Good morning and happy long weekend everyone! Let’s kick this one off with a question…do you think Apple is cooked without Cook?

With an iconic “hello” tweet, John Ternus rose this week, knighted in as CEO and protector of the Apple realm. And whether you think they’re in trouble or not depends on what you think Apple is (and should be) betting the next 15 years on.

Cook’s thing was supply chains and logistics. And his thing took Apple from around $350 billion to $4.6 trillion. A legendary run of corporate value-add. Jobs was the product guy who created the innovation. Cook was the ops guy who protected it and scaled it.

Now it’s John, and John is a hardware guy. And that tells you everything you need to know about where Apple thinks the next value-add comes from. He must protect Cook’s logistics machine and then go build the next frontier of hardware on top of it. It’s a nice story, and we’re at act III where the hero either wins or loses. Let’s go John.

There is strategy lesson here amidst my morning ramble: who a company hires to lead IS the strategy. Just ask “what is this persons thing?”, and that thing is what the big bet will be on.

In the next 5 minutes over your coffee: why Netflix is opening up in a way they said they never would, the company trying to kill its own product, the two words to just kill right now, the coolest ad idea I’ve seen in a long time, and the drones delivering to your pool.

What gets said is only as useful as what it actually helps get done. No matter how good the notes are, if nobody actions it…well.

The Granola MCP takes what you talked about in meetings and informs the work you're doing in other apps. They have tons of connectors to other data, productivity, and GTM tool unlocking dream workflow combos and making it easy to query and action your notes.

Last year Netflix tried to buy Warner Bros. This would have been a massive add to the catalog. Except as you know, Hollywood and Washington said no.

So why has Netflix been talking to NBC and Fox about carrying Peacock and Fox One now inside the Netflix app—and what’s interesting about it?

Well, if you can’t buy the content, then mind as well distribute the streaming service and take a cut. Just like the first law of thermodynamics, a Netflix execs appetite for revenue cannot be destroyed.

Amazon has been doing this for years. I get all my streaming channels like Apple and HBO and Paramount (and more) inside the Amazon app. YouTube also just bundled all of Peacock into Premium.

The hardest problem in streaming is customer acquisition, and that’s exactly what Netflix has to sell. Whoever owns the customer relationship taxes everyone else in the stack. It’s the end state of most winning platforms—first you beat your competitors then you charge them rent.

If you’re lucky enough to win (or already have won) a niche, then your distribution becomes a second product. Our negative CAC idea was a flavor of this. Ben from Stratechery had an excellent as always deep dive on why Netflix probably should have bought Roku instead 👇

AI gets you 90% of the way and then stalls. You get the doc or the deck, but it’s not quite the finished, verified thing you can actually ship. And the dangerous errors are the convincing ones, because a 95%-right output looks done.

Tendem is where to send that last mile. 10,000+ vetted experts plus multi-layer QA send back a finished, signed-off result. Mine last week was a whiteboard photo in, and a a genuinely human strategy deck for my new team out.

They also just shipped a gallery of 97 ready-to-run business tasks you can browse without an account. Lead lists with proof. Landing page rewrites. Check-the-science reviews. Go see what you could hand off today.

PostHog is taking how they die very seriously. Should you be too?

Basically they don’t believe you get to keep product market fit, especially now. So they’re asking the right question…if a team powered by AI rebuilt their product today, what would they build and what would they skip?

They think the answer is PostHog Desktop. So, they did it themselves, which is as they say “a self-disruption now in open beta.”

The only good defense is the offense you run on yourself.

Product-market fit is not owned but leased. You fight for it everyday now. Irrelevance is one exec or team or you drifting off at the wheel.

So the rent has gone up on it. There are hundreds of tiny teams building what you do but for right now, plus Anthropic wandering into everyone’s territory.

Step one → write down how you die. Three or four one-liners on who or what makes your product unnecessary.

Step two → fund the attacker yourself. Give the death-page to a small team with a blank slate, reporting to a founder instead of the department they’re disrupting. As they say, “you get to be the incumbent and the seed investor at once (startups attacking you would kill for this setup).”

“AI-powered” is like saying you’re the best pizza in New York. Or “the platform for scale,” or “world-class.” It don’t mean nothing. Most AI products right now generally look the same, sounds the same, and claim the same thing. And saying AI powered does not separate you from anything in anyones mind.

Off the back of the PostHog bit above, your product differentiator can collapse overnight with the next model release. Your positioning is the only asset a new model drop by itself can’t delete. And AI-powered is hurting your positioning.

Positioning is the thing that can compound for years. When capability is a commodity (Claude has made it so), then the category you claim and the enemy you name is what the game is about.

If you deleted “AI-powered” from your homepage, does it make it any less clear what you do or who you are for? Nope.

Go back to the old-school stuff: For (target customer) who (need), (product) is a (category) that (key benefit), unlike (named status quo or competitor) we do (key differences). Start winning on positioning again.

Somewhere, a CFO just approved the line item “sticker on Giulia’s laptop.” Three CFOs, actually. Palette, Afes and Go Nimbly bought ad spots on a consultant’s MacBook lid. The lid “closes” September 18 and then seals for two years.

Such a fun idea in the zeitgeist of the whole ad bidding thing going on right now.

If you run the math, a sponsored post buys you about 1.5 seconds of thumb-hover before someone scrolls on. A sticker on that lid sits through a 45-minute client meeting where the person opposite has nowhere else to look. It’s in the background of every video, every conference, every co-working space for 24 months. No scrolling past and skipping. “It’s the only ad format in 2026 with a 100% completion rate.” she said.

CPMs keep climbing, attention keeps shrinking, and everyone’s answer is to buy more of the thing that works less. As she puts it, the entire media industry is trying to engineer its way back to what a sticker does by default. And the best part… the targeting. Whoever sees that lid is sitting in a meeting with her, which is probably a tighter ICP filter than any ad platform sells. She’s become the placement and made a marketplace for others to do the same..

Go find the unpriced attention that sits in front of your exact customer. It’s rarely a feed. This is where the best marketing ideas live. Also clock her scarcity mechanics—a hard close date and a two-year seal for a sticker. “The feed depreciates. The lid appreciates” is on the money 👇

I hope your books are waterproof…because for just $2.99 on orders under $50, Amazon will drop off your orders via Prime Air drones in under 30 minutes. They haven’t quite stuck the landing yet, but that will change.

Uber also invested in Zipline and is targeting 1 million drone deliveries a day by the end of 2029 and DoorDash recently got that FAA certification for DoorDash Air. Uber even cut 3,300 jobs this week partly to fund a $10B+ autonomy bet.

Drones are coming very fast. Amazon/Uber/DoorDash are logistic delivery heros and they’re making this the new channel. Zipline already completes a delivery every 20 seconds.

The next time you forget butter at the shop, go stand by your pool. I don’t know I’m grasping at straws here this was just interesting to me. I’m bullish on flight though and if you’re interested to see how the drone company that started by delivering blood in Rwanda is reinventing how anything gets delivered, almost instantly, watch this video

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📺 A video—Perhaps one of Uber’s best decisions → “Why Uber added the Chime sound” (yes I made the video 😂)

📬 A read—The Atlantic’s review of Michael Pollan’s new book on consciousness. There are 106 competing theories of what makes you you, and a single neuron in your head can do what an entire deep neural network does. → Read it