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2025.20: Product Dreams and Marketplace Realities
The best Stratechery content from the week of May 12, 2025, including Airbnb and the limits of Founder Mode, Inside the NBA lottery in Chicago, and femtoseconds.
Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!
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On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week.
- Airbnb and the Limits of Founder Mode. Wednesday’s Daily Update was Stratechery at its very best. The focus was this week’s news that Airbnb is relaunching its app and expanding its purview to include a new Services offering and a revamped, curated approach to selling Experiences, all in the hopes of making the Airbnb app more than just a once or twice-a-year destination for users around the world. Responding to those ambitions, Ben synthesizes analysis of Airbnb’s past experiments, comments from Founder and CEO Brian Chesky, honesty about what the Airbnb experience entails today, and reflections on the gap between how Chesky wants his company to be seen and where market forces have taken it instead. The piece is filled with themes that apply more broadly across tech, and if you missed it this week, it’s worth your time over the weekend. — Andrew Sharp
- Inside the NBA Lottery in Chicago. The NBA Playoffs continue apace, but this week also brought high drama for the dregs of the league, as the NBA held its annual Draft Lottery in Chicago. My co-host Ben Golliver was inside the drawing room for the Washington Post as the Dallas Mavericks(!), with 1.8% odds(!!), took home the number one pick. Greatest of All Talk recapped the whole evening earlier this week, including a look at how the NBA conducts this business every year, abject heartbreak for my Washington Wizards, and conspiracy theories that were ubiquitous and unavoidable after another team lost its once-in-a-generation superstar to Los Angeles and was rewarded with a chance at a franchise player (in this case, Duke’s Cooper Flagg). All of it is the height of absurdity, which is to say, it’s exactly the sort of event that makes for a great podcast. — AS
- Do You Know What a Femtosecond Is? If you don’t, fear not, because 72 hours ago I was right there with you. Then I watched Jon Yu’s video explaining a) what a femtosecond is (spoiler: one quadrillionth of a second); b) what femtosecond lasers are; and c) the ways in which those lasers are used today. A field of study that began with measuring horses galloping and a machine called a phosphoroscope later spawned micro-chemistry, and today is dominated by lasers that are integral to everything from Lasik surgery to semiconductor manufacturing. This is a video that will make anyone smarter, but what I appreciated was the reminder to be amazed and delighted by the long (and continuing!) history of human curiosity and ingenuity. Check it out below, or, if you prefer it in podcast form, Stratechery subscribers can access the entire Asianometry catalog here. — AS
Stratechery Articles and Updates
- OpenAI Restructuring, Microsoft’s Rights, Simo and Windsurf — OpenAI is tying up all its loose ends in preparation for being the user interface for AI
- Airbnb’s New App, Experiences and Services, Chesky’s Founder Mode — Airbnb has a new app with new offerings for experience and services; I’m not sure the economics make sense for either.
- An Interview with Ben Thompson at the MoffettNathanson Media, Internet, and Communications Conference — An interview with Ben Thompson about AI and Big Tech.
Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber
Asianometry with Jon Yu
Sharp China with Andrew Sharp and Sinocism’s Bill Bishop
Greatest of All Talk with Andrew Sharp and WaPo’s Ben Golliver
Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson
This week’s Stratechery video is on Apple and the Ghosts of Companies Past.
