What I'm Reading, Saving, and Rethinking

Happy Friday! Every week, I save dozens of posts, articles, and newsletters that challenge my thinking. Here's what stood out this week and why I think it's worth your time too.

🔥 This Week's Saves

🔗 Airbnb’s New App, Experiences and Services, Chesky’s Founder Mode

Summary: Ben Thompson analyzes Airbnb’s 2025 Summer Release, in which the company expands its app to include new Experiences, Services, and an AI-powered concierge. This signals CEO Brian Chesky’s shift back to “founder mode.” Chesky wants to recapture the magic of Airbnb and expand its product’s surface area.

Why It Matters: Founder-led reboots are rare and risky. This move mirrors Apple’s “iPhone moment” or Facebook’s “pivot to mobile” but it’s happening after Airbnb has matured and gone public. It challenges the traditional aggregator playbook. Airbnb is centralizing demand and now trying to shape behavior across the entire travel lifecycle. It’s an ecosystem play.

My Take: I posted about Airbnb’s new release on LinkedIn last week. Yes, travel is more than lodging. But Airbnb’s power was in doing one thing (i.e. where you stay) better than anyone else. Adding chefs, dog trainers, and massage therapists feels like the return of “Uber for X” logic. That’s Aggregator Drift 101 and it’s worth being skeptical.

Bottom Line: Chesky tried this 8 years ago and failed, blaming it on crappy UX and an immature app. Ben thinks it failed because the economics didn’t work. I agree with Ben. I also think that when founders return to “founder mode” it’s because they’ve lost control of the story they tell themselves (side note: “founder mode” is code for “I’m the founder and I can act like a dick because I don’t trust any of the people I hired”).

🔗 You Need a Better Testing Strategy

Summary: Most A/B tests suck. Casey Hill’s team at DoWhatWorks combed through 25,000+ experiments and found only 10% actually moved the needle. Why?

• Everyone’s copying each other’s mediocre ideas.

• “Best practices” are often dead wrong.

• Even when companies do find winners, they don’t implement them.

He’s calling for a full reset: fewer, bolder, better-aligned tests that challenge assumptions and actually get shipped.

Why It Matters: Your team might be wasting time validating ideas that were bad from the start. Worse: you might be copying a competitor’s test that already failed for them and you don’t even know it. Testing is supposed to accelerate growth. Done wrong, it just slows you down while giving you the illusion of progress.

My Take: The A/B testing industrial complex is broken. Too many teams test headlines like it’s 2011. Too few teams treat testing like a product function: tied to strategy, roadmap, and impact. If your test backlog isn’t scary, it’s probably not worth running.
This isn’t about button color. It’s about bets that can change the trajectory.

Bottom Line: Stop running safe, shallow tests. Kill the “best practices” gospel and test what actually matters to your users. Implement your damn winners. And please: stop copying your competitor’s losing variant just because it’s live. A smart testing strategy should scare you a little.

🔗 Business is the New Sports

Summary: The Covid Pandemic had an unintended consequence: without sports, we looked to get our competitive fix from somewhere else. Enter: business. Startups became sports teams. Founders became athletes. VCs became team owners. Pitch decks became mixtapes. Twitter became ESPN for nerds. And us? We became fans and adopted the Red Sox - Yankees rivalry:

• Uber vs. Lyft

• Amazon vs. Shopify

• Facebook vs. TikTok

Why It Matters: Your portfolio is now at the mercy of vibes. Fundamentals still matter, but they’ve got a loud, flashy cousin now: fandom. In the era of meme stocks, Twitter-native CEOs, and live-streamed earnings calls, the market is trading on resonance just as much as it is on revenue (or so it seems). We’re not just betting on products anymore. We’re betting on personalities, communities, and narrative arcs. Now we have to track which founder is playing the heel, which product launch has trailer-level hype, and which company just became a TikTok punchline.

My Take: This explains a lot. Why some mid startups raise at insane valuations. Why tech Twitter feels like ESPN for nerds. Why founders treat Series A announcements like press tours. The upside? It levels the playing field: anyone with an idea and an audience can win. The downside? Hype can outpace fundamentals fast. We're all playing the game now.

Bottom Line: Founders can’t just builders anymore. They need to be broadcasters, too. If you want to raise, recruit, or rally a tribe, you need more than a product. You need a plot. In this new era, the founder who owns the story wins the market, even if someone else built the better product.

This newsletter is for you. What marketing challenges are you facing in your marketing journey? Reply directly to this email with your questions or topics you'd like to see covered in future issues.

Until next week,

Adam

P.S. Found this helpful? Forward it to another founder who might benefit—we're all in this together.