him for anything.

    That’s what abundance does. It gets manufactured so quietly that people forget to feel rich.

    This mini-book makes the case that the next twenty-five years compound that abundance faster than any stretch in human history. Every newborn a shareholder. The average family a millionaire. The scary national debt outgrown instead of paid down.

    Selling America short has been a losing bet for two hundred fifty years. This audiobook is the argument for why the next twenty-five make that bet look ridiculous.

    Here’s what you’ll get inside:

    [00:00:38] – Citizenship Now Comes With Equity: A 2025 law hands every American newborn $1,000 invested in the market on day one. It’s the first federal program in history designed to make every baby a capitalist.

    [00:06:47] – The Two Bills Technology Never Touched Are About To Collapse: Your phone already turned a $30,000 pile of gadgets into deflation nobody noticed. Robots and robotaxis are coming for the last two holdouts, the roof over your head and the help you could never afford to hire.

    [00:16:39] – Why The Average American Family Becomes A Millionaire: Stack universal stock ownership, collapsing costs, passive income, and a debt-free generation, and the math stops reading like a fantasy.

    [00:31:56] – Immigration Run Like A Venture Portfolio: America is about to select for hunger the way a VC selects for potential. You’ll hear why the laborer’s kid who becomes the founder is a bet no visa application knows how to score, and why that Flywheel is America’s real moat.

    [00:49:12] – When Washington Becomes The Country’s HOA: As platforms deliver the services governments used to ration, the federal role shrinks to maintaining a few common areas and otherwise staying out of the way. It’s the most optimistic case for smaller government you’ll hear, and it isn’t a political one.

    If the news has you convinced the American story is ending, this audiobook is the counter-argument, and it’s built entirely on math.

    That’s how a country stops managing scarcity and starts manufacturing abundance.

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead

  • Here’s what we covered in this episode:

    1. Microsoft is selling the business agenda, not the software.

    Microsoft launched a new company: Microsoft Frontier. $2.5 billion, 6,000 engineers, sent inside other companies to make their AI work. That is consulting. The highest-margin software business ever built just walked into one of the lowest-margin businesses in tech, on purpose.

    The stock is down about 20% this year and has shed over a trillion from its peak.

    The Wall Street Journal covered it. It never asked why the richest software company on earth needs an army of humans to sell software that sells itself.

    Companies are not stuck on the technology. They are stuck on the vision. Almost none have made AI the co-founder of the company, the way we said two years ago.

    The high-order bit in enterprise is the business agenda, not the tech. Whoever owns it wins. Enterprise AI is still in its startup phase, and every startup is a small piece of technology wrapped in consultants who go find the use cases. Amazon put a billion into the same idea two years ago. OpenAI and Anthropic followed.

    The move is talent, not acquisition. Poach the $10-million specialist: half the cash, five times the upside in equity. Point them at the niches where the use case is obvious:

    * Bankruptcy and turnaround. Ninety days to pull a business out of the fire.

    * M&A due diligence. Buy this, sell that, fast. Perfect for AI.

    * Cost takeout. The least strategic move and the most certain one.

    Own the business agenda around the tech, and you own the category. Microsoft gets it. The legacy consultants didn’t.

    2. Wall Street thinks Elon is buying a phone company. He’s building a bundle.

    Starlink is six years old with more than 10,000 satellites and 10 million broadband subscribers.

    Its IPO filing put Starlink Mobile’s market at $740 billion. Last month, the Philippines became the first country to connect phones straight to the satellites. No towers. Dense cities still need them, but a country of remote islands is where Starlink isn’t an option, it’s the only one.

    Wall Street’s plan for him: buy T-Mobile. Wrong lens. Elon wants the spectrum, not the company, the way Google bought Motorola for the patents. He could cut two-thirds of T-Mobile’s $23 billion in overhead, put a 20x multiple on it, and unlock $320 billion. Cost-cutting was never the point.

    Two things make this his fight.

    * Radically analog: nobody stands up rockets, data centers, and networks at his speed and cost.

    * The bundle: Microsoft became Microsoft this way, taking four category kings, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Harvard Graphics, and dBase, and declaring them one category: Office.

    Own the pipe, and you own what runs on it.

    The cell phone bill. Global mobile is a $200 to $400 billion-a-year category. Between 70% and 94% of homeless Americans carry a phone. It’s a category with no off switch, and the beachhead for a new category built while the telcos aren’t looking.

    3. Europe has a heat problem. It actually has a reframe problem.

    175,000 Europeans die from heat every year, per the World Health Organization.

    Paris hit 104 last week, the fourth such day since the 1800s. The fix is a century old: AC.

    Adoption is stranger.

    Japan 91%, South Korea 86%, China 60%, Mexico 16%, India 5%. On this one technology, the UK is closer to India than to the developed world. Japan and South Korea were destitute 60 years ago. AC didn’t just make them comfortable, it made them productive.

    The fight went ideological. The same script is now running in America over AI data centers, the buildout that could double GDP, argued about like a threat instead of a cure.

    Every transformational technology hits the same emotional wall before it wins:

    * Air conditioning. A century-old machine still fought in European courts.

    * Full self-driving. The freedom to hand an aging parent back their independence.

    * GLP-1s. Proof we were never destined to be an obese country.

    The way out is word of mouth, the most powerful form of marketing there is.

    Roger Martin calls it being reflective, not reflexive. Make it personal. Your parents. Your grandparents. The friend six months pregnant heading into a European summer with a fan.

    The Wall Street Journal covered the death toll and missed that the cure shipped a hundred years ago. The fight was never about the machine.

    3 conversations to have about the news with the Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot

    We just told you what’s happening to three categories. The bots help you figure out what it means for yours. Reading the news is the easy part. Turning it into something actionable is the hard part, and that is exactly what The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot are built for. They jam with you 24/7, they come with the founding tier, and they never get tired of your follow-up questions.

    Take this to them this week:

    * Own the business agenda, not the technology. Tell the bots what tech you’re betting on and have them find the business agenda underneath it, the vision your customer is actually stuck on. Microsoft hired 6,000 humans to sell that, not the software.

    * Turn your product into a bundle. Tell the bots your one product and have them spec the category kings around it you could fold into a single thing customers can’t unbundle. Elon wants the pipe so he can own everything that runs on it.

    * Stop selling the spec sheet. Tell the bots a technology your market keeps rejecting and have them reframe it from an ideological fight into a personal, emotional yes. Europe is losing 175,000 people a year to a spec-sheet argument.

    Three headlines, one move. Somebody has to hold the customer’s hand through the transformation. That’s the whole game.

    Not a founding member yet? You can join here.

    What’s coming up on Pirate Street Journal

    We’re making a few changes to Pirate Street Journal next month.

    Every Tuesday, we drop a Pirate Street Journal episode at 7 a.m. PST / 10 A.M. EST. Three topics, thirty minutes, a couple of bongos.

    The first two Deep Dive Reports (DDRs) have already earned their keep:

    * Volume 1 (May 22, 2026): we said AI hardware was about to re-rate. Micron is up 61% and just posted the best quarter in its history.

    * Volume 2 (June 10, 2026): we said more than one thing can be true about the SpaceX IPO, strong for the long run and volatile near term. It IPO’d at $135, ran to $202, and sits at $153 as of June 25, 2026.

    The reports are built to pay off not just the day they drop, but over the next few quarters, even the next year or two. So we are making two changes.

    One, the reports get their own lane. Episodes drop Tuesdays. Mini-books and DDRs come out every other Friday.

    Two, who gets what changes. There are now two kinds of reports:

    * Deep Dive Reports (DDRs). The long, twice-a-month Friday reports. Founding Members get the full report. Everyone else gets a preview in their inbox and can read the rest by upgrading.

    * Breaking News reports. When there is breaking news on a category transformation, every paying subscriber gets the full report, Monthly and Founding alike.

    Starting with the next DDR, the complete version is a Founding Member benefit.

    Two ways to climb aboard now:

    Monthly: $20/month. You’ve done dumber things with $20. You get the Tuesday episodes, every DDR preview, and every Breaking News report in full.

    Founding: $375/year. About a dollar a day for every future DDR start to finish the day it drops, plus:

    * The Pirate Eddie Bot and the Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners

    * Every mini-book we have ever written (300+)

    * Our entire audiobook library (30+)

    * All seven of our full-size books

    Want the whole thing every time? Become a Founding Member.

    Recorded Friday, June 26th. Every number above is as of that morning.

    Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

    Stay tuned for next week’s episode.

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe
  • This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe

    This mini-book is read to you by AI Pirate Eddie.

    (If reading is more your style—or you want to see all sources and GIFs—you can read the written version here.)

    Most Americans have no idea how rare the country they live in actually is.

    Pirate Christopher’s Scottish grandfather crossed an ocean for a job at a rubber factory. Pirate Eddie’s father walked away from a law career in Korea to clean floors and drive a limo in Hawaii. Two families, two wars, two bets on the same country. Neither of us would be Pirates without it.

    Here’s the data most people walk past. Since 2007, Gallup has asked people in 150+ countries where they’d move if they could pick anywhere. The USA wins every time, by a mile. Not because Americans are superior. Because America is built differently.

    Every other country on Earth is a club. America is a catapult.

    That single idea is the spine of our new mini-book, now an audiobook. It’s a birthday letter to the USA, and it’s 25 predictions for the next 25 years, all built on weird data instead of wishful thinking.

    Optimism is easy to mock and hard to earn. We tried to earn it.

    Here’s what you’ll get inside:

    [00:02:18] – America Isn’t a Club, It’s a Catapult: The wealthiest man in Japan was bullied and denied credit for being ethnically Korean, in the only country he ever held citizenship in. You’ll hear why belonging by belief instead of blood is America’s rarest export.

    [00:05:27] – The Three Questions That Make a Country: How do you belong, where does power live, what does participation cost. Run every nation on Earth through those three questions and exactly one comes out the other side.

    [00:09:08] – Why Efficiency Never Kills Demand: In 1865, every smart economist bet that more efficient steam engines would burn less coal. They were spectacularly wrong. The Jevons Paradox is the most powerful argument against the scarcity premise ever written, and it’s why AI won’t shrink the pie, it’ll blow it wide open.

    [00:16:17] – The Moon Becomes America’s Number One Tax State: California throws off $265 billion a year in taxes. Do the category math on a fully industrialized moon, and the number that comes back is bigger. This is not Star Trek. Some of these resource contracts are already signed, and China isn’t the Category King of what comes next.

    [00:33:57] – Disease Is a Bug, and We Can Now Fix the Code: Your DNA is four letters running three billion lines of source code. CRISPR is a find-and-replace function for the human body, and we’re standing in the LASIK moment, back when a procedure went from millions of dollars to a Tuesday afternoon errand.

    If you’ve been told the future is something to brace for instead of something to build, this mini-book will change which direction you’re facing.

    That’s what it means to be a different category of country.

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead

    PS: Help like-minded pirates “think different.”

    If reading this opened your mind to new and different thinking, share it with a friend or click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can learn about Category Pirates.

  • Here’s what we covered in this episode:

    1. State Farm is fighting to keep the customers it should fire.

    Progressive just took the personal auto crown State Farm held since World War II. It sells more than half its policies direct. No agent.

    State Farm’s answer: fly 19,000 agents to Vegas, throw a Pink concert, then tear up their contracts. Sign a worse deal by 2027 or take a buyout. Gross income could drop 40%.

    Did the CEO read the data right? No.

    He saw customers leaving and built a playbook for the wrong one.

    The switcher. Shops every renewal, picks the lowest number, gone the second someone is cheaper. State Farm has paid to chase that customer for decades. So has everyone else.

    The superconsumer. Never shops at renewal. Loves coverage, wants more, compounds lifetime value.

    The supers are already in the data, hiding behind non-obvious signals: too much life insurance, a thing for gummy vitamins, three or four refrigerators, a household that was ready when COVID hit. The super of one is the super of nine. The generator buyer is the insurance buyer.

    Mistake one: chase switchers instead of finding the supers already in the data.

    Mistake two: dismantle the agent network instead of backing the proactive agents over the reactive ones.

    Cut the switchers and the company shrinks while profit climbs.

    2. P&G is selling the technology when it should be selling the problem.

    P&G owns 60% of US detergent. Tide alone is close to 40. They spent a decade building Tide Evo, a dry three-inch tile. Since March it has taken 0.6% of the category.

    A consultant on the record cannot name the problem it solves at twice the price of a pod. Why?

    Because P&G is selling the tile, not the problem.

    Market the product and the customer thinks you want their money. Market the problem and they think you want to help.

    The problem is real and unspoken: Evo takes the water out. Easier to carry. Does not burst like a pod. Works in cold water, so you skip the heat and the cost.

    The superconsumer is the older, fixed-income customer who cannot wrestle the jug anymore. P&G is hiding from her because they think a niche shrinks the mass market. It does the opposite. Niching down expands word of mouth, which expands the market.

    Removing water is a category move a century old:

    * NestlĂŠ, 1867. Dehydrated milk to reach babies fresh supply could not. It built a food empire.

    * Keurig. Sold coffee as a concentrate waiting for the water you add.

    * Starbucks Via. Reinvented instant coffee so completely it refused to call it that.

    * SodaStream. Ships the syrup and lets you pour the rest.

    Every decade, someone strips the water out of a wet product and unlocks a category.

    Pull the water and you pull it from manufacturing, packaging, the truck, and the shelf. At scale the tile should hit a 70% gross margin, well above liquid Tide near 50 and pods around 60. The retailer moves the same revenue in less shelf space.

    Name what you built and you own no-water detergent, plus every aisle where removing water applies next. P&G has not framed, named, or claimed any of it.

    3. America has a supply problem. Singapore had a category problem.

    America is short 1 to 5 million homes. The whole debate is supply: smaller lots, granny flats, less red tape. Starter homes used to be a third of everything built. Today they are 10%.

    Singapore refused the premise and built a different category. Public housing engineered for longevity and connection. Vertical villages that stack senior apartments, a medical center, and a preschool in one building. Elder care next to four-year-olds on purpose.

    The data is the strange part.

    * Life expectancy is up about 20 years since 1960.

    * Centenarians doubled in a decade.

    * Singapore is now the sixth blue zone on Earth, and the first one a government built from scratch.

    The residents with the most assets are the elderly, and they use the most healthcare, so they quietly cover the fixed cost of the building everyone else lives in. Co-living solves loneliness at both ends of the barbell, the young who have not started families and the old who outlived their friends.

    The Wall Street Journal covered the shortage and missed that the answer already shipped, with 20 extra years of life attached.

    3 conversations to have about the news with the Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot

    We just told you what is happening to three categories.

    The bots help you figure out what it means for yours. Reading the news is the easy part. Turning it into something actionable is the hard part, and it is exactly what The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot are built for. They jam with you 24/7, they come with the founding tier, and they never get tired of your follow-up questions.

    Take this to them this week:

    * Find your supers through the non-obvious signals. Tell the bots what you sell and have them spec who quietly buys too much of it, the way the generator buyer keeps three refrigerators. The super of one is the super of nine. State Farm is chasing switchers and ignoring the supers in its own data.

    * Sell the problem, not the technology. Tell the bots what you built and have them name the problem it solves, then frame it, name it, and claim it. P&G took the water out of detergent and only talked about the tile.

    * Turn your shortage into a category. Tell the bots a problem everyone in your space calls a supply problem and have them rebuild it as a category problem. Singapore turned a housing shortage into 20 extra years of life.

    Not a founding member yet? You can join here.

    What’s coming up on Pirate Street Journal

    We’re making a few changes to Pirate Street Journal next month.

    Every Tuesday, we drop a Pirate Street Journal episode at 7 a.m. PST / 10 A.M. EST. Three topics, thirty minutes, a couple of bongos.

    The first two Deep Dive Reports (DDRs) have already earned their keep:

    * Volume 1 (May 22, 2026): we said AI hardware was about to re-rate. Micron is up 61% and just posted the best quarter in its history.

    * Volume 2 (June 10, 2026): we said more than one thing can be true about the SpaceX IPO, strong for the long run and volatile near term. It IPO’d at $135, ran to $202, and sits at $153 as of June 25, 2026.

    The reports are built to pay off not just the day they drop, but over the next few quarters, even the next year or two. So we are making two changes.

    One, the reports get their own lane. Episodes drop Tuesdays. Mini-books and DDRs come out every other Friday.

    Two, who gets what changes. There are now two kinds of reports:

    * Deep Dive Reports (DDRs). The long, twice-a-month Friday reports. Founding Members get the full report. Everyone else gets a preview in their inbox and can read the rest by upgrading.

    * Breaking News reports. When there is breaking news on a category transformation, every paying subscriber gets the full report, Monthly and Founding alike.

    Starting with the next DDR, the complete version is a Founding Member benefit.

    Two ways to climb aboard now:

    Monthly: $20/month. You’ve done dumber things with $20. You get the Tuesday episodes, every DDR preview, and every Breaking News report in full.

    Founding: $375/year. About a dollar a day for every future DDR start to finish the day it drops, plus:

    * The Pirate Eddie Bot and the Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners

    * Every mini-book we have ever written (300+)

    * Our entire audiobook library (30+)

    * All seven of our full-size books

    Want the whole thing every time? Become a Founding Member.

    Recorded Friday, June 26th. Every number above is as of that morning.

    Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

    Stay tuned for next week’s episode.

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe
  • SpaceX went public on a Friday.

    By Tuesday, it was worth $2.5 trillion, bigger than Amazon.

    Four days in, it spent $60 billion on a four-year-old startup.

    That startup was worth half as much in November.

    Wall Street called the price insane.

    The price is the least interesting thing about it.

    Here’s what we covered in this episode:

    1. Wall Street says Musk overpaid for Cursor. We think it was a bargain.

    SpaceX hit $2.5 trillion by Tuesday and passed Amazon into the top five in America. Then it bought Cursor, the AI coding startup, for $60 billion in stock. Cursor was worth about $29 billion in November, so Musk paid double in a few months. Four MIT students built it in 2022, the CEO is 25, and a team in the low hundreds already throws off billions in revenue against Claude Code and Codex.

    There are two kinds of acquisitions.

    One buys a rival in a flat category and strips out the duplicate cost. That is what most people picture.

    This is the other kind. You buy the king of a category about to explode.

    Cursor’s founder said he built a new type of software, a category for building AI software with AI. The press fixated on the price and missed the sentence.

    Microsoft bought DOS. Google bought YouTube. Facebook bought Instagram. Each one looked overpriced for the same reason.

    2. Trillion-dollar companies can't get power approved. A million households fixed it with a balcony

    Two weeks ago we said the power layer of the AI stack is nearly empty, with about $156 billion of US data center projects blocked or delayed. In Germany, more than a million households installed plug-in solar. You hang panels on a balcony, plug into a wall outlet, and run in under an hour. Each one is capped around 800 watts.

    Utah went first last year. Several states have legalized it since, and more than 30 are now considering it.

    A starter kit runs a few hundred dollars and pays for itself in a few years where power hits 30 to 40 cents a kilowatt-hour.

    Rooftop solar stayed a luxury because of permits and cost. Strip those away and a new category shows up: distributed, consumer-owned power at Costco prices.

    3. Chick-fil-A makes four times what KFC does per store, and it's closed on Sundays.

    KFC is 74 years old, 34,000 restaurants, over 150 countries, and just announced the biggest overhaul in its history. New sauces, a boba drinks line called KWENCH, interiors built like an Apple store crossed with a Vegas sphere, new logo. Same week, Yum sold Pizza Hut for $2.7 billion to bet harder on chicken.

    KFC has more US locations than Chick-fil-A, over 3,600 stores, under $2 million a year each. Chick-fil-A does about $7.5 million per store. Four times the money, with one fewer day a week, because it closes on Sundays.

    KFC’s problem was never store count. It’s the category design inside each box.

    Boba and screens redecorate the magic triangle without refreshing it.

    Chick-fil-A’s edge is the ownership model: private, anti-franchise, a $10,000 buy-in, an acceptance rate under 1%, two drive-thru lanes, a menu tight enough to keep the line moving.

    KFC already ceded Southern fried to Popeyes and the mega category to Chick-fil-A at home. Its real weapon is a global footprint and the one food that travels everywhere. Bring the best foreign menus back and win on what makes it different.

    3 conversations to have about the news with the Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot

    We just told you what is happening to three categories. The bots help you figure out what it means for yours. Reading the news is the easy part. Turning it into something actionable is the most important piece, and it is exactly what The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot are built for. They jam with you 24/7, they come with the founding tier, and they never get tired of your follow-up questions.

    Take this to them this week:

    * Sort your next big bet into consolidation or acceleration. Ask the bots which moves in your space buy a category king and which only buy cost savings. Musk just paid $60 billion to own the top of a stack he didn’t build.

    * Find the abundance play in your category. Tell the bots what you sell and have them spec a version that gets cheaper and better the more people use it, the way a million balconies beat one. Then ask where the network effect kicks in and how this is relevant to you.

    * Stress-test your own glow-up. Tell the bots what you are about to change and have them split it into surface redecoration and real category design. KFC is spending its biggest budget ever on boba while Chick-fil-A makes four times per store.

    Not a founding member yet? You can join here.

    What’s coming up on Pirate Street Journal

    Every week, we drop the podcast. Three topics, thirty minutes, one cowbell.

    Once a month, we publish a written deep dive, the kind of category analysis you cannot get anywhere else. That one is for paying subscribers only, monthly and founding.

    Two ways to climb aboard now:

    Monthly subscriber: $20/month. You’ve done dumber things with $20.

    Founding subscriber: $375/year. For about a dollar a day, you get every mini-book we’ve ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven of our Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners for category building.

    Subscribe today and start jamming with the bots.

    Recorded Friday, June 12. Every number above is as of that morning.

    Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

    Stay tuned for next week’s episode.

    Hey Ho, Let’s Go!

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe
  • Gartner grew its revenue again last year.

    Investors wiped out more than $30 billion of its value anyway.

    The stock fell from $551 to $155 in about twelve months.

    Still profitable. Still growing. Still the name every CIO knows.

    Wall Street just stopped believing it has a future worth paying for.

    The business is fine. The future got repriced.

    Here’s what we covered in this episode:

    1. Gartner grew revenue again last year. Wall Street wiped out $30 billion anyway.

    For 40 years, Gartner was the company you paid to tell you what tech to buy. It peaked at $551 a share in November 2024. This week it trades around $155, a 70% collapse, with market cap down from roughly $42 billion to about $10 billion.

    The revenue still grows. That is not the point. For a growth company, value is investors’ read on the category's going-forward potential, and Wall Street has decided that Gartner does not have one. The moment you can ask an AI which CRM to buy and get a real answer for free, a six-figure research subscription starts to look like a fax machine.

    Roger Martin pegs true strategy at about 3% of what the big consulting firms sell. The other 97% is best practices, benchmarking, gap analysis. Monkey see, monkey do. That is exactly what AI commoditizes first. The value moved to whoever can create net-new knowledge instead of repackaging the old kind.

    2. Thirty vendors paid in, consumers paid $250 at the door, and the marketing event turned a profit.

    An aesthetics company called Orange Twist ran a Lightning Strike in Newport Beach called TwistX. A mid-six-figure event at the Hyatt that turned a profit. Vendors covered about a third (30 brands paying to get in front of buyers), consumers covered about a third ($250 a head at the door), and on-the-spot treatment bookings covered the rest. Paid media for the whole thing ran maybe four figures.

    A Lightning Strike concentrates a year of marketing budget into one moment instead of spreading it thin across twelve. Pulled off right, it pays for itself, which flips marketing from cost center to profit center. Almost nobody does it.

    It also shows where consumer money goes when everything digital gets cheaper by the week: AI, agency, and the body you live in. Two GLP-1 drugs now do about $55 billion a year at 80% margins, matching the combined revenue of the top four AI companies at half the margin. The one thing a model cannot hand you is what you see in the mirror.

    3. Teen unemployment is actually lower than it was in 1979. The Wall Street Journal calls it a crisis.

    The Wall Street Journal ran a crisis headline: summer hiring for teens is the weakest since the government started counting in 1948. Then look at the data. Teen participation peaked near 58% in 1979, and the share holding a job has fallen from 49% to 31%. But teen unemployment is 14% today, down from 16% in 1979. The kids who want work are finding it faster than their parents did. New York City’s summer program drew 200,000 applicants for 100,000 slots and had to run a lottery.

    The decline is almost entirely teenagers opting out. The edge a wealthy kid used to buy with an unpaid internship now costs $20 a month for anyone with a laptop. The gate the Journal is mourning just blew open.

    Run the math the way Pirate Christopher did. A young person who banks $100,000 and parks it in the S&P 500 at a 10% historical average is worth about $1.7 million in 30 years. Wealthy people own things that work for them. That lesson is finally cheap enough for everyone.

    What’s coming up on Pirate Street Journal

    Every week, we drop the podcast. Three topics, thirty minutes, one cowbell.

    Once a month, we publish a written deep dive, the kind of category analysis you cannot get anywhere else. That one is for paying subscribers only, monthly and founding.

    Two ways to climb aboard now:

    Monthly subscriber: $20/month. You’ve done dumber things with $20.

    Founding subscriber: $375/year. For about a dollar a day, you get every mini-book we’ve ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven of our Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners for category building.

    Subscribe today and start jamming with the bots.

    Recorded Friday, June 12. Every number above is as of that morning.

    Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

    Stay tuned for next week’s episode.

    Hey Ho, Let’s Go!

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe
  • We loved celebrating all the moms in our lives a few weeks ago over Mother’s Day, and now it’s time to celebrate the dads.

    Before we get into the episode, we have something fun to share.

    The Parent Bundle and a Father’s Day offer

    This week we’re launching the Parent Bundle, and if you sign up as a new Founding Subscriber between now and Father’s Day, you’ll get the full bundle included at no extra charge.

    Here’s what’s inside:

    * The Joy Book: written by Pirate Eddie’s daughter Audrey (when she was in 6th grade), this physical book is available individually for $25 (more on this below)

    * How To Build Your First (Crazy Profitable) Business As A Teenager Vol. 1: 18 radical ideas for Native Digital entrepreneurs. The original. Available individually for $12.99 on Amazon here.

    * How To Build Your First (Crazy Profitable) Business As A Teenager Vol. 2: the AI sequel: 18 more ideas built for the era of AI co-founders and $30K summers. Available individually for $12.99 on Amazon here.

    Know a dad who needs this? Share this post (and next week’s mini-book: Fatherhood 3.0) with him. Know a teen who should read the AI book? The Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 links are right there. And if you just want the whole stack for yourself, the $40 full physical bundle has you covered.

    New Founding Subscribers who sign up before midnight PST on June 21 get the full physical bundle free.

    If you’re already a Founding Subscriber, watch your inbox for a digital version of the Joy.

    If you’re ready to hop aboard, you’ll get the Parent bundle on the house and immediate access to the Pirate Eddie and Christopher Bots (your 24/7 category design jam partners), access to our full audiobook library (35+), and the entire Category Pirate library (including all 7 of our big books and 300+ mini-books).

    → [Become a Founding Subscriber and get the Parent Bundle included here.]

    Now. To the episode.

    Fatherhood 1.0 left the building. Fatherhood 2.0 showed up. Fatherhood 3.0 might be the most important design challenge yet.

    A generation ago, fathers worked.

    That was the job. Leave it to Beaver dads were providers, not participants. Fatherhood 1.0 was simple, if you squinted past how hollow it actually was.

    Then the data shifted. Today’s fathers spend 90 minutes a day on childcare in the United States, up from 20 minutes in 1985. In Canada, the number tripled. Globally, across Germany, Norway, Japan, Australia, the arc is the same: fathers are more present than any prior generation.

    So why does it still feel like a false choice? Why does “legendary career” still seem to compete with “legendary father”?

    In this episode, Pirates Eddie, Christopher, and Bri dig into what that tension actually is, and where it comes from. And the answer is more interesting than “you need better balance.”

    The problem with Fatherhood 2.0 isn’t the quantity of time. It’s what children see when they have it.

    The most powerful gift a father can give has nothing to do with attendance

    Pirate Christopher’s late therapist, David Willingham, put his finger on something that the modern parenting conversation has mostly missed.

    For generations, children watched their fathers work. Farmers, shop owners, craftsmen, small business owners: the work happened at home or nearby, and children saw their fathers being excellent at something. As the economy shifted and fathers disappeared into offices, children inherited a different version of fatherhood: a man who came home tired.

    Present, maybe. But not at his most powerful.

    The Creator Capitalist unlock here runs parallel to what we explored with Motherhood 3.0: when you separate your time from your income, you don’t just get agency over your schedule. You get to show your kids what it looks like when you’re actually doing the thing you were built to do.

    Not a watered-down, weekend version of yourself. The whole thing.

    Pirate Eddie walked through the math of his own career, making partner in consulting while his kids were young, traveling constantly, trying to be present on the weekends while his wife, Pirate Kristen, carried the weight at home. He’s candid about what the tradeoffs cost. But Pirate Christopher reframes the ledger: Eddie’s kids didn’t just miss time with their father. They watched their father build something legendary. And those two things aren’t in opposition.

    The false choice of Fatherhood 2.0 is: you can have a great career OR you can be a great dad. Pirates reject that premise entirely.

    The Joy Book: what Pirate Eddie’s daughter actually thinks

    Speaking of what kids absorb.

    Audrey Yoon wrote a book about growing up with Eddie as her father. The title is deliberately not spoiled here. What we’ll say is this: her early memories include a 6 a.m. birthday breakfast before a 9 a.m. flight. Pirate Eddie tells the story with some sheepishness in the episode. Audrey tells it as one of her favorites.

    Kids see differently than we think they do.

    Here’s a sneak peek at what’s inside (read to you by Pirate Eddie and animated by his oldest daughter, Miya):

    The Joy Book is available now in the Shopify store, individually for $25, and bundled in the Parent Bundle for $40. It was written by Audrey, and it is the most honest accounting of Fatherhood 2.0 you will find.

    Here’s how to navigate this conversation:

    * 0:00 – Tom Peters and the Creator Capitalist origin story: Pirate Eddie and Christopher open with Roger Martin’s X post and land on Tom Peters as one of the original creator capitalists, which sets up everything that follows about what it means to make your own place rather than fit into someone else’s.

    * 7:33 – The four capitals and the fatherhood problem: Pirate Christopher pivots to the core thesis: trading time for money is what breaks both fatherhood and financial capital.

    * 14:00 – The data that got Pirate Eddie thinking: Pirate Bri shares the charts. Fathers globally are tripling their childcare time. The numbers are real and they set up the hard question: why isn’t it working the way we thought it would?

    * 18:27 – Pirate Eddie’s honest accounting of his own career as a father: Partner while the kids were little, global travel, Kristen carrying the weight. He doesn’t spin it. He walks through what he would do differently, and what he wouldn’t.

    * 24:00 – The therapist’s point about watching your father work: Pirate Christopher shares Willingham’s thesis: multiple generations ago, kids witnessed their fathers being excellent. Then offices happened. This is where the episode shifts from data to category design.

    * 29:00 – Rejecting the false choice: Pirate Christopher lands the argument. Legendary career OR legendary father is a premise to reject, not a trade to manage. The Creator Capitalist path is what breaks the chain.

    * 45:00 – Parenting never ends, and that’s the most terrifying insight: Pirate Eddie on what it looks like when the problems level up from “don’t touch the stove” to “what do you do when your kid marries the wrong person.”

    * 47:07 – Pirate Christopher’s six-and-a-half years: Tushar’s murder, Michael’s death, COVID, the DA, 2,407 days to four life sentences. What children see when they watch the adults they love stand back up.

    * 57:19 – Pirate Bri’s reader’s digest: The daughter’s perspective, her dad’s absence, and the question she’s watching her generation not quite answer yet: what does Fatherhood 4.0 look like when kids who had all the presence grow up?

    Fatherhood 3.0 is the design problem worth solving

    Fatherhood 1.0 was presence-optional. Fatherhood 2.0 added presence and kept the career, and then wondered why the tradeoffs were still brutal.

    Fatherhood 3.0 asks a different question: what if you could stop choosing?

    Next week we’re releasing the Fatherhood 3.0 mini-book. If you haven’t already, go read the Motherhood 3.0 mini-book first. The theses are designed to be read together.

    And if this episode hit differently, Audrey’s book is the version of this story told from inside the house.

    Go get the Parent Bundle. Come back next week. And in the meantime, do something legendary in front of your kids.

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead

    P.S. The Parent Bundle is live, and new Founding Subscribers get it free through Father’s Day.

    The Joy Book ($25 individually), AI Teen Books Vol. 1 and 2, are all bundled together for $40. New Founding Subscribers who sign up between now and Father’s Day get the bundle included at no extra cost. Existing Founding Subscribers get digital versions on the house.

    The Pirate Eddie Bot and Christopher Bot also come with your Founding subscription, so you can start working through your own category design any time.

    → [Become a Founding Subscriber and get the Parent Bundle here.]



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe
  • This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.categorypirates.news

    On June 12, SpaceX is going public at $135 per share and a $1.75 trillion valuation.

    4% of total shares are being offered. Of those, 30% have been allocated for retail investors to buy directly at the $135 IPO price. The standard retail allocation in a mega-cap IPO is 5 to 10% of shares, with the overwhelming majority reserved for large institutional buyers like pension funds and mutual fund managers.

    SpaceX is tripling that, which is unusual.

    At a $75 billion raise, that is roughly $22.5 billion in shares flowing directly to retail. More than many entire IPOs.

    One of SpaceX’s lead underwriters told Reuters they had never seen anything like the expected retail demand.

    Both Anthropic and OpenAI have also filed to go public sometime this fall.

    It is a mad rush to raise capital to fund the AI infrastructure buildout. Valuations defy gravity and become a moving target as ARRs change every month and cash-burning businesses like xAI flip to cash-flowing with the stroke of a single deal.

    IPOs Are Dangerous, Right?

    Truist analyst Keith Lerner pulled the data on 30 major IPOs from the last 15 years.

    The names you have heard of. Facebook. Uber. Palantir. Snowflake. CrowdStrike. Even the biggest winners experienced massive take-downs in their first year.

    The median Year 1 max drawdown across all 30 IPOs was 54%. The average was 55%. Robinhood dropped 90% from its peak. Rivian dropped 88%. Lyft dropped 79%. Uber dropped 68%.

    That is just the drawdown. Jay Ritter at the University of Florida has tracked every U.S. IPO since 1980. Over three years, the average IPO underperforms the market by 23.4%.

    It is a feeding frenzy for the sharpest sharks on Wall Street. IPOs get bid up by retail enthusiasm, then shorted on the way down. The average Joe and Jane gets whacked.

    So if you are sitting at home watching the SpaceX IPO ads roll across your screen, the safest move is to: remember the data.

    Except.

    It turns out most of America will eventually invest in SpaceX (and likely Anthropic and OpenAI) whether they realize it or not.

    62% of Americans own stock as of 2024. The vast majority of that ownership is indirect, sitting inside 401(k)s, IRAs, S&P 500 index funds, and total market funds. The S&P 500 alone is tracked by tens of trillions of dollars in passive money.

    To get into the S&P 500, a company is supposed to make money. The sum of its four quarters of earnings has to be positive on a GAAP basis, and so does its most recent quarter. That rule is decades old. It is the reason Tesla sat outside of the index until the end of 2020, years after it had become one of the most valuable companies on earth.

    That rule is about to be broken on purpose for some of the indices.

    The other major indexes have already moved. Nasdaq’s Fast Entry rule, effective May 1, 2026, cut the Nasdaq-100 waiting window from roughly three months to 15 trading days. CRSP, the index behind Vanguard’s funds, introduced an alternative path that could place SpaceX in the Russell 1000 within five trading days of the IPO.

    The S&P 500 refused to change the rules.

    So is this bad?

    Not necessarily. There will be many Category Kings of the AI era. SpaceX is currently one of them. So who will be the Category Kings of AI? And how does the AI game board look through the category lens?

    Let’s look at who the Category Kings were across the value stack in the PC era, the Dot-com era, and the Social/Mobile era. The pattern tells us what to look for now.

    Remember, we’re not financial advisors, and this is not personal financial advice.

    We’re presenting you with data through the category lens to give you a different POV on how categories rise and fall. And in this case, how the mega tech stack categories evolve over time.

    The Pirates 6 Layer Rum Cake

    Jensen Huang sells the AI economy as a five-layer cake. Energy at the bottom. Chips next. Cloud infrastructure above that. Models on top of cloud. Applications at the very top. Stack them. Slice them. Invest in them.

    It is a useful frame.

    It is also incomplete.

    The Pirates expanded the cake to six layers and simplified the language. Power instead of Energy. Internal Hardware instead of Chips. Infrastructure stays. Operating System instead of Models, because the OS is what every era’s category designer has always called the layer that makes everything else work. We added a layer Jensen left out. End-User Hardware. The device the customer touches. The PC, the phone, the device, the App Store toll booth. Applications stays at the top.

    Six layers. Power, Internal Hardware, Infrastructure, Operating System, End-User Hardware, Applications.

    The reason Jensen’s cake matters less than the Pirates Cake is that Jensen’s cake describes one era. The Pirates Cake describes every era. PC. Dot-com. Social/Mobile. AI. Same six layers, different category leaders.

    Before digging in, three rules guide the analysis.

    Rule 1. Pay close attention to multi-era category kings.

    Microsoft won the PC era. Microsoft won the Dot-com era. Microsoft is in the top three of the AI era opening act, four decades after going public. A $10,000 investment in Microsoft at its 1986 IPO, held through every crash and every doubt, was worth approximately $80 million by December 31, 2025.

    Roughly 8,000x.

    A 26% compound annual return for forty years.

    A $10,000 investment in Apple at its 1980 IPO was worth approximately $25 million by the same date.

    Roughly 2,500x.

    A 19% compound annual return for forty-five years.

    A $10,000 investment in Apple the day the iPhone launched in June 2007 was worth approximately $570,000 by December 31, 2025. Roughly 57x in eighteen years.

    What’s our point? There will be multiple Category Kings. You can still do great, even if you miss it early.

    Multi-era winners compound through platform shifts, recessions, market crashes, leadership changes, and competitor onslaughts.

    Rule 2. Hardware wins first. Then software.

    Every era opens with a hardware-led leader. IBM in PC. Intel in Dot-com. Microsoft in Social/Mobile, which is the exception that proves the rule because Microsoft was the prior era’s vertical integrator extending its run.

    Now Nvidia in AI.

    The opening years of every era belong to whoever ships the picks and shovels. Always. The closing years belong to whoever owns the operating system and the layers closest to the customer.

    Rule 3. Multi-era winners own the most valuable areas of the stack.

    Not the most layers. The most valuable ones. Operating Systems are always one of them. End-User Hardware or Distribution into the customer is usually another. Applications on top are the third. The App Store alone takes 30% of every transaction every developer makes on the platform forever. That is the most valuable layer in the matrix, and Apple owns it outright. The closer to the customer, the higher the multiple. Internal Hardware is bigger in revenue. End-User Hardware and Apps are bigger in compounding value.

    Now walk the matrix.

    The Era Matrix

    Companies as rows. Layers as columns. Each filled dot is a real owned business in that layer. The two market cap columns show the average across the first three years of an era and the last three years. Teal marks the first-window leader. Pink marks the last-window winner. They are never the same company.

    PC era ¡ 1985 to 1999

    The first-window leader was IBM at 79.9% share of named-player market cap. IBM owned three layers. Internal Hardware in mainframes and servers. Infrastructure in enterprise services. End-User Hardware in the original IBM PC and the ThinkPad. IBM won the opening for one reason. The IBM PC defined the category. Every other PC was an IBM clone. The hardware that ran the era belonged to IBM.

    The last-window winner was Microsoft at 41.9% share. Microsoft owned three layers. Operating System in Windows. Distribution through OEM bundling deals that put Windows on every PC sold. Applications in Office. Microsoft did not make hardware. Microsoft made the thing every piece of hardware needed to be useful. By 1999, Windows ran on 95% of PCs sold. Office had no real competition. Microsoft was, briefly, the most valuable company in the world.

    IBM dropped to 17.6% by the close. The hardware category gets the party started, and Operating Systems take the stage later.

    Dot-com era ¡ 1995 to 2002

    The first-window leader was Intel at 25.1% share. One layer. Internal Hardware. Every server, every workstation, every desktop running the web ran on Intel chips. The web was a hardware buildout before it was anything else. Cisco rode the same wave at 11.4%. IBM held on at 16.8%.

    The last-window winner was Microsoft at 24.7% share. Same Microsoft. Same three layers. Same Operating System. Same Distribution. Same Applications.

    This is the most important data point in the matrix. Microsoft is the only multi-era, multi-category winner in modern technology history. Won PC. Won Dot-com. Did it by holding the Operating System layer through the platform transition. Windows ran the local PC. Internet Explorer bundled into Windows became the way most people got to the web. Office moved from the desktop to the web. Same playbook. New surface. Same compounding.

    Intel finished Dot-com at 20.1%. Cisco at 16.8%. Both are still huge. Both are about to fall away in the next era. The hardware leader of one era is rarely the hardware leader of the next.

    Social/Mobile era ¡ 2004 to 2020

    The first-window Category King was Microsoft at 47.0% share. The same Microsoft. Two consecutive era wins and into the category lead of the third era’s opening act. This is what Rule 1 looks like on a chart.

    The last-window winner was Apple at 25.3% share. Apple owned four layers. Internal Hardware in Apple Silicon. Operating System in iOS. End-User Hardware in the iPhone and the App Store. Applications in Music, Maps, Messages, Camera, Photos. The most complete vertical integration in technology history.

    Apple owned the most valuable layers of the stack. Operating System. End-User Hardware. Apps. The three layers closest to the customer.

    Intel collapsed from 21.9% opening share to 3.9% closing share. The hardware leader of the prior era lost an entire era’s worth of share. Cisco never recovered from Dot-com. Microsoft, the vertical integrator, did. Same pattern as the IBM-to-Microsoft handoff. Hardware leaders fade when the layers they do not own start to compound.

    Nvidia opened Social/Mobile at 1.1% and closed at 3.2%.

    Few people saw what they were going to do next.

    AI era ¡ 2024 to 2026

    Nvidia is the first-window Category King at 22.3% share. One bingo point in Internal Hardware. Same role Intel played in Dot-com. Same role IBM played in PC.

    Behind Nvidia: Apple at 20.3% with four layers. Microsoft at 19.6% with three layers. Alphabet at 12.9% with five layers. The vertical integrators are already in position. The last-window Category King has not declared itself yet. The matrix says it will not be Nvidia, if they don’t add more points on the Bingo card. The matrix says it will be one of the companies with the most valuable and/or the most points on the Bingo Card. Ideally, it will own the Operating System plus the layers closest to the customer.

    The question is which one.

    Head to Head in the AI Era

    We have a few hypotheses about what might happen next.

    Hypothesis 1. Low-regulation states can be the Category King in US power.

    China is adding the equivalent of the entire US grid every few years.

    In 2025, China added 543 gigawatts of new capacity across all technologies. That single year of additions is 12% more than all the power plants combined in India. China’s total power generation capacity is now 3.75 terawatts. The US sits at 1.3 terawatts. Roughly three times the US. China is investing more than $500 billion per year in energy buildout. The US grid grew by a fraction of that.

    Regarding Power, the US federal government is being slow and stupid.

    Poorer, but prescient states can leapfrog their legacy.

    The regulation, the permitting, the environmental review cycles, the local NIMBY opposition. None of it is calibrated for an AI era that needs power yesterday. Microsoft had to revive Three Mile Island because building a new nuclear plant from scratch is essentially illegal.

    So xAI built Colossus 1 in Memphis, Tennessee. You would think they would be in the pole position for Colossus 2.

    Tennessee regulators slow-walked the gas turbine permits.

    Mississippi said yes.

    Mississippi’s governor announced xAI’s $20 billion investment as the largest single investment in Mississippi history. Tennessee just took Starbucks and In-N-Out headquarters.

    The states willing to build will win the AI era.

    California’s regulatory structure makes it effectively impossible to build the hyperscale facilities (500 MW+) that are now the standard for AI infrastructure.

    Developers in California top out around 50 MW. In Virginia and Texas, projects routinely run ten times that size.

    Every transmission line, backup generator, and power connection triggers CEQA environmental review, adding 18–36 months to any project timeline.

    The result: Silicon Valley has 489 MW of total data center capacity. Northern Virginia has 4,039 MW. That’s an 8x gap. And Virginia added over 1 GW of new capacity in 2025 alone. California added roughly 20 MW.

    Texas is booming with abundant land and no state income tax.

    Google committed $40 billion to Texas data center infrastructure through 2027. Microsoft is scrambling to secure natural gas-backed sites in Texas and West Virginia. No comparable investment is flowing into California.

    You can see smaller, speedier governments winning in Asia.

    Korea is the only country in the world other than the US with more than one trillion-dollar market cap company. Samsung Electronics crossed $1 trillion in May 2026. SK Hynix crossed three weeks later.

    Both built on the DRAM and HBM memory categories that feed the AI hardware buildout. Two trillion-dollar companies in a country of 51 million people, mostly because they own a critical category in the AI value stack.

    Bloomberg Economics forecasts Samsung and SK Hynix combined performance bonuses alone will grow from 4 trillion won in 2026 to 30 trillion won by 2028. South Korea’s finance minister is publicly debating how to use the tax windfall, with talk of creating a sovereign wealth fund to absorb it.

    Korea Herald is reporting Samsung and SK Hynix combined tax revenue over the next three years is projected to roughly equal half of South Korea’s national government debt.

    Two companies.

    Three years.

    Half the country’s debt.

    And Korea’s debt-to-GDP ratio is already only 49%, less than half the US level. The AI tax windfall is hitting a country that did not need it. That is what owning a single category in the AI value stack can do for an entire economy.

    Europe and high-regulation US states lose.

    California cannot build a 170-foot bridge in under three years. California is not going to build power plants and data centers in the AI era. Europe has not had a meaningful new technology company at scale in two decades.

    Both will be left behind.

    Western Europe, sadly, is becoming a place locked in the past, where tourists from the future visit.

    Hypothesis 2. Today, Alphabet and Muskonomy appear poised to win.

    Both are going for full bingo.

    Both own or are acquiring more layers than the rest of the field. Alphabet has the cash flow to solve the layers they do not yet own. Musk has the ability to raise immense amounts of capital just on the cult of his personality.

    Hypothesis 3. Expect weird M&A and JVs.

    The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

    Microsoft and OpenAI was the masterstroke of the era’s opening years. And now reportedly fraying. Musk had public beef with Anthropic, but his beef with OpenAI was bigger, so he cut a $1.25 billion per month deal with Anthropic for Colossus capacity.

    Google just cut a deal to pay xAI over $900 million per month for compute. This seems odd given they are both going for Bingo, but then again Google owns a healthy chunk of SpaceX.

    Solo players will shrivel.

    Standing alone with one or two layers is not a path to winning. In the mega categories. It is a path to being acquired, merged, or marginalized.

    With these hypotheses in mind, here is what must be true for each player to be the AI era Category King.

    Nvidia

    Nvidia has one spot on the bingo card. Proudly

    Internal Hardware. But their timing is awesome right now.

    Here’s what must be true for Nvidia to win.

    Nvidia must hope that the Internal Hardware phase is the longest of any era we’ve seen. This is the bet they are making, which is investing within the Internal Hardware part of the stack. Nvidia’s taken their monster cash flows and invested $2 billion into Lumentum, which is Optics and Components. They invested $3 billion into Corning for fiber optic cables. They invested $2 billion into Synopsys, a leading electronic design automation firm. And a $2 billion investment into Coreweave, to help build out clouds. If Internal Hardware’s reign lasts a long time, Nvidia will be fine.

    While they aren’t personally moving into other areas of the bingo card, Nvidia has committed $53 billion in about 170 deals across the value stack.

    * Power: $2.1 billion into Iris Energy

    * Operating Systems: $100 billion commitment to OpenAI, $10 billion into Anthropic and $2 billion into xAI

    * End User hardware: They participated in a $1 billion Series C into Wayve, a UK autonomous vehicle company. They also invested in a $675 million dollar round into Figure AI robotics.

    * End User applications: $50 million into Recursion Pharmaceuticals, $50 million into Kore.ai, a conversational AI for enterprise, participated in a $141 million Series B for Hippocratic.ai, a medical-grade LLM.

    Equity stakes are great, but they are not businesses they own.

    Nvidia’s bet is that hardware demand stays insatiable for years. The playbook from here is the Apple playbook of the 2010s. Stock buybacks. Dividends. Returning cash to shareholders. Growing the stock through financial engineering rather than category expansion.

    Nvidia is going to be enormous. And unlikely to be the era mega-category winner.

    OpenAI

    OpenAI has two spots on the bingo card.

    Operating System in GPT. Applications in ChatGPT and enterprise products.

    Here’s what must be true for OpenAI to win.

    The rumored chip program would add Internal Hardware. Stargate would add Infrastructure. ChatGPT has consumer mindshare but does not own end-user hardware. Jony Ive left Apple to join OpenAI, and he’s building a consumer AI device. The Apple deal would add Distribution into End-User Hardware.

    That’s a lot to do, while trying to out-innovate Anthropic.

    And the rumored trust issues with Sam Altman make partnerships tricky. If the capital markets tighten, OpenAI does not have Alphabet’s cash flow to buy their way in.

    Anthropic

    Like OpenAI, Anthropic has two spots on the bingo card.

    Operating System in Claude. Applications in Claude.ai, Claude Code, and enterprise products. Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic had a rumored profitable quarter and ARR that seems to grow each month.

    Here’s what must be true for Anthropic to win.

    Anthropic has a lot of the bingo card to fill, with cash flow that is promising but not yet present. This means partnerships are the default.

    The Colossus deal with Musk gives Anthropic Infrastructure access without owning it. The enterprise embedding strategy through Claude Code, Claude in Excel, and Claude in Chrome is a credible path to being inside every workflow rather than owning a consumer surface.

    The math of building Power, Internal Hardware, Infrastructure, End User Hardware and Applications organically is brutal. The math of joining one of the bingo contenders is easier.

    Meta

    Meta has three spots on the bingo card.

    Infrastructure in their own data centers. End-User Hardware in Ray-Ban Meta and Quest. Applications in Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

    Here’s what must be true for Meta to win.

    Meta must solve for power, but as important, Meta would need to build or buy a real Operating System. Llama is a model, not an OS layer the way iOS or Gemini is. Meta would need Internal Hardware beyond MTIA.

    This is where all the cash they burned on AR/VR would have come in handy. These are a lot of spots on the bingo card to invest or buy their way into.

    Facebook needs a friend. A deep partnership with someone who has the layers Meta does not have. Standing alone, Meta does not have a credible path to bingo.

    Microsoft

    Microsoft has three spots on the bingo card.

    Infrastructure in Azure. Operating System in Windows and Copilot, as well as their partnership with OpenAI. Applications in M365 and Copilot apps.

    Here’s what must be true for Microsoft.

    Microsoft has to solve for Power and Internal Hardware. Power is the same constraint everyone faces, but Microsoft has the cash flow and the data center footprint to move first. Internal Hardware is the harder one.

    Microsoft has never been good at end-user hardware. Windows Mobile failed. Zune failed. Surface is a rounding error. And Microsoft lost over one billion on their retail stores.

    Can they win in Internal Hardware?

    The realistic path is acquisition. AMD has been rumored for a decade. Or can Microsoft time it right when hardware’s importance fades?

    This will be the biggest bet of Nadella’s career.

    Apple

    Apple already has four spots on the bingo card.

    Internal Hardware in Apple Silicon. Operating System in iOS, macOS, and Apple Intelligence. End-User Hardware in every device the customer touches. Applications in the Services bundle and Apple Intelligence features.

    Here’s what must be true for Apple.

    Apple has to solve for Power, Infrastructure, and AI user experience. Power and infrastructure are heavy capex businesses Apple has historically avoided, so Apple buys power on the grid. Apple leases compute from AWS and Azure.

    Apple has to own the inputs they currently rent.

    The biggest risk to Apple is in AI experience; Apple sucks. Think about the difference between Siri and ChatGPT or Claude. It’s a joke.

    And experience is what Apple has historically been awesome at.

    On Monday, June 8, they finally announced Siri AI as part of the iOS 27 September software update.

    Their saving grace might be their hard stance on privacy, which is a credit to Tim Cook. His missional stance on privacy has built massive trust with consumers. If and when AI models can shrink enough to use less power and work on end-user hardware, Apple might be able to dodge their missing spots on the bingo card.

    Alphabet

    Alphabet has five spots on the bingo card.

    Internal Hardware in TPUs. Infrastructure in GCP. Operating System in Gemini and Android. End-User Hardware in Pixel and Nest. Applications in Gmail, Workspace, YouTube, Maps, Search.

    Here’s what must be true for Alphabet to win.

    Alphabet has to solve for Power, like the others. They also have to prove Internal Hardware is more than just a blip. Gemini has to integrate deeply into Gmail, Workspace, Search, Maps, and Android faster than AI cannibalizes the ad business that funds everything else.

    But they have what it takes. They have the cash flow to solve Power. They have the user base for the layers closest to the customer. They have the data to train the best models.

    The risk is internal. Alphabet’s organizational physics make speed hard.

    Muskonomy

    Musk theoretically has all six spots on the bingo card.

    Power in Tesla Energy via solar panels, batteries, and mega-pack batteries. Internal Hardware via AI4 and AI5 chips for Teslas and eventually Optimus. It is doubling down in Internal Hardware via its upcoming Terrafab investment as they build their own chips. Infrastructure in Colossus. Operating System in Grok and FSD. End-User Hardware in Tesla cars, Optimus, Starlink satellites, and Starlink terminals. Applications in FSD, Optimus, and the Macrohard concept.

    The only entity in tech history covering all six layers.

    Here’s what must be true for Musk to win.

    The clock is ticking as Musk has to execute M&A under a favorable White House. Tesla and SpaceX are strongly rumored to merge. Musk wanting to put all of his companies together is a major driver of the SpaceX IPO. The three companies have to stay coordinated under one strategic umbrella, even though they have different cap tables and different boards.

    While Tesla is a $100 billion revenue company and SpaceX has been cash flow positive for a decade, none of it is throwing off the free cash flow of an Alphabet or Nvidia.

    And Musk has to survive himself. This is a massive keyman risk, given his penchant to say what he thinks regardless of controversy.

    The Ultimate Game of Thrones

    The AI era is the ultimate mega category game of thrones. Eight players. Six layers. Five principles from history and one open layer at the bottom of the stack. One throne.

    Here is what to do about it.

    The Career Decision

    Everyone is fighting for layers two through six. Almost no one in the United States is fighting for Power. That is where the wide-open category space is. Whoever builds the company that figures out how to deliver gigawatts of clean, fast, permittable power for AI data centers becomes the category kingmaker for every other player in the matrix.

    This applies to careers across the stack. Take the job at the company that has a credible plan to solve Power, whether that company is a state economic development office in Tennessee or Mississippi or Texas, a nuclear startup, a distributed energy network, a grid operator, or one of the bingo contenders investing in their own generation.

    The talent shortage in Power is enormous.

    The category potential is enormous.

    The competition is thin.

    Run away from anything that has one layer and a great story. Intel was the best-performing tech stock of 1995. Nvidia is the best-performing tech stock of 2024 and 2025. One of those statements aged badly. The other one is sitting on a pattern that says it will too.

    And remember. All of this analysis could be wrong. We’re providing the category lens to a discussion about the potential for who will be the biggest winners, in a business media landscape that is ignorant of how market categories work.

    The Creator Capitalist Move

    Learning how to invest (money, time, and intellectual capital) wisely in this Game of Thrones can extend your financial capital. And open the aperture of your thinking about the future.

    Solving problems across the value stack is worth its weight in gold.

    Look at the gaps in the matrix.

    Power is wide open.

    Infrastructure outside the hyperscalers is contested.

    Operating Systems belong to a handful of giants, but the categories that ride on top of those operating systems are wide open. The Creator Capitalist white space is in the categories Wall Street has not named yet.

    Build a category that requires AI but is not defined by it. Do not build an AI app. Build a category that an AI application is one expression of. Whoever languages a new category that lives in the matrix gaps gets to be the next Microsoft. The compounding from getting that right is bigger than anything else you will do with your career or your capital.

    The Speculative Capital Question

    If you are thoughtful about picking the next Category King, you can live like a king.

    If you are already invested in the S&P 500, you are already invested in AI Category Kings. The matrix proves the point. Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia, and the rest of the top names sit inside the S&P 500. They are most of the index. The S&P 500 is the most boring and reliable way to participate in the AI era. Buy. Hold. Forty years from now your $10,000 looks like Microsoft money. Probably not Microsoft money. But it looks like a winning lottery ticket someone left on your desk.

    Don’t forget.

    The S&P 500 has a median return of 13.1% over the last 50 years.

    If you want a little more juice, QQQ works. The Nasdaq 100 overweights the technology names that win eras. Same companies. Higher concentration. Same buy-and-hold thesis.

    19% is the median return of the QQQ since its 1999 launch.

    If you have speculative capital, use your category design brain to figure out the top three companies that will get to bingo. Look at the matrix. Find the companies with five or six layers, or a credible path to five or six layers. Make your call on which one will own Operating Systems plus the layers closest to the customer. Make your call on which weird M&A or JV moves first. Make your call on which solo player gets acquired and at what price. Make your call on whether Muskonomy stays coordinated under one strategic umbrella long enough to claim bingo.

    The Category Kings will be the players who fill out the most valuable rows.

    We’ll be back with another episode next week.

    Hey Ho, Let’s Go!

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead

    P.S. Do you like our Deep Dive Reports? Why or why not? Please let us know on LinkedIn and Substack notes.

    P.P.S. Do you like the name Deep Dive Reports? Should we call it PSJ DDR? Dance Dance Revolution?

  • The University of Michigan consumer sentiment index just came in at 44.8.

    The lowest reading in the history of the survey.

    April was already the worst on record. We beat it, then beat it again a month later.

    Near-zero unemployment. Record-high stock market. GDP growing. Entrepreneurship at an all-time high.

    And the consumer says this is the worst they can remember.

    Something doesn’t add up.

    Here’s what we covered in this episode:

    1. “Record low” is good news.

    The consumer isn’t behaving like the survey says.

    Nobody’s broke and curling up in a ball.

    They’re getting smart. Waiting longer to buy a car. Buying less packaged food. Trading stuff for experiences.

    Because the real issue is not the consumer ‘income statement’. The real issue is the consumer ‘balance sheet’ is bloated and designed for a nuclear family that is declining.

    * Single family homes that are too expensive and too much space for single people.

    * Big cars sold for families that aren’t being formed.

    * Groceries to cook in a DoorDash world.

    The old linear life script is dissolving. Get married, get the house, get the promotion, collect your Scooby Snacks of purpose along the way. When that script breaks, people go find meaning on their own terms.

    2. The synthetic customer, and the race to beige.

    Bain published “Synthetic Customers Earn Their Stripes.” AI-generated buyers, backtested against a real conjoint study, replicated about 90% of the outcomes. Which features drive choice. Which products to launch. Even early price sensitivity. Target and US Bank are already testing on synthetic audiences before anything ships.

    The technology is a huge unlock.

    Sadly most companies will use it the wrong way.

    Everybody builds one. Everybody aims it at the fat part of the bell curve. They optimize the average customer into the ground and call it insight.

    Synthetic customers trained on average consumers makes us all dumber. We have an opposite POV…check it out.

    3. The triple wasn’t good enough.

    The QQQ is up around 600% over ten years, roughly 21% a year. The S&P did 13 to 14%. To get rich, you just had to sit still.

    Gen Z isn’t sitting still. A third have played prediction markets, a third hold crypto, and a quarter of their portfolios sit in non-traditional assets. The punchline: roughly 69% of Polymarket accounts have lost money since 2022.

    The FOMO flipped. A triple every year for a decade, and a whole generation said, not good enough, I want the fences.

    Why swing that hard? 9/11, then 2008, then COVID, each one before they could legally drink. When every safety net detonates that early, “wait 40 years” sounds naive.

    What’s coming up on Pirate Street Journal

    Three weeks a month, we drop the video. Three topics, thirty minutes, one cowbell.

    Once a month, we publish a written deep dive, the kind of category analysis you cannot get anywhere else. That one is for paying subscribers only, monthly and founding.

    Next week, we’ll be publishing a deep dive.

    Two ways to climb aboard now:

    Monthly subscriber: $20/month. You’ve done dumber things with $20.

    Founding subscriber: $375/year. For about a dollar a day, you get every mini-book we’ve ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven of our Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners for category building.

    Subscribe today, get the next deep dive the day it drops, and start jamming with the bots.

    Recorded Friday, May 29. Every number above is as of that morning.

    Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

    Stay tuned for next week’s episode.

    Hey Ho, Let’s Go!

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe
  • Jennifer Hall Thornton has a PhD and a law degree. Her kids’ friends call her Dr. Doctor.

    She ran the everything-but-sales side of a digital company while raising two kids thirteen months apart, with an elderly mother nearby and a husband who lived on a plane. She was in the first Academy cohort, before anyone could tell her the timing was right. She told them the timing was right.

    She is also an Agentic Mom.

    Jennifer built a set of Claude skills that logs into her kids’ college Canvas, checks for anything new, downloads it, summarizes it, emails them, and then builds practice quizzes from the material. She built it for herself first. Then she shared it with her 18 and 19-year-olds.

    The agentic mom is agentifying her children.

    A mother who learned to delegate the donkey work of her own life to AI agents, looked at her kids drowning in logins and busywork, and decided they did not need to be good at the stuff she had to be good at to survive school.

    Pirate Jennifer did not raise her kids to be the best version of her. She is consulting them into the best version of them.

    Most parents try to clone themselves. They want the kid to do the thing they did, or the thing they wish they had done.

    Pirate Jennifer did the opposite, and she did it before Creator Capitalist gave her the words.

    She made her kids write thank-you notes. Three a year, starting in third grade, one for each year of school by graduation. Both kids wrote far more than required.

    Her son’s handwriting is unreadable, and his fourth-grade teacher still messages him two years out of high school because he wrote her a note. Her daughter emailed a high school neuroscience teacher as a college freshman because something he taught her showed up on a biology midterm her professor never covered. He wrote back inside the hour.

    That is relationship capital, built by a nine-year-old and ten-year-old, compounding for a decade.

    The dinner table was a debate where you had to keep up no matter your age. That is intellectual capital. Showing up late, turning in sloppy work, going to office hours because you are actually curious, all of it builds reputation capital.

    She taught the four capitals before her kids could spell them.

    Then Creator Capitalist came out, and Jennifer read it and thought, well, duh. She had been running the flywheel the whole time. She finally had the languaging for it.

    She told us that Creator Capitalist starts thirty years earlier than we thought.

    We wrote Creator Capitalist for adults. Mid-career or later, people who have already built some of the four capitals and are looking for what is next.

    Jennifer read it and started talking about how the frameworks were for her teenagers. In her velvet-hammer way, she told the donkeys to look again.

    Creator Capitalist is for kids, too.

    She is right. The four capitals are a flywheel, the same compounding engine that Christopher teaches young people about money. Except it starts spinning at 19 instead of 50.

    Tell a 19-year-old they have no intellectual capital, and they will believe you.

    Pirate Jennifer calls BS.

    Intellectual capital is not the diploma. It is how you approach a problem, and what your friends come to you for.

    Her son is a poli-sci major who taught himself to run every machine in the engineering lab, became the TA for a course only engineering students are allowed to teach, and got paid for it. He applied to twelve colleges and got into twelve, with no sports and no titles, because he was different and had a story to tell.

    That is a Creator Capitalist, two years out of high school.

    Her daughter Emily is studying biochemistry at UT Austin. She loads every note and slide into a Claude project and has Claude teach her, write quizzes, grade them, then build new quizzes targeting only what she is getting wrong.

    Before her last exam she asked Claude for the hardest questions it could write. When the professor found one Claude missed, she fed it back and told Claude it blew it.

    She is co-creating her education with AI, then taking it back into the traditional system and winning. Her friends say it is too complicated.

    They are going to regret it.

    Here’s how to navigate this conversation:

    * 06:01 – Parenting in the age of AI: Pirate Christopher opens by asking what it is actually like to raise an 18 and 19-year-old right now, and why Jennifer is a far better parent to young adults than she was to little kids.

    * 11:09 – The book whack: How Jennifer told Category Pirates that Creator Capitalist, the book they wrote for mid-career adults, is really a curriculum for teenagers, and why they did not see it coming.

    * 11:44 – The thank-you note machine: Three notes a year starting in third grade, the fourth-grade teacher who still writes back, and relationship capital built by a nine-year-old.

    * 14:34 – The poli-sci grease monkey: The son who got into all twelve colleges he applied to with no sports and no titles, then became the engineering lab TA he was technically not allowed to be.

    * 22:55 – The flywheel at 19: Why the four capitals are the same compounding engine Christopher teaches kids about money, except they start spinning thirty years earlier.

    * 33:07 – “I call BS”: Jennifer dismantles the myth that young people have no intellectual capital, and explains what intellectual capital actually is.

    * 34:44 – The agentic mom agentifies her kids: The Claude skill that logs into Canvas, summarizes new material, and builds quizzes, and the moment Jennifer realized she should hand it to her children.

    * 39:26 – AI in the classroom: Why banning AI is the wrong move, what counts as cheating versus co-creating, and the World Book Encyclopedia parallel.

    * 42:01 – Teaching Claude to teach you: Emily’s biochemistry workflow, the hardest-quiz challenge, and the Feynman technique applied to an AI.

    * 46:33 – Build a bot, sell it to your friends: Eddie on why a college kid should build an O-chem TA bot, charge classmates fifty bucks, and learn the material better in the process.

    * 53:15 – The Dickens exercise: If 18-year-old Jennifer were starting today, loving to learn and unafraid to fail, what would she build.

    * 01:04:19 – Start with relationship capital: Why young people should start the flywheel with the capital they already have, and how to find the intellectual capital you do not know you own.

    We were not wrong about Creator Capitalist. Jennifer just showed us it starts earlier than we thought.

    The framework does not care how old you are. It cares whether you get the flywheel spinning before everyone else does.

    Jennifer did it intuitively, over fifteen years, without the words. She raised two Creator Capitalists, then spent this conversation reverse-engineering how she pulled it off.

    Imagine what that compounding looks like for a kid who has the framework AND the next twenty years ahead of them, instead of behind them.

    Whether you are the parent or the kid, the work starts the same way.

    Get the agents running. Get the flywheel spinning. Stop doing the donkey work a machine can do, and spend the time you save building the four capitals nobody can take from you.

    Arrrrrr,

    Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead

    P.S. The fastest way to start agentifying your own life (or your kid’s).

    Pirate Jennifer built her agents alone, a step or two ahead of everyone around her. You do not have to.

    Become a Founding Subscriber and you get access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and the new Pirate Christopher Bot, the fastest way we know to put the four capitals to work in your life, your career, and your kids’ education, without waiting for permission from a school that still thinks AI is cheating.

    → [Become a Founding Subscriber to get access here.]



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe
  • Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for compute.

    Every month through May of 2029.

    Roughly $45 billion total.

    That single contract is bigger than SpaceX’s entire annual revenue today.

    Software is paying hardware. Hardware is paying energy. Energy is paying space.

    Is it three card monte?

    Or is the pie getting massively bigger?

    This should be on every business news front page this week. Instead, the headlines are about Sam Altman’s house getting attacked, Eric Schmidt getting booed off a stage, and OpenAI quietly leaking that it might file for an IPO too.

    Here’s what we covered in this episode:

    1. AI gets an F in marketing.

    360,000 Americans are in Facebook groups organized against data centers. AI is polling less popular than ICE, less popular than Trump, less popular than politicians.

    The technology being protested is curing diseases and driving much of US GDP growth.

    So why are so many angry at AI?

    Pirate Eddie has a theory, and it does not involve AI at all.

    Marriage rates. Birth rates. Teenage drinking. Labor force participation among young men.

    All down.

    Life stages and zest for life as we know was crumbling before AI.

    2. SpaceX is going public. The TAM is the size of the American economy.

    The S-1 is pitching a $28.5 trillion total addressable market.

    U.S. GDP is $32 trillion. SpaceX is asking public markets to fund a business roughly the size of the entire American economy, run by a CEO whose vesting schedule requires interplanetary colonization.

    Imagine being on the dock before the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria set sail and you were offered a chance to invest in the new world.

    What was the ROI on America?

    What if you had a chance to invest in Space?

    But the history of IPOs is that retail investors get hurt.

    The history of Elon Musk is that betting against him is also expensive.

    The Pirates how category designers think about an IPO this size without losing your mind or your savings.

    3. The category queen vs. the category queen.

    The fastest-growing company in the history of business is not OpenAI.

    It is Anthropic.

    Anthropic was founded by people who left OpenAI. They are now in talks at $900 billion. Higher valuation. Higher growth. First profitable quarter ever at $11 billion in revenue.

    Andrej Karpathy, founding member of OpenAI and the man who coined vibe coding, just joined Anthropic. Ross Nordeen of xAI joined Anthropic earlier this month. The defectors are recruiting the defectors.

    Category Design 101 says the queen takes 76% of the economics. Everyone else shares 13%. So which one is the queen?

    Pirate Christopher has a frame on the video that recasts the entire question. He thinks this is not OpenAI versus Anthropic at all.

    This is the (new) Pirate Street Journal.

    Every Wednesday, we pick three headlines worth paying attention to and break down the category underneath.

    Three Wednesdays a month, the video is free (for now). Once a month, we drop a written deep dive for paid subscribers, the kind of category analysis you cannot get anywhere else.

    Two ways to climb aboard:

    * Monthly subscriber: $20/month. You’ve done dumber things with $20.

    * Founding subscriber: $375/year. For about a dollar a day, you get every mini-book we’ve ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven of our Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners for category building.

    To never miss a deep dive, become a subscriber today.

    What’s coming up on Pirate Street Journal

    A few of the threads from this week’s episode are running headlong into a much bigger story, which is the IPO season that is about to define the next decade of public markets.

    On June 10th, two days before SpaceX is estimated to start trading, we are publishing the next PSJ written deep dive. We will be working through how a category designer thinks about investing in an IPO of this scale, what the category math says about SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic going public in the same window, and we don’t know what the headlines will do between now and then, so there will be more.

    Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have Series 63, Series 7, Series 6 7, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

    Stay tuned for next week’s episode!

    Hey Ho, Let’s Go!

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead

    P.S. - Founding subscribers get every mini-book we have ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners for category building for about a dollar a day. You have done dumber things with a dollar a day.

    👉 Become a founding subscriber.



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe
  • This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.categorypirates.news

    Last week, we recorded the very first episode of the Pirate Street Journal.

    The Pirate Street Journal is for leaders with a different mind.

    A different take on business news.

    Through the category lens.

    Our mini-books are timeless. PSJs are timely.

    Our mini-books are long stories longer. PSJs have 30-minute seat belts.

    Our mini-books are thinker’s high. PSJs try to help you think before you act.

    But, but, but, but…

    Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have Series 63, Series 7, Series 6 7, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).

    Think of this like professional wrestling. It’s entertainment.

    Don’t be so smart, you’re stupid and suplex your safety net savings.

    Hey Ho, Let’s Go!

    PSJ is the new weekly thing. The video’s free. The deep-dive written analysis is paywalled. Watching makes you informed. Reading makes you different.

    Two ways to climb aboard:

    * Monthly subscriber: $20/month. You’ve done dumber things with $20.

    * Founding subscriber: $375/year. For about a dollar a day, you get every mini-book we’ve ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven of our Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners for category building.

    To read this week’s deep dive, become a subscriber today.

    1. Why is Salesforce down? Why is Micron up?

    The Mag 7 reported earnings, and they were great overall.

    But here’s some weird data.

    Salesforce (one of the Category Kings of SaaS) lost about a third of its market capitalization in the last 12 months, despite strong revenue and operating income. Forward P/E down 28% in twelve months. Benioff just announced a $50 billion stock buyback, one of the largest in corporate history.

    Micron (memory for AI) saw over a 6x increase in its stock price in the last 12 months, also with incredible revenue and operating income. Forward P/E sat at roughly 3x a year ago. Today it is over 7x. The stock more than tripled in that window, but earnings grew faster than the multiple did.

    In the columns, we have the Mag 7, plus SpaceX, which is soon to go public, as well as Micron and Salesforce.

    The rows are what matter.

    * Top row, Potential investors. Forward P/E above roughly 27, which is about +5 above the S&P 500 average PE multiple.

    * Middle row, market-average band. Forward P/E is roughly 17 to 27. The S&P 500 lives here at around 22.

    * Bottom row, Performance investors. Forward P/E below roughly 17, which is about -5 below the S&P 500 average PE multiple.

    The actual PEs are merely a placeholder, as there’s nothing magic about plus or minus 5 from the S&P 500 average.

    We want to discuss the fact that there are two types of investors.

    Performance investors. They invest in companies because of their current and near-term performance. Their performance is predictable, reliable, and steady. Sometimes slow, but never surprising. These are usually Category Kings today.

    These companies are valued at lower multiples, whether it is price to earnings, enterprise value to EBITDA, or price to sales.

    And there are Potential investors.

    They invest in companies regardless of their performance now or in the near term, but in their long-term future potential. Usually, these are companies that can become future Category Kings that no one else really sees.

    These companies are valued at much higher multiples, usually because earnings or sales are emerging and expected to accelerate.

    When Potential investors start buying a stock, they lift the forward PE multiple as they are willing to pay a premium for potential. They think the category size of prize is growing and has huge upside.

    They think the category is on the good side of the S-curve. All boats rise with the tide.

    When Potential investors sell a stock to Performance investors, it depresses the forward PE multiple because they aren’t willing to pay a premium for potential. They think the category size of prize is static and has limited upside.

    2. Are you on the good or bad side of the s-curve

    Performance vs. Potential investors are fundamentally debating one fundamental question.

    Is the category and company on the good or bad side of the S-curve?

    You don’t have to be right on the precise number and date. It’s not like picking black 17 on the roulette table.

    It’s just picking black or white. Using data and Category Design. And thinking about thinking.

    You don’t have to predict timing. You don’t have to predict a number. You should, but don’t have to, do fancy analysis.

    Left or right of the S-curve is the question.

    If you are right, and everyone agrees with you, it can be a profitable bet.

    If you are right, and everyone disagrees with you, you can create generational wealth.

    But you have to be comfortable with the loneliness, name-calling and mockery that comes with rejecting the premise.

    When Pirate Eddie wrote in HBR that Netflix’s 80% stock drop in 2011 was Wall Street being dumb, Wall Street called him dumb. When Pirate Eddie shared on CNBC about Tesla’s superconsumer being a new superconsumer who valued both functional and fun cars, Wall Street called him dumb again.

    When Pirate Eddie wrote in HBR that General Mills should sell its cereal business, he made a lot of former clients/friends at General Mills angry. But the data at the time was undeniable. 12 years of category decline. And unless you believed carbs and sugar were ever coming back into vogue, General Mills’ cereal business would never be more valuable than it is today. And they should sell it.

    General Mills’ stock is down 38%, while Kellanova (old Kelloggs with cereal spun out) is up +4% since being acquired by Mars. General Mills’ PE ratio is 8x, and Kellanova’s PE is 23x.

    Sometimes being right doesn’t feel great at first.

    But the cost of being legendary is the willingness to be different.

    3. Re-rating is a result of Category Design

    Re-rating is when Wall Street decides a company’s multiple should be higher or lower.

    Revenue, gross margins, and cash flow don’t change. The value of those economics does.

    Everything we value, we’ve been taught to value.

    Re-ratings are simply a redefinition of the Category.

    Did you know Domino’s Pizza was the 2nd best performing stock from 2010 through the end of 2019?

    Why? It transformed from a pizza delivery company to a tech company that happens to deliver pizzas. They invested heavily in their ‘pizza tracker’, apps, and frictionless mobile apps.

    It’s Category Design 101.

    And if you invested $1,000 into Domino’s at the beginning of 2010, you’d have $40,000 in 10 years.

    The best part is that re-ratings can happen slowly. You could have jumped on the Domino’s train any of the first 9 years of its run and done well.

    Wall Street is often blind to Category Design.

    Category Design is your unfair advantage.

    4. The SaaSpocalypse is overstated

    The financial press has decided this is the death of software. Salesforce down $135 billion. ServiceNow down $100 billion. Workday down $50 billion. Hundreds of billions of dollars in enterprise software market cap gone in a year.

    It is the wrong frame. Software is not dying.

    On May 15, Marc Benioff sat down with the All-In Podcast and said,

    “… the software market’s rerated. It happens every now and then. There are cycles. You know, I’ve been doing Salesforce for 27 years, enterprise software for 40. And the market’s rerated.”

    — Marc Benioff

    The earnings are fine, but the multiples got cut.

    Salesforce guided to do $46 billion in revenue and $16 billion in cash flow this year. Performance is not the problem.

    Potential is.

    The market used to price these companies as Potential plays. Software is eating the world, every business needs a CRM SaaS, the seat count never stops growing. That story matured. The category got knowable. The TAM became visible. So the market quietly moved these names down a row. From Potential. To Neutral. Some all the way to Performance.

    Benioff is responding to this exactly the way a category designer should. He is doing three things in parallel. Buying back stock at compressed multiples because he believes the business is worth more than the market pays for it. Acquiring companies (Informatica), while, in his words, “everything’s a little cheaper.” And, most importantly, repositioning Salesforce out of the SaaS category entirely. AgentForce. Slack as the context engine. Humans, agents, and headless platforms interoperating.

    If that repositioning works, Salesforce gets re-rated up again under a new category label. Same business. Different multiple. Different shareholders. That is the move.

    4. AI hardware is more valuable than AI software

    The content in this section is 100% created by AJ on X @alojoh.

    He’s a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, who built his own pirate ship that is a combination of investment research and trading advice with a rare alignment of incentives with his subscribers.

    The goal of equity research is to drive trading revenue for investment banking, not necessarily at the benefit of the reader of the research. There is a strong motivation to put out positive news and analysis for investment banking clients and even stronger reluctance to say anything negative about those same clients. It is not 100% trustworthy.

    The incentives for most traders/investors is to grow their own returns, even at the expense of subscribers/readers. They may tell you to buy a stock, but only after they bought it, and at times, they sell as they tell you to buy. Or their incentive is to grow their assets under management and charge you 2% of assets and 20% of carry for as long as possible.

    AJ is the odd combination of a top-tier investment researcher who uses it to trade for his own account. His basic subscription on X is only $7/month, but his hardcore channel is $500/month, which Pirate Eddie subscribes to and has already generated more than a 20x ROI on the cost of the annual hardcore subscription. Sign up if you like buried treasure.

    AJ is a pirate who routinely rejects the premise. This section is a synthesis of his insights and work and is shared with his permission.

    One of the most provocative quotes from AJ is, “Hardware is the endgame” for AI.

    For decades, software economics have always trumped hardware economics.

    In the age of AI, it’s no longer always true.

    Eighteen months ago, the DRAM memory industry was effectively left for dead. Post-COVID demand had snapped back. Customers had massively over-ordered during the shortages. The industry was working through an enormous inventory overhang. Prices collapsed. The major players took huge losses. Standard semiconductor cycle. Standard low-multiple memory business.

    Then the AI buildout happened underneath them. In two or three months, the entire setup will be inverted. Utilization went from roughly 20% to over 100%. Hyperscalers moved into “whatever it takes” pricing mode on memory. Long-term supply agreements got locked in across the three major players (Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix) who together produce roughly 95% of global DRAM.

    Memory used to be a commodity. Now it is AI infrastructure.

    The cleanest way to show you why is to put Micron next to the most darling AI software stock on the public markets right now. Palantir.

    * Revenue growth (year over year). Micron +196%. Palantir +85%.

    * Operating margin. Micron 67.6% (GAAP). Palantir 60% adjusted, 46% GAAP. Yes, you read that right. The memory chip company has a higher operating margin than the AI software company.

    * Rule of 40 (revenue growth percent plus operating margin percent). This is an awesome rule of thumb. If you want to know if a business is healthy or not, just take their revenue growth percent and add it up with their operating margin percent. If both are greater than 40%, you have a great business. Per Palantir’s own Q1 2026 investor deck, Micron sits at 265%. Palantir sits at 145%. Palantir is literally publishing slides that show Micron crushing them on the metric they brag about.

    * Forward P/E. Micron roughly 7x. Palantir roughly 95x. Palantir trades at a multiple thirteen times higher than Micron, while growing slower, earning lower margins, and scoring lower on its own framework of choice.

    This AI hardware company has the better business by every operating measure. The software company has the better multiple by every valuation measure. That is what a re-rating up looks like when it is not yet complete on one side and what a Potential premium looks like when it might be ahead of itself on the other.

    This does not mean Palantir is doomed. It means the gap between the two multiples is going to close.

    5. The Mag-7 will be the Mag-10. Abundance will follow

    We are not telling you software is over.

    Anthropic and OpenAI will do extraordinarily well. Pirate Christopher made the call on the pod. These are the largest, fastest-growing companies ever created, sitting in private markets at scale that exceeds most of the Mag-7. They are the leadership of the next decade of AI software. When they go public, the math changes for everyone.

    But the SaaSpocalypse is more about the rise of AI hardware and hardware in general. This is why Micron is exploding. And why SpaceX is about to launch the largest IPO in history.

    The Mag-7 framing is already obsolete. Three names belong in the group that are not in it yet, and the math suggests all three of them get added inside the next twelve months.

    * OpenAI. Created the fastest-growing category in startup history. Reported to be exploring an IPO window.

    * Anthropic. Became the fastest-growing company in history. Already operating at a scale that exceeds most public Mag-7 members on the metric that matters most, category formation speed.

    * SpaceX. IPOing in June. Already cash-flow positive thanks to the Colossus lease deal with Anthropic, and reportedly being talked about at $1.75 to $2 trillion.

    And it does not stop at ten.

    Stripe could be next. The private IPOs of the last decade are starting to unwind. Every name that has been trapped in private markets at Potential multiples is about to become available to public investors who have been starved for Potential exposure.

    One more thing the matrix hints at.

    There is still no energy company in the Mag-anything bucket. Tesla is sometimes pitched as the answer because of its solar and battery business. The actual AI energy story is coming.

    There is a real chance we are entering one of the largest equity bull markets in modern history, and most professionals are still positioned for a recession that did not happen.

    Global GDP in 1926 was about $3 trillion. Today it is roughly $126 trillion. That is a ~50x expansion of human-created value in 100 years.

    The mechanism was not “stocks went up.” The mechanism was that humans kept designing new categories that created value from nothing. Refrigeration. Electrification. The semiconductor. The internet. Each of those was, in its moment, an abundance boom. Each one looked like a bubble in the middle innings. Each one was actually a re-rating of the entire economy onto a new S-curve.

    If AI is the next one, the abundance argument runs like this:

    * The S&P 500 goes up because the Mag-10 carries it. The top names are already a huge share of index weight. When they re-rate up, the index does too, almost mechanically. This is already happening.

    * The Nasdaq goes up more, because both the AI hardware layer and the AI software layer live inside it. Hardware re-rates up. Software re-sorts. The up names are bigger than the down names. Net positive.

    * Productivity finally shows up in the data. If even 30% of the AI productivity case is real, US GDP growth surprises to the upside for years. That is the macro backdrop bulls have been waiting for since the 1990s.

    * The Potential investor pool expands as more capital chases the abundance narrative. More Potential capital, chasing the same names, pushes multiples higher. The re-rating accelerates.

    If we are right about the abundance boom, the index investor does well. The Performance investor does fine. The Potential investor does great.

    But the category designer wins differently. The category designer wins by spotting re-ratings, in both directions, before the analyst class can model them.

    All of this boils down to two questions.

    * Is the category on the good or bad side of the s-curve?

    * Is the risk of staying the same greater than the risk of changing?

    If you can answer those questions honestly about your business, your career, your portfolio, your category, you could create a massive outcome and avoid sailing into rocky waters.

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead

  • “Bet on yourself sooner” is the most popular piece of career advice on the internet.

    It’s also the most useless.

    Nobody who says it tells you what to bet on. So most people hear it and do the obvious thing. They bet harder on the most visible capital they already have. They chase a bigger title. A bigger paycheck. A bigger brand name on the resume. They mistake “betting on yourself” for “doubling down on what other people already validate.”

    Then they wonder why nothing compounds.

    Linda Deeken did the opposite for twenty years.

    And it’s the reason she can run her own thing now with more leverage than most of the partners who once outranked her. Five kids. Two sets of twins. A daughter with Down syndrome who also beat cancer. A husband with his own career. A solo consulting practice (Deeken Strategies) that out-earns most W-2 partners. A returning client roster that calls her because she “makes them better.”

    She built all of that by quietly betting on the two capitals nobody could see.

    Reputation and financial capital are visible.

    That’s why most people chase them. You can see the diploma. You can count the comp. You can ride them into the next room and let the room react.

    Relationship capital and intellectual capital compound silently. There is no certificate for the fifteenth time a client said “you make me better.” Nobody throws you a parade for refining your point of view in the margins of someone else’s slide deck. The work is real, the leverage is real, and the compounding is real. None of it is legible to the people watching.

    Linda spent twenty years building the two capitals nobody could see her building. By the time she launched Deeken Strategies, the math was lopsided in her favor. The reputation and the financial returns came roaring in because the other two had been compounding the whole time.

    That is the actual lesson. Bet on the right capital sooner.

    Four moves that looked like sidesteps and were actually compounding.

    Linda turned down Stanford for UW Madison at 17. Her father was older, her mother had her at 43, and her family needed her closer. She traded the diploma everyone in her future networking room would have recognized for time with people who would not be around forever. Relationship capital up. Reputation capital sacrificed.

    She left Mercer for The Cambridge Group. Mercer had the bigger brand. Cambridge had the female partners, the better operating model, and the path that would actually let her become both a serious consultant and a mother. Reputation down. Relationship and intellectual capital up.

    She went to Miller for a year, had her first set of twins, then came back to Cambridge as a CMO, not a partner. Title down. Writing muscle up. The CMO role forced her to develop her own point of view instead of executing other people’s frameworks. That’s the season most consultants never get. It’s also the season that built the intellectual capital she now monetizes on her own.

    She launched Deeken Strategies before she had the permission slip she wanted. By her own admission, that was the bet she wishes she had made sooner. She could only make it because the first three bets had already loaded the dice.

    Her superpower is the outcome other people get when they work with her.

    The way Category Pirates defines a superpower is different from how most people do it. Most people would say a superpower is what you’re good at. We say a superpower is the outcome you produce for others that you are best known for.

    Linda’s clients describe her in three words: smart, humble, oriented to your outcomes.

    That combination is rare on its own. It’s rarer still in someone running a household of seven. And it’s the languaging she earned by writing, by refining her POV through the CMO season, and by treating every client engagement like a long-term relationship instead of a short-term transaction.

    She runs her household the same way she runs her client work. She has a SWOT analysis for each of her five kids. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. She is not parenting her kids to become the best version of her. She is consulting them into the best version of them.

    This is what integration actually looks like. The work feeds the parenting, the parenting feeds the work, and both halves get sharper because the same operating system is running underneath both.

    Here’s how to navigate this conversation:

    * 05:17 – Turning down Stanford at 17: The first time Linda chose relationship capital over reputation capital, and why she never built her identity around the diploma she didn’t get.

    * 12:23 – Chemical engineering as a consulting prep school: Why studying the hardest thing makes the easier things easier, and why “learning the lingo” is the first move in building intellectual capital.

    * 18:55 – Leaving Mercer for Cambridge: Trading the bigger brand for the operating model that would actually let her become both a serious consultant and a mother.

    * 25:12 – The Miller detour: One year in corporate, a set of twins, a move to Milwaukee, and what she learned about herself in a job she didn’t love.

    * 26:35 – The CMO role she designed: How Linda built a returning role at Cambridge that gave her flexibility AND forced her to develop a POV instead of executing other people’s frameworks.

    * 29:08 – “Put me in coach”: The moment the CMO role stopped being enough and Linda launched Deeken Strategies.

    * 45:53 – Smart, humble, oriented to your outcomes: The three-part combination that became Linda’s superpower and the languaging her clients use to refer her.

    * 49:38 – Children as consulting projects: The SWOT-per-kid framework, why she rejects the “I want my kid to do what I never did” trap, and what Sarah is teaching the whole family.

    * 1:04:19 – Own your own future, fearlessly: Linda’s closing convict to every woman watching from the sidelines.

    What Linda is doing is not a one-off.

    It’s a pattern.

    The same pattern Creator Capitalist documents end-to-end. Bet on relationship and intellectual capital first. Develop your point of view. Find the work that builds your four capitals at the same time. And then, when you can’t bear NOT to bet on yourself any longer, bet.

    She did it intuitively, over twenty years, without the framework. Imagine what that compounding looks like when you have the framework AND the twenty years ahead of you instead of behind you.

    Connect with Linda:

    * Follow her on LinkedIn here

    Arrrrrr,

    Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead

    P.S. The fastest way to figure out which capital you’re under-betting on.

    Linda did this work over twenty years, mostly alone, by writing in the margins and pressure-testing her own thinking against clients who became friends. You don’t have to.

    Become a Founding Subscriber, and you’ll get access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and the new Pirate Christopher Bot. They will challenge your premise, sharpen your POV, and stop you from doing what most people do when they say they’re betting on themselves, which is just betting harder on the capital they already have plenty of.

    → Become a Founding Subscriber to get access here.



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe
  • We have an exciting update for you.

    A year ago this week, we launched the Pirate Eddie Bot. At the time, it was a librarian. You’d ask it a question, it would point you back to a mini-book, you’d go do your own thinking.

    A year later, it’s a thinking partner. Pirates jam with it at 2 AM and walk away with categories they had been sitting on for years. They use it to design Lightning Strikes that produce six-figure outcomes. They send real Eddie text messages that say things like “the Pirate Eddie Bot is effing awesome.” (More on that in a minute.)

    We’ve shipped a lot this past year, and we’re shipping even more today.

    Here’s what’s launching today for Founding members.

    Pirate Eddie Bot 2.0 ships today. This is our first major version upgrade since the bot launched a year ago. Going forward, the Pirate Eddie Bot will ship on a release cadence, the same way Anthropic ships Sonnet and OpenAI ships GPT. A new version will be released every six months.

    Version 2.0 is so much better than 1.0 that it surprises even us. Every month, Founding members produce outcomes with it that we didn’t think a bot could produce.

    Pirate Christopher Bot 1.0. Live for the first time, exclusively inside Founding. He’s the hammer to Eddie’s velvet. Where Eddie gives the direct answer, Christopher tells a story and reframes the question. Founding subscribers can access the Pirate Christopher Bot with the same password used for the Pirate Eddie Bot.

    Of course, the Pirate Christopher bot won’t say “effing.”

    Together, the two bots do something neither does alone. Ask the Pirate Eddie Bot. Paste the answer into the Pirate Christopher Bot. Watch the Pirate Christopher Bot push back. Run that back through the Pirate Eddie Bot.

    It’s the closest thing to being in an Academy workshop without being in the room.

    And here's everything else we shipped this past year. Already inside the Founding subscription.

    Three new books shipped this year. Lightning Strike Marketing, Thinker’s High, and Creator Capitalist (available to Founding Members today).

    24 new audiobooks.

    24 new mini-books + access to the library of 250+ mini-books.

    48 Wednesday Founder posts.

    With that said, three things are changing this week.

    1. The annual plan as you know it is ending today. Going forward, the annual tier and Founding are the same thing. Same benefits, access, and bundle. You will still see an annual option when you go to subscribe (Substack doesn’t let us remove it), but it is now functionally identical to Founding.

    2. Founding pricing is moving Sunday May 17th at midnight. These are the final few days to lock in $350 forever. If you upgrade by Sunday, you get grandfathered in at $350 for life, as long as you keep renewing. That includes everything we just shipped today, this year, and next year. Starting Sunday at midnight PST, Founding moves to $375. Permanently. You can expect to see a modest price increase for new subscribers every year.

    3. Both bots are now exclusively inside Founding. The Pirate Eddie Bot 2.0 and the Pirate Christopher Bot 1.0 live inside the Founding tier. That is the only place to access them.

    What this means for you.

    If you’re already a Founding member at $350: You are locked in at $350 forever, as long as you keep renewing. Your Pirate Eddie Bot password is the same for the Pirate Christopher Bot. You can access both bots here.

    If you’re on the $200 annual plan: Many of you have been with us for years. As a thank you for your loyalty, we want to be radically generous. Starting today, you get the full Founding bundle at your same $200 price. Forever, as long as you keep renewing. Both bots. Every audiobook. Every mini-book. Every founder’s deck. You’ll receive your unique password for the bots in your inbox today.

    If you’ve been on the fence: Now’s the time. After Sunday, the only way in is $20 a month for the library, or $375 for the Founding bundle.

    The price is moving from $350 to $375 because the bundle is materially bigger than it was last year. Last year, you got one bot. Now you get two. Last year, there were 4 books; now there are 7.

    👉 Lock in $350 Founding before Sunday May 17th at midnight here→

    The best thing we’ve ever built.

    In two careers, dozens of best-selling books, and several top 1% podcasts, we have never built anything that produces outcomes at this ratio.

    For about a dollar a day, you get an AI thinking partner trained on every framework we have ever published. The same questions we ask people who pay $10,000 to be inside the Category Design Academy. Plus a second bot to push back on the first one. Available at 2 AM. Never runs out of words. Gets smarter every six months at no additional cost.

    We hear it from Founding members every week. They opened the bot for one thing and walked out with the language for something they had been chasing for years. They closed deals they thought were dead. They named a category they had been circling for a decade.

    It is the most leverage we have ever put inside a subscription. And it is the highest-leverage thing the people inside the Founding tier are using right now.

    Don’t take our word for it.

    Kyle Okimoto has built his career on being rational. Cambridge Group strategy consultant. Head of strategy for Merrill Lynch’s wealth management business. Head of marketing at E*Trade. He’s launching a new category right now that helps families in Hawaii consolidate ownership of inherited commercial real estate.

    He has access to every AI on the planet. He picked the Pirate Eddie Bot.

    When Eddie asked him why, here’s what he said:

    “I’ve known you for decades. I know your family. I know we have the same value system. I know your intellectual capital. I trust the rigor of your IC. I trust the integrity of your IC.”

    A man who built his career on rational decisions made an emotional one. Around trust.

    That’s what you get when you join as a Founding member.

    One more thing. A group offer for teams.

    For the first time, we’re opening a 10+ seat Founding bundle at $300 per seat. If you’re a CMO, a founder, or a team leader who wants ten people trained in category design with full bot access, you can register your team here.

    Sunday is the line.

    A year ago this week, we shipped the Pirate Eddie Bot 1.0. Today, 2.0. Six months from now, 3.0. A year from now, 4.0.

    We’ll keep shipping. The price will reflect the work.

    But the OG $350 only lives until Sunday May 17th at midnight. After that, it’s $20 a month for the library or $375 for Founding.

    If you’ve been on the fence for a while, this is the week.

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe
  • We did something different this episode.

    Pirate Eddie wasn’t here. Pirate Christopher wasn’t here. Pirate Bri sat down with five of the most formidable Creator Capitalist moms in our pirate ship and let them run the conversation.

    Pirate Alexis Skigen Rago. Built her business eight years ago after Corporate America made her ask permission to volunteer in her own kid’s classroom. Mom of two boys, ages 14 and 18.

    Pirate Melissa Andrews. Building and scaling across continents while her 19-year-old (autistic, brilliant) and her 17-year-old (off at boarding school by choice) keep her honest. 4 a.m. starts and 1 a.m. calls to five continents.

    Pirate Jennifer Hall Thornton. Ran the everything-but-sales side of a digital company while raising two kids 13 months apart, an elderly mother nearby, and a husband on a plane. Now relaunching with the four capitals as her map.

    Pirate Mary Kathryn Johnson. Started her first business in 2003 with an 18-month-old and a 4-year-old, a Bob the Builder keyboard cover, and a Windows 98 machine. First in her family to go to college. Mom of two grown sons, 24 and 27.

    Pirate Lydia Flocchini. Lawyer turned legal-tech category designer. Mom of two (one graduating college, one graduating high school in the same season).

    Five women. Three Academy cohorts. One conversation that should be required listening for every mom (and every man married to one) in our orbit.

    Here’s the thesis they landed on, and we couldn’t have said it better ourselves:

    The most undervalued asset on the planet is the work moms have been doing for free.

    The volunteer hours. The household OS. The school logistics. The relationship capital built on the sidelines of a soccer game. The reputation capital compounding inside a PTA that’s secretly a Fortune 500 in disguise.

    Society has spent a hundred years telling moms that work doesn’t count. Five Creator Capitalists in this episode just called b******t on that, on the record.

    Mothering and Creator Capitalism run on the same playbook.

    If you’ve read Creator Capitalist, you already know the four capitals. What you haven’t seen is what happens when five moms apply that lens to the work they were never paid for, the kids they’re raising into a world that hasn’t been invented yet, and the businesses they’ve built (or are about to).

    Each of them has a different on-ramp into the same conversation.

    One is using AI as a translation layer between her neurotypical brain and her neurodivergent kid’s.

    Another is watching her son weaponize Claude inside an upper-division engineering class he isn’t technically qualified to take.

    A third is helping her daughter category design a Shopify store before she’s even old enough to vote.

    We’re not going to spoil the answers here. They’re better when you hear them tell it.

    What we will tell you is this:

    A category nobody’s named yet came up in the middle of the conversation. A new framework for how to think about the people you build with. A moment where one of our Pirates basically pitched an entire business live on tape without realizing it.

    And by the end, the five of them had quietly written a starter kit for any woman watching from the sidelines who’s been told her work doesn’t count.

    A 3-step starter kit for any mom watching from the sidelines.

    If you only walk away from this episode with one thing, walk away with this:

    Make up a company name. Even if you never use it. Then write your last 10 years of “non-paid” work as if you were the CEO of that company. The volunteer board seat. The household operations. The school logistics. The unpaid emotional and logistical labor. You’ll be staring at a resume that would get hired in any sane economy.

    Build a personal board of directors. Three to seven people. Not your spouse. Not your best friend. People who will give you the unvarnished truth, point you at opportunities, and amplify the value you can’t yet see in yourself.

    Pick a structure. A framework that helps you think instead of letting you spin. Creator Capitalist is one option (we’re biased). The Academy is another. Pick the one that forces you to do the work and stick with it long enough for it to click.

    The why behind each step is in the conversation, and it’s a lot more interesting hearing five women who’ve actually run the play talk it through than reading us summarize it.

    Here’s how to navigate this conversation:

    02:30 – The empty nest math: What boarding school, college roommates, and “I dream of being an empty nester” actually reveal about the seasons of a Creator Capitalist’s life.

    08:30 – Digital natives vs. analog natives: Why the way our kids build relationships looks nothing like ours did, and why that’s a feature, not a bug.

    12:30 – Hire your kid: The case for bringing your kids inside the business early, what role to give them, and the moment Mary Kathryn realized her teenager could outproduce most adults.

    18:30 – The IBM dad and the entrepreneur mom: Why the kids of Creator Capitalists are absorbing a completely different operating system than the one we grew up with.

    24:30 – The oxygen mask: Why moms are running on fumes by 40, who’s actually paying for it, and the line in the sand the women in this conversation are finally drawing.

    33:30 – AI as the mom translation layer: Two stories about neurodivergent kids and the AI use case nobody is writing about yet. Worth the price of admission alone.

    42:00 – The data drop: What’s happening to women’s access to capital right now, why it’s going the wrong direction, and what these five are doing about it.

    45:30 – The new business hiding in plain sight: Pirate Jennifer names a category live on the recording. We won’t spoil it. You’ll know it when you hear it.

    50:30 – The value of your value: The line of the episode, courtesy of Pirate Mary Kathryn. If you only press play for one moment, make it this one.

    1:00:00 – Walking the starter kit: Five Creator Capitalists working through why each move matters, what they wish they’d known earlier, and the one piece of the kit each of them resisted the longest.

    To connect with our Creator Capitalist Moms:

    Follow Pirate Lydia Flocchini on LinkedIn

    Follow Pirate Alexis Skigen Rago on LinkedIn

    Follow Pirate Melissa Andrews on LinkedIn

    Follow Pirate Jennifer Hall Thornton on LinkedIn

    Follow Pirate Mary Kathryn Johnson on LinkedIn

    Arrrrrr,

    Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead

    P.S. — Mother’s Day is coming up.

    If you want to gift the mom in your life something genuinely valuable, or if you are the mom and you’re looking to start creating value of your own, the best place to start is with the Pirate Eddie Bot.

    It’s the fastest way we know to put the four capitals to work in your life, your career, and your relationships, without waiting for permission from anyone.

    → Become a Founding Subscriber to get access to the Pirate Eddie Bot here.



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe
  • This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe

    Nearly half of all economic value is created by the people everyone else feels sorry for.

    We ran the numbers. Two cells on the entire demand matrix account for 78% of all economic value created across hundreds of careers. Not twelve cells. Two.

    The biggest one? Lifequakes crossed with turnarounds. 47%.

    Translation: nearly half the wealth, reputation, and category-defining work in the world comes from people in the middle of the thing everyone spends their life running from.

    The conventional career advice is to avoid disruption, minimize risk, and find the safest landing spot. The data says that advice is how you stay average. The quake isn’t the detour from your category. It is your category.

    This audiobook is the playbook. Four P’s. Six AI prompts. Three military stories that will rearrange how you think about your own turmoil.

    Here’s what you’ll get inside:

    [00:02:00] – Where Real Career Breakthroughs Actually Come From: 78% of economic value is concentrated in two cells of the demand matrix. We walk you through the math and the moment a person realizes that staying the same is riskier than changing. That’s the ignition point for every pivot that ever mattered.

    [00:10:00] – The 4 P’s. Not Another 47-Step Plan: Puke. Plant. Prioritize. Progress. A framework you can actually run when the ground is moving. Pirate Eddie uses his own personal quake (the one he handled badly) to show you why the first step is the one most people skip.

    [00:18:00] – Which of the Four Capitals Has the Greatest Upside Right Now: Every quake rebalances your Financial, Relationship, Reputation, and Intellectual Capital. The mistake is trying to rebuild all four. The move is making a deliberate bet on the one the quake just handed you for free.

    [00:26:00] – Why Military Veterans Are Walking Category Design Case Studies: Three stories at three stages. Dr. Eric Hanson pitched 36 times before someone said yes. Robby Cronstedt is standing at the edge of the cliff right now. Captain Shelly Rood walked through nuclear bombs. Their POV is the Superpower.

    [00:30:00] – AI as Your Career Intelligence Officer: Six copy-and-run prompts that turn AI from a shortcut into a Superpower. Ring Assessment. Puke Session. Endure or Escape. This isn’t prompt engineering. It’s a system for seeing the shift early and repositioning before everyone else notices the ground moved.

    If you’re in the middle of a career quake right now, or you can feel the tremors starting, this mini-book will change how you read the ground under your feet.

    That’s how you convert turmoil into treasure.

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead

    PS: Help like-minded pirates “think different.”

    If reading this opened your mind to new and different thinking, share it with a friend or click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can learn about Category Pirates.

  • This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe

    Most people think careers are built through planning.

    They’re not. They’re built through quakes.

    Unexpected moments that shake everything:

    Your job

    Your identity

    Your relationships

    Your sense of what matters

    You don’t avoid these moments. You become because of them.

    This mini-book introduces a new way to understand your career—not as a ladder, but as a system of forces shaping you in real time.

    If you can learn to read those forces, you don’t just survive quakes. You use them.

    Here’s what you’ll get inside:

    [00:02:00] – Lifequakes Are the Rule, Not the Exception: Research shows we experience major life disruptions every 12–18 months, with 3–5 true “lifequakes” across adulthood. These aren’t linear or predictable—they’re messy, nonlinear, and they reshape everything.

    [00:07:00] – The Three Rings That Actually Define Your Career: Your career sits inside three interacting forces:

    Global quakes (AI, economy, war, culture)

    Organizational quakes (bosses, roles, pay, politics)

    Personal quakes (health, family, purpose)Most advice focuses on one. Winners learn to read all three—at the same time.

    [00:12:00] – Why Global Forces Shape Your Destiny More Than You Think: You don’t control macro shifts—AI, recessions, regulation—but they control what’s possible.

    [00:18:00] – Organizational Quakes: The Game You Think You’re Playing: Promotions, bosses, compensation, and role clarity feel like “the career.” They’re not. They’re one ring. Over-index here, and you miss the bigger game. Under-index, and you get crushed by politics and structure you didn’t see coming.

    [00:24:00] – Personal Quakes: The Ring That Actually Determines Everything: Your relationships, health, family, and sense of purpose are not separate from your career—they are your career infrastructure. The right people accelerate you. The wrong ones destroy you. And most people don’t realize this until it’s too late.

    [00:30:00] – Seven Truths About Quakes That Change How You See Everything: You can’t stop quakes—but you can change your POV about them.

    [00:36:00] – From Surviving Quakes to Becoming Quake-Wise: The goal isn’t a stable career. That’s a myth. The goal is to shorten the distance between shock and strategy. To read signals faster.

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead

    PS: Help like-minded pirates “think different.”

    If reading this opened your mind to new and different thinking, share it with a friend or click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can learn about Category Pirates.

  • This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe

    Most people read about strategy. Pirates execute it.

    This is the first edition of Lightning Strike Legends—a series where we show real Pirates running real strikes with real revenue.

    Lydia Flacchini and Nick Kringus didn’t follow a marketing playbook. They built creator capital first—then pointed it at a single moment.

    Three weeks. $24K invested. $90K signed on day two. $270K in near-term pipeline. Up to $1M in total opportunity.

    That’s not marketing. That’s a Lightning Strike.

    Here’s what you’ll get inside:

    [00:01:00] – Why Creator Capital Comes Before Revenue: This strike didn’t work because of tactics. It worked because Lydia and Nick had already built the four capitals—intellectual, reputation, relationship, and financial. The strike didn’t create value. It revealed and monetized value that was already there.

    [00:06:30] – Finding Your Bandmate Multiplies Everything: Lydia (revenue scientist) and Nick (category strategist) weren’t just collaborators—they became a band. When two people with clear superpowers align around a shared problem and POV, the output isn’t additive. It’s exponential.

    [00:11:30] – The Legendary POV: Are You AI Invisible?: Their breakthrough wasn’t a tactic—it was a question. “Are you AI invisible?” reframed the entire personal injury legal market. As AI replaces search, both victims and lawyers are disappearing from discovery. That’s a category problem, not a marketing problem.

    [00:16:30] – Category Science > Conventional Wisdom: Their research revealed something shocking: SEO authority had almost zero correlation with AI visibility (0.076). That single number punched the industry in the face—and created instant word of mouth.

    [00:20:00] – The Strike Stack: Info War, Air War, Ground War: The strike wasn’t random—it was structured:

    Info War: The 0.076 insight and AI invisibility POV

    Air War: Booth + live podcast creating visibility and credibility

    Ground War: Real conversations, real diagnostics, real closingThe stronger the intellectual capital, the less financial capital you need.

    [00:24:00] – Close Before You Leave: Revenue Is the Goal: Lydia set the tone: “We need five clients before we leave.” By day two, they signed a $90K client. The strike paid for itself before they even left the conference.

    [00:27:00] – What’s Actually Stopping You From Striking: It’s whether you’ve mapped your creator capital and have the courage to act. Most people don’t lack opportunity—they walk past it, like the economists ignoring the $100 bill on the sidewalk.

    Arrrrrrr,

    Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

    Eddie Yoon

    Christopher Lochhead

    PS: Help like-minded pirates “think different.”

    If reading this opened your mind to new and different thinking, share it with a friend or click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can learn about Category Pirates.