Strategic Profiler

Driving Gloves And The Spreadsheet That Conquered the World And Vanished In October 1979, weeks after VisiCalc shipped as the very first electronic spreadsheet for the Apple II, I was already teaching it in offices across New Jersey. Just a punk kid talking to suits No connections, no inside track just a me with the original disks and a room full of wide-eyed accountants who had never seen anything like it. Then, on the week Lotus 1-2-3 officially launched January 26, 1983, I walked into Computerland of Somerville as their external trainer. Snow on the ground, radiators hissing, and executives from some of New Jersey’s biggest companies treating every @ function and macro like sacred knowledge. I trained them on Release 1 straight out of the box. They all believed they were building something permanent. Back then, the spreadsheet was supposed to be the ultimate moat. Wall Street analysts, CIOs, and tech prophets declared it the forever business. Lotus was the killer app that sold the IBM PC. Profits looked eternal. No one, not a single person I trained, not a single expert writing in the trade press would have believed you if you said that one day nobody would care what brand of spreadsheet they used. “Good enough” was good enough? They would have laughed you out of the room. Yet that is exactly what happened. By the late 1980s Lotus had doubled down with Release 3. It was a technological leap 3D worksheets, better graphics, rewritten in C but it came at a steep price. The list price was $495, more than $1,330 in today’s dollars. And that was just the software. To run it “all in” you needed a high-end 286 or 386 PC, a hard disk, and at least 2 MB of RAM, hardware that typically cost $3,000 to $6,000 in 1989 (roughly $8,000 to $16,000 in today’s dollars). The full setup per workstation easily pushed the total investment to $4,000–$7,000 back then, or well over $10,000–$19,000 when adjusted for inflation. Companies paid it because they thought the moat was permanent. They were wrong. Microsoft Excel arrived: good enough, and perfectly timed with the Windows boom. Then came cheaper competitors, open-source, cloud spreadsheets, and finally free, ubiquitous options baked into every laptop and phone. The “spreadsheet market” as a distinct, high-margin category simply evaporated. Today, no one under forty even thinks about it. It’s infrastructure, like electricity or paper. Invisible. Commodity. The brand name that once defined an entire industry is a footnote. Look around your life right now and you’ll see the same pattern everywhere. We are not surrounded by the absolute best products, nor by the absolute cheapest. We are surrounded by the good enough ones that won. The operating system on your phone, the video app you use, the note-taking tool you open every day, none of them are perfect, but they are accessible, cheap or free, and they spread like wildfire until they became the default. That is precisely where we are headed with artificial intelligence. The smartest voices today insist AGI and ASI will remain scarce, proprietary, and eternally profitable. They talk about intelligence as the ultimate moat. I smile when I hear it because I’ve lived this exact story before, on those freezing mornings in Somerville, New Jersey. Coding AIs like Claude (or whatever comes next) will soon be so common, so freely available, and so embedded in everything that no one will pay premium prices for them, just as no one pays premium prices for spreadsheets anymore. The intelligence layer will become generic. Cheap. Everywhere. Invisible. “Good enough” always wins. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes and the rhyme this time is going to rewrite every industry, including the one that thinks it’s building the final, unassailable moat. The spreadsheet taught us that lesson the hard way. The AI era is about to teach it again, only faster. This video is peak 1980s vibe, remember to put on your driving gloves…

Google is making $62 billion a quarter destroying the websites it NEEDS to survive. This is literally a death spiral that ends with Google killing itself. Let me explain what's going on... Google added AI summaries to the top of every search result in 2024. When you Google something now, the answer sits right there on Google's page. You never have to click anywhere. Google took the information from someone else's website, summarized it, and kept you inside Google's ecosystem. The result: 60% of all Google searches now end without a single click to any website. Small publishers lost 60% of their traffic in one year. Medium publishers lost 47%. Even the biggest names in media, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Business Insider, all saw traffic fall between 22% and 55%. The Axios CEO called it "a referral extinction event for the ad-supported web." Google's response to all of this was to tell publishers they can "opt out" of having their content summarized. But opting out also REMOVES your description from normal search results. So the choice Google gives you is let us steal your content for free, or become invisible on the internet. That's extortion. The Washington Post laid off another round of journalists this year because of it. Stereogum, one of the most respected music publications on the internet, had to BEG readers for donations. Business Insider cut 21% of its staff. Dozens of smaller publishers have shut down entirely. The people who actually CREATE the information Google summarizes are going bankrupt while Google posts record revenue. But here's where this gets interesting and where everyone stops thinking: Google's AI summaries are only as good as the content they summarize. If the publishers who write the original articles, run the original investigations, and create the original data go out of business, there is nothing left for Google to summarize. The AI starts recycling old information, the answers get stale, the quality drops, and users start noticing that Google's summaries are increasingly wrong, outdated, or useless. Google is essentially strip-mining the internet for short-term revenue. They are extracting all the value from content creators without paying for it, driving those creators out of business, and then wondering why the quality of their own product is declining. This is exactly what Napster did to the music industry in the early 2000s: Made content free, creators went broke, and quality collapsed. It took a decade to rebuild. Google is doing the same thing to the entire internet at 100x the scale. Rolling Stone, Variety, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard are now suing Google for antitrust violations. Chegg, the education platform, lost 49% of its traffic and is suing too. The UK's competition authority just ordered Google to let publishers opt out without being punished. The DOJ already ruled Google is an illegal monopoly. And Google's defense in court is genuinely unbelievable. They argue that publishers CHOOSE to let Google index their content and can leave anytime they want. That's like saying you choose to pay protection money to the mob because technically you could close your business and move to another city. Google controls 90% of search. Leaving Google means leaving the internet. Meanwhile Google is investing billions in custom AI chips to make these summaries cheaper at scale. Every quarter the problem gets worse. The internet as we've known it for 25 years ran on a simple deal: Publishers make content. Google sends traffic. Advertisers pay for the traffic. Everyone wins. But Google just BROKE that deal and kept all the money.

Tokenized ETFs are on the rise. $IVVon's market cap is up ~150% in the past month, making it the largest tokenized ETF. Ondo Global Markets holds ~74% of the tokenized ETF market, setting the standard for how real-world assets come onchain.