Category Pirates

Category Pirates šŸ“ā€ā˜ ļø
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The authority on category design, category creation & creator capitalism. Sharing how legendary entrepreneurs, executives, marketers, and creators design business breakthroughs. By Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, & Bri Clark www.categorypirates.news

  1. 2 days ago

    Google's free cash flow went negative for the first time. Does it matter with $242 billion in cash?

    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, Hereā€™s what we covered in this episode: 1. Is Googleā€™s negative $6 billion free cash flow is good news? Revenue of $119.8 billion, up 24%. Cloud up 82% with a $514 billion backlog, up from $460 billion in a single quarter. Free cash flow of negative $6 billion, the first negative quarter in company history. The Journal ran one great chart of the cliff and called it worrying. Same filing shows $242 billion in cash and marketable securities. Trailing twelve month revenue of $446 billion. Trailing operating cash flow of $186 billion. One chart cannot explain a company mid-transformation, and a quarter is the wrong unit of measurement when the thing you are measuring is a category migration. Milking versus prosecuting. Two kinds of companies exist. The ones milking a category king position they already own, and the ones prosecuting a future opportunity while the window is open. Buybacks are the tell for the first group. A buyback is a company admitting it has run out of ideas and would rather grow the stock than the business. Cloud added $11 billion of incremental revenue. Search added $8.3 billion. The most perfect business ever built on the internet is now the slower half of its own company, in dollars, and that is the achievement. * Amazon. Incorporated 1994, no full year of profit until 2003, stock up roughly 300,000% since IPO. * NVIDIA. Still founder led, still prosecuting. * Microsoft. A CEO who acts like a founder, and the innovatorā€™s dilemma refuted. * IBM. Read its most recent quarter for the alternative. The Mag Seven are guiding to somewhere between $700 and $750 billion of CapEx this year because AI shows the greatest category potential ever exhibited. The press covered the cliff and missed the migration. 2. Does the man who built a $10 billion law firm need 5,000 people, or just 20? Kirkland & Ellis became the first law firm in history to cross $10 billion in annual revenue. David Fox, 68, wrote that playbook. He just co-founded Irving, an AI-native firm running in stealth with fewer than 10 lawyers and engineers, already advising on real deals. Kirkland has set aside $500 million for its own AI platform. Reject the premise. Kirkland is going to light that money on fire, because the money is being spent to make thousands of people incrementally more productive inside a structure built for people. When the movie camera arrived, the first thing anyone did with it was point it at a stage play. Movies only happened when someone built entertainment purpose-made for the camera. Most law firms, and most of the S&P 500, are still videotaping the play. Fox is doing the other experiment. Firm with AI at the core, people bolted on. His own question: does he need 5,000 talented people, or 20. All the value sits with the senior partner who has the context and the battle scars, plus the AI-native 20-year-old. The middle layer of associates and managers of managers has value in the old system only, and the old system needs to feed the middle to keep the machine running. Knowledge worker to creator capitalist. Applying existing knowledge is the job AI takes. Creating net new things with AI is the job that survives. Make AI the co-founder of your career. And the billable hour is over. McKinsey is already 25% outcome-based. Nobody cares how long it took. 3. What if doing the right thing paid 12x? Optus Bank, founded 1921, and M&F Bank, founded 1907, just announced a merger creating the largest African American owned financial institution in the country. Ten locations, $1.27 billion in combined assets, a deal worth more than $105 million. Five years ago, right before we wrote about it in Harvard Business Review, M&F traded under $4 a share. It closed near $48. That is a 12x return in a bank most of Wall Street has never heard of, and the merger happened by choice rather than distress. Charitable investing over charitable giving. Giving is a transfer. Investing aligns the incentives, which means it compounds and it repeats. Justice deposits started as corporate treasury cash parked in minority depository institutions. The next level was buying the equity. * Netflix. 2% of global cash holdings, over $100 million. * PayPal. $500 million. * Block, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, State Street, Moodyā€™s. Deposits and stock. * Costco, Dickā€™s Sporting Goods, Aflac. In as well. None of them wired that money out of sympathy. They wired it because these are legendary banks run by great operators. CEO James Sills grew the balance sheet, cut non-interest expense, originated SBA loan revenue, and bought back shares. There is a category design question underneath. A Black-owned bank is a specialization built on a highly identifiable superconsumer, and niching down on your super works when you commit to it completely. The free market, not a mandate, is what fixed this one. Weā€™re publishing a mini-book on Charitable Investing this Friday. 3 conversations to have about the news with the Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot The bots come with the founding tier and jam 24/7. Their job is to take this weekā€™s moves and run them against your category, not ours. * Find out whether you are milking or prosecuting. Hand the bots your last three budget decisions and ask which future opportunity each one is prosecuting. If the honest answer is that you are defending a position you already hold, you are Alphabetā€™s critics, not Alphabet. * Ask what you are videotaping. Describe your core delivery model and ask the bots which parts exist only because humans used to do them. Fox found his answer and it was 5,000 people versus 20. * Convert one giving line into an investing line. Bring the bots a cause you already fund and ask them to design the version where the incentives align and the money comes back. M&F went from under $4 to $48 while doing exactly that. The through-line: in all three stories, the people who look reckless are the ones building for the category that is arriving, and the people who look prudent are optimizing a category that is leaving. Not a founding member yet? You can join here. Recorded Friday, July 31. 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 weekā€™s episode. Arrrrrrr, Category Pirates šŸ“ā€ā˜ ļø 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

  2. 28 Jul

    Niching Down on Weird Data with AI Solves Ice Cream, Movies and Power Bottlenecks

    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, Hereā€™s what we covered in this episode: 1. Can a power plant on a truck beat China? Five years ago, China had under four gigawatts of energy storage. Today it has around 155 and is targeting 300 by 2030. The entire United States has 57. Chinese suppliers control 90% of the global market for storage battery cells. Centralized top-down versus decentralized bottoms-up. China wins centralized. No NIMBYism, hundred-year plans, local mayors competing to execute. America wins by letting ten thousand flowers bloom. Where government fails, the category canā€™t wait. Musk worked out that the government had become a critical part of his supply chain, so he did what Apple did and bought it. July filings showed he took APR Energy for roughly $1 billion: trailer-mounted turbines topping a gigawatt, deployable in days. * Microsoft. Firing up Three Mile Island through Constellation. * Meta. Launched its own free community college to train the trades it cannot hire. * Tesla. Megapacks for cities running brownouts, Powerwalls for homeowners arbitraging cheap electrons against peak pricing. The missing piece has a name: the megapod. Batteries plus GPUs, a data center in a box, sized between the grid-scale Megapack and the household Powerwall. Any enterprise with unused land becomes a distributed data center. Alaska pays every resident about $1,000 a year for sitting on oil. The megapod is that annuity for a farm, a church, a factory. The Journal reported the scoreboard and missed the rule change. Power is a peak usage problem, which makes it a pricing problem you can solve from your garage. 2. Can weird data pay your rent? Ben Affleck sold a stealth AI startup called InterPositive to Netflix for $587 million in cash. A downtown Los Angeles ice cream shop called 28 Wishes bets $20 a day on cold weather forecasts and covers 43% of its rent. Seven-person companies are doing the work of fifty, with 15% fewer managers and 15% lower costs. Thereā€™s weird data and weakness data. Every business sits on data nobody else has, and most of it documents where the business is weak. Ice cream sales fall about 20% every time it drops below 70 degrees. The prediction market turns that weakness into a hedge that pays the landlord. Turn cost into revenue. This is the Amazon move. Shipping cost became Prime. Compute cost became AWS. * InterPositive. Trains a small model on a single filmā€™s own footage, lighting, and style. An artist equipped with AI, not an AI engineer walking into film. Netflix created binge watching and can now load the buffet faster. * Lemonade. Everybody hates filing a claim, so it built its point of view on the thing the insurance category is worst at. * Universities. Administrators drove tuition through the roof. Cut that layer 15% and college costs 15% less. Read wealth inequality as taking from the rich and you get one set of solutions. Ask how to make everybody wealthy and you get Invest America. 3. Are consultantsā€™ outcome based fees a sign that fixed salaries will no longer be the norm? McKinsey has tied 25% of global fees to outcomes. Bain says 30% of its business is now AI and tech-enabled, on the way to 50%. BCG expects AI work to jump from a fifth of revenue to 40% next year at a $12 billion firm. Meanwhile, the $300 to $500 consultant hour is cracking, and 150 alumni of those firms are under contract training AI to do the entry-level work. Waiters and waitresses are wondering what took them so long? The question is will time-based compensation (hourly, salary) without outcomes last much longer for everyone else? Missionaries who drive outcomes are about to get paid more. Free riders lose the hiding places. 3 conversations to have about the news with The Pirate Eddie Bot and The Pirate Christopher Bot The bots run this weekā€™s moves against your category, not somebody elseā€™s. They come with the Founding tier, and they jam at 2 am. * Find your missing middle. Tesla had grid scale and household scale and nothing in between, which is where the megapod lives. Ask the bots what sits between your biggest offer and your smallest, and who is stranded in that gap. * Audit your weird data and your weakness data. Hand the bots the parts of your business you would rather not talk about. An ice cream shop turned ā€œit gets cold sometimesā€ into 43% of its rent. * Reprice from time to outcome. Give the bots your invoice and ask what outcome the client actually bought. If McKinsey can put a quarter of its fees at risk, you can put something at risk too. One through-line connects all three. The incumbent optimizes the game as written. The pioneer changes what gets counted: power that moves instead of power that stays plugged in, data nobody thought was an asset, and the outcome instead of the hour. Two ways to climb aboard now: Monthly: $20/month. Youā€™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 * All seven of our full-size books * Every mini-book we have ever written (300+) * Our entire audiobook library (30+) Want the whole thing every time? Become a Founding Member. Recorded Friday, July 24th. 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 weekā€™s episode. Arrrrrrr, Category Pirates šŸ“ā€ā˜ ļø 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

  3. 24 Jul

    The Agentic CMO Audiobook

    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 Someone owes Pirate Christopher a lot of money. HP bought Mercury Interactive for roughly $4.5 billion. After the deal closed, the head of HP Enterprise told her executives that the category Christopher framed, named, and claimed, Business Technology Optimization, was half the reason they bought the company. Half of $4.5 billion. You know what the marketing dashboard said about that? Nothing. There was no impression count for ā€œwe changed what the acquirer believes this company is.ā€ The most valuable thing a CMO ever does, drive enduring market cap, is the one thing no attribution model on earth can see. So a third of the Fortune 500 now runs with no CMO at all, and the ones who keep the seat get 4.1 years before the budget and the blame catch up. The Agentic CMO is the mini-book Christopher wishes someone had handed him when he became a public-company CMO at 28. Itā€™s about the currency switch that makes the company build itself around you, and the AI co-founder that turns it from a theory into a Tuesday. Every AI-marketing book teaches you to organize intelligence faster. None of them tell you where the point of view comes from. This one starts there. Impressions are Canadian dollars at an American cash register. Hereā€™s how to start printing the currency the boardroom actually spends. Hereā€™s what youā€™ll get inside: [00:02:55] ā€“ Impressions Are Canadian Dollars at an American Register: Reach, awareness, engagement, all real, and all worthless at the counter where your CFO, board, and investors actually spend. [00:12:13] ā€“ How Elf and a Candy Called Nerds Minted Market Cap: Kory Marchisotto turned ā€œdupeā€ from an insult into a category and took marketing from 7% of sales to 22%. [00:23:53] ā€“ The $4 Trillion Hiding Inside Wasted Marketing: P&G cut $200 million from its digital budget and sales went up. eBay ran a controlled experiment on its own paid search and got back 37 cents on the dollar. [00:30:37] ā€“ War Game the Battle Before You Fight It Once: The most expensive words in marketing are ā€œletā€™s see how it performs.ā€ Generals donā€™t launch and pray, they war game. [00:43:07] ā€“ A Day in the Life of the CMO They Build the Company Around: 7 a.m., her strategy agent flags where the company drifted off its category POV overnight. By 8:30 the fleet has war-gamed a price move worth 8% of operating profit. If youā€™ve ever built enterprise value the scoreboard couldnā€™t see, and watched the company struggle to count it, this mini-book hands you the currency to prove it was you. Thatā€™s how the seat companies delete becomes the seat they build themselves around. Arrrrrrr, Category Pirates šŸ“ā€ā˜ ļø Eddie Yoon Christopher Lochhead PS: Help like-minded pirates ā€œthink different.ā€ If reading this opened your mind to new and different thinking, share it with a friend or click the ā¤ļø button on this post so more people can learn about Category Pirates.

  4. 21 Jul

    Count your blessings and your burdens when it comes to data centers, price increases and careers

    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, Hereā€™s what we covered in this episode: 1. Is New York being so smart theyā€™re stupid? On July 14th, New York became the first state in America to ban new hyperscale data centers. Governor Kathy Hochul signed a permit freeze of up to a full year, with calls to extend it. The stated reasons: power bills, water, grid strain. Category kings bring more blessings than burdens, and New York only did half the math. In 1978, four people started a memory company in the basement of a Boise dental office. Thatā€™s Micron. Today itā€™s the third-largest private employer in Idaho, and its newest expansion is $15 billion, the largest private investment in state history and the first new memory fab built in America in 20 years. The choice governors keep missing is future versus past. Shenzhen was a fishing village in the late ā€˜70s and is now 17 million people, proof there can be more than one Silicon Valley. The next Boise is wherever someone decides to welcome it. 2. Are Appleā€™s higher prices good long-term? On June 25th, Apple raised prices across the line: the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra jumped $1,300, the M4 Max $500, even the entry MacBook $100. Tim Cook called the memory shortage a ā€œ100-year flood.ā€ DRAM and NAND ran up about 60% last quarter, another 13 to 18% coming, and analysts say memory could double before itā€™s done. Business Media reads a supply-chain story. The category underneath is where your AI lives and who gets to watch. On-prem is back, and the high-order bit is data ownership, not the sticker price. For 30 years, the arrow pointed one way, into the cloud, ever since Benioff incorporated Salesforce in 1999. Itā€™s swinging back, because when your data goes into someone elseā€™s servers, they see what youā€™re doing and build the context layer on top of it. Ask Cursor, which grew into one of the fastest software companies ever on top of Claude, right until Anthropic saw the growth and shipped a competitor. Play that out for the enterprise and the individual: * Goldman Sachs writing an S1 does not want an AI harvesting its intellectual capital. * Merck, P&G, Citibank. Every regulated giant lands on the same paradigm: I own my data, I own the context layer, you canā€™t compete with me. * Dell. Infrastructure growing 40%, consumer laptops 5%. On-prem drives both, and hardware prices with it. Apple is a missionary on privacy the way Netflix was on binge-watching when Pirate Eddie got flamed for cheering its 2011 price hike. More memory on the phone means more AI on the device, plus the agency to route the right model to the right task instead of being beholden to one LLM. 3. Can Costco cashiers become millionaires? The Wall Street Journal profiled a Costco cashier: $32.90 an hour, 60 years old, 40 years in, started at Price Club making $5.85. He owns a three-bedroom house with a pool and a 401k north of a million dollars. Heā€™s not the exception. Costcoā€™s own CFO says many thousands of hourly workers have crossed a million in retirement, and turnover runs 7% a year against a retail average of 60%. That math only works one way. The category makes the career, so find the category king before itā€™s crowned and ride the left side of the S curve. Costco marks everything up 15% when the rest of retail runs 35 to 40%, and that radical generosity is the tell. The pattern is everywhere once you stop looking at prestige: * US Robotics. The CEOā€™s secretary and janitor both hit millionaire on stock before the 3Com acquisition. * Chobani. Gave 10% of the company to its 2,000 early employees. * WinCo, Stewartā€™s Shops, waste management. Nobodyā€™s dream rĆ©sumĆ©, stacked with millionaire employees anyway. Then look at the other side. Xerox did almost $22 billion in revenue in 2011 and is on track for about $7 billion this year. You can be smarter and sharper than you were then and still be worse off, because Xerox operates in declining categories. The category made you a loser while you got better. 3 conversations to have about the news with the Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot The Pirate Eddie Bot and the Pirate Christopher Bot are your 24/7 jamming partners on the Founding tier. They take the weekā€™s moves and help you apply them to YOUR category. Three to run this week: * Count your blessings, not just your burdens. Hand the bots your industry, your city, or your company and ask what ā€œyes to the category kingā€ would pull along the way New York refused and Boise didnā€™t. Pressure-test whether youā€™re planning for the next 40 years or the last four. * Own your data and own the context layer. Ask the bots where in your business youā€™re handing your intellectual capital to someone who can turn around and compete with you, and what your on-prem version looks like. Cursor learned this the expensive way. * Find the category king before itā€™s crowned. Feed the bots your career or your next hire and score it on the S curve: is the category rising, does it treat its supers and investors well, is AI the co-founder? Thatā€™s the difference between a Costco and a Xerox. The through-line across all three: the category makes the company, which makes the career, and the news keeps rewarding the people who reject the premise the press prints. Not a founding member yet? You can join here. Whatā€™s coming up on Pirate Street Journal Tuesday episodes: 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. Two ways to climb aboard now: Monthly: $20/month. Youā€™ve done dumber things with $20. You get the Tuesday episodes, Friday mini-books, 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, July 17th. 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 weekā€™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

  5. 18 Jul

    BREAKING NEWS: A car with eight cameras just claimed the word "privacy."

    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. Donā€™t wait a week to listen. Hereā€™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, ā€œIf you donā€™t pay for the product, you are the product.ā€ Itā€™s hard to trust a company when you are the product. Thatā€™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 canā€™t compete with. New categories require new metrics. The category king does not inherit the old scoreboard, it invents one. ā€œAvoided emissionsā€ 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 Weā€™re stealing another Joe Pine idea, which is the true purpose of a company is to help humans flourish. Teslaā€™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 isnā€™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 donā€™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 ā€œavoided emissionsā€ 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 ā€œI donā€™t trust the robot.ā€ 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. Whatā€™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. Youā€™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). Weā€™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

  6. 14 Jul

    Micron just put $250 million into a million kids' accounts and made charity obsolete.

    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, Hereā€™s what we covered in this episode: 1. Micron and Gwen Shotwell didnā€™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 Micronā€™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 Cupā€™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-eeā€™s, Waffle House, and free refills, then telling the folks back home the warnings were a lie. Whatā€™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 Americaā€™s move is to keep raising its hand to host. 3. Black Rifle Coffee sells coffee. Its best ad of the year didnā€™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 Americaā€™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 Rifleā€™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 ā€œI want your money.ā€ Make something for your super and they hear ā€œthey want to help me.ā€ 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. Whatā€™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 IPOā€™d at $135, ran to $202, and sat at $153 as of June 25, 2026. Two ways to climb aboard now: Monthly: $20/month. Youā€™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 weekā€™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

  7. 10 Jul

    America: A Different Category Of Country Part 2 Audiobook

    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 Kingā€™s subjects. They would not trade places with him for anything. Thatā€™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. Hereā€™s what youā€™ll get inside: [00:00:38] ā€“ Citizenship Now Comes With Equity: A 2025 law hands every American newborn $1,000 invested in the market on day one. Itā€™s the first federal program in history designed to make every baby a capitalist. [00:06:47] ā€“ 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] ā€“ 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] ā€“ Immigration Run Like A Venture Portfolio: America is about to select for hunger the way a VC selects for potential. Youā€™ll hear why the laborerā€™s kid who becomes the founder is a bet no visa application knows how to score, and why that Flywheel is Americaā€™s real moat. [00:49:12] ā€“ When Washington Becomes The Countryā€™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. Itā€™s the most optimistic case for smaller government youā€™ll hear, and it isnā€™t a political one. If the news has you convinced the American story is ending, this audiobook is the counter-argument, and itā€™s built entirely on math. Thatā€™s how a country stops managing scarcity and starts manufacturing abundance. Arrrrrrr, Category Pirates šŸ“ā€ā˜ ļø Eddie Yoon Christopher Lochhead

  8. 7 Jul

    Why Microsoft is Moving Into a Lower Margin Business?

    Hereā€™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 didnā€™t. 2. Wall Street thinks Elon is buying a phone company. Heā€™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 Mobileā€™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 isnā€™t an option, itā€™s the only one. Wall Streetā€™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-Mobileā€™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. Itā€™s a category with no off switch, and the beachhead for a new category built while the telcos arenā€™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 didnā€™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 whatā€™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 youā€™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 canā€™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 customerā€™s hand through the transformation. Thatā€™s the whole game. Not a founding member yet? You can join here. Whatā€™s coming up on Pirate Street Journal Weā€™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 IPOā€™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. Youā€™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 weekā€™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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About

The authority on category design, category creation & creator capitalism. Sharing how legendary entrepreneurs, executives, marketers, and creators design business breakthroughs. By Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, & Bri Clark www.categorypirates.news

Information

  • Creator
    Category Pirates šŸ“ā€ā˜ ļø
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    122
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    Ā© Category Pirates
  • Show Website
    Category Pirates

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