Field Notes

Celebrities (Kim Kardashian, Hailey Bieber, Rihanna) are billionaires from their business ventures, not their main craft. Influencer marketing is an EXTREMELY cost effective sales channel. Dollars are being allocated to affiliate marketing and away from Google and Facebook ads. TikTok shop is burgeoning.

But this is stale news. What does the advertising landscape look like in 3 years?

AI’s ability to fill in the blanks has improved dramatically in the past months. We can write a bad prompt, and get a great output. Claude, for example, even asks questions to narrow the scope. We’re getting lazy. But people will realize how expensive tokens are. Token management is going to be more prevalent. You just can’t write “build me a new website”. We’re going to get smarter about context structuring.

It took me 3 years and 2 jobs to learn an LBO. I had to learn from templates nestled away in my company’s file drive. There was no publicly available, robust LBO template that worked in practice.

Now, Claude can make a template in 30 seconds with a bad prompt.

Knowledge that lived in Goldman file systems is now free. The rate of learning has condensed.

The most favorable lending products use inventory as collateral, but brands that have spent years building marketing presence haven’t accumulated enough inventory to access meaningful lines of credit. The rate of growth is constrained by their inventory on hand. But modest growth is not attractive to equity investors - the actual cure to bridge this gap. How do you get out of this Catch 22?

There is a lending product missing in this lifecycle stage.

Microsoft Word might be dead. AI writes in markdown and HTML. Drop in your design system as context. Your HTML will be more beautifully designed than whatever you can make in Word or PowerPoint. Rewire your habits. Skip the “now configure this into MSFT” prompt. Editing HTML is learnable.