2025.23: What Nike Learned About E-Commerce

Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!

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On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week.

1. Why Nike is Working with Amazon. Nike’s struggles in the past several years have been well-chronicled, and as the company attempts to re-center itself and chart a new course under a new CEO, news came down recently that Nike will begin selling its products on Amazon. Tuesday’s Daily Update explores that story from all angles, beginning with the lessons to be drawn from Nike’s actually quite coherent execution on what was a nevertheless directionally disastrous decision to prioritize sales on Nike.com and de-emphasize wholesale sales to retailers in 2020. More interesting, though, is the broader analysis of modern e-commerce dynamics and the reality that for a variety of large, national brands that want to take their business online, the smartest strategy of all may be waiving the white flag on “owning the customer” and instead becoming a first-party seller on Amazon and accepting the compromises that come with that arrangement. — Andrew Sharp
   
   
2. The Logic of an Anduril and Meta Partnership. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey made headlines last week with a public mending of fences after Luckey’s controversial Facebook firing in 2017, and for anyone interested in the Anduril-Meta partnership that undergirds that reunion, Wednesday’s Daily Update is a terrific primer on the logic for both sides. Anchored by a look back at the origins of Silicon Valley and critical early choices made by Bob Noyce to not engineer Intel products for the U.S. military, Ben explains why Meta arrived at a different conclusion in 2025, after a decade of investment in Reality Labs and VR technology that has yet to find much of a market among mainstream consumers.   — AS
   
   
3. The Japanese Rice Crisis. If you’ve heard about Japan’s rising rice prices, the latest Asianometry episode from Jon Yu is a great way to dive deeper into what’s happening and why. The short version: Over the last 75 years, the Japanese government has engineered a massive public-private bureaucracy to manage the pricing and delivery of rice, and what’s emerged is a brittle system vulnerable to external shocks. Among the issues today, a 2023 heat wave across Asia led to rice shortages in June 2024, while the average age of rice farmers (69 years old) and acreage reduction policies have left the country with less supply resilience, even as the rest of the world produces more rice than ever. All of it is a great window into one of the biggest stories in the world, and a good argument for the long term benefits of free markets. — AS

Stratechery Articles and Updates

• Nvidia Earnings, Nvidia’s China Argument, NVLink Fusion — Nvidia’s earnings suggest that inference is taking off, but the loss of China is a problem in the long run. Then, Nvidia moves to dominate networking for everyone.
• Nike on Amazon; Nike’s Disastrous Pivot; Inevitability, Intentionality, and Amazon — Nike executed a disastrous pivot over recent years, away from physical retail to D2C. Now they have no choice but to embrace Amazon, but that might be the best thing that could happen to them.
• Anduril + Meta, Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, Meta’s Motivations — Meta made a deal with Anduril to develop headsets for the military; does Reality Labs finally have a customer that will justify the investment?
• An Interview with Cursor Co-Founder and CEO Michael Truell About Coding With AI — An interview with Cursor founder and CEO Michael Truell about AI coding and capturing the critical point of integration in the AI value chain.

Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber

• The Apple Shoe
• Markdown and AI Dev Tools

Asianometry with Jon Yu

• Japan’s Recent Rice Price Crisis
• What’s Next for Southeast Asia’s Data Center Boom?

Sharp China with Andrew Sharp and Sinocism’s Bill Bishop

• The Trade War Becomes a Supply Chain War; A Global Rare Earth Emergency; Xu Qiliang and the Xi Rumor Mill

Greatest of All Talk with Andrew Sharp and WaPo’s Ben Golliver

• A 2025 Finals Preview: The Case for the Pacers, OKC Inevitability, A New Era in Teambuilding, and the Thibs Firing

Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson

• Operation Spider’s Web and Global Trade, More on io and Devices of the Future, The Allure of Sports on Streaming
• Nike’s Lessons on the Internet, Why Nike on Amazon Makes Sense, Meta and Anduril and Silicon Valley History

This week’s Sharp Tech video is on the troubling future of the open web.