Business Insights — Reputation, AI search & company teardowns

All columns

• How Axon Gave Away Body Cameras and Turned a Taser Maker Into a Software Giant — A man starts a stun-gun company in a garage, vowing to make the bullet obsolete. Thirty years later, it's a software com
• While Everyone Built AI for Big Business, Avoca Answered the Plumber's Phone — In an era when ChatGPT writes essays and draws pictures, using AI to answer a plumber's phone sounds almost trivial. But
• CollectWise Handed the Most Hated Job in Business to AI. The Results Are Striking — Debt collection makes every list of the world's most hated jobs. CollectWise, founded by a former lawyer, handed the ent
• How to Remove Defamatory Posts in Korea: The Full Reporting and Legal Process — Getting a harmful post taken down in Korea is a staged process: a platform report first, then a formal legal takedown re
• 3 Mistakes to Avoid Before Requesting Removal of a Harmful Post — Removing a harmful post takes a few essential steps: securing evidence, deciding whether it states a falsehood, and prev
• Which Online Posts Can Be Removed? 4 Criteria That Decide — Whether an online post can be removed comes down to one question: is it legally protected opinion, or unlawful content?
• How Handshake Turned 20 Million Student Profiles Into a $1.1 Billion-a-Year Business — Handshake was an ordinary college career app — until OpenAI and Google started lining up to buy from it. The secret wasn
• The Man Who Built Google for the Workplace — and Where Your Company's Knowledge Is Hiding — Silicon Valley long called enterprise search a graveyard for startups. Even Google never cracked it. Glean walked into t
• How AI Lets Small Organizations Punch Above Their Weight — 76% of small and midsize businesses already use AI, but only 14% have built it into their core operations. AI's real val
• Why Private Equity Is Buying 'Unsexy' Businesses — A Korean company that signs people up for internet service sold at a ₩300 billion valuation. A US car wash chain went fo
• Fanatics Never Went Public. Here's What It Really Sells — No IPO, yet a valuation of about ₩47 trillion, estimated 2025 revenue of ₩13 trillion and data on 100 million fans. Masa
• Why AI Never Cites Your "Well-Written" Posts — If the blog posts you labored over have never once been cited in a ChatGPT or Perplexity answer, the problem isn't your
• The 5 Factors That Drive AI Citation — What Controlled Experiments Found — "How should I write to show up in AI search?" We answered it with controlled experiments and large-scale data instead of
• Asking "Just Any AI" vs. Handing It to a Blog Agent — While building this blog, we ran an experiment: the same request, given to a bare AI chatbot and to the OPUS blog agent.
• How Advertising Evolves — What the World Cup Reveals About Ad Technology, and the Startups Behind It — If you felt a flicker of pride seeing a familiar domestic brand on the sideline boards during a World Cup broadcast, tha
• When a Single Review Becomes an Ad — How to Actually Put Reviews to Work — Instead of flinching at that 1-star notification, some brands turned the review into an ad. Coffee brand La Colombe lift
• Buying Back a Doctor's Time — How Abridge Took Over the Hospital Market — Abridge, the medical AI that turns exam-room conversations into clinical notes, doubled its valuation in four months to
• The Company That Reached Nasdaq Selling "We'll Erase Your Past" — A Full Breakdown of LegalZoom's Business Model — LegalZoom isn't in the record-scrubbing business. It unbundled the work lawyers used to do, turned standardized legal ta
• Korea's Amended Network Act Took Effect July 7 — How Remedies Changed for Victims of Defamation and False Posts — Up to 5x punitive damages for disinformation, and fines up to KRW 1 billion (~$720K) for repeat distribution. Here's wha
• The People Who Built Airbnb and Stripe Just Named 7 Things They Want to Fund — YC partners put their own names on the Summer 2026 list of what they want to invest in. Running through it is one signal
• 5 Checks Before You File a Trademark Yourself — "Submitted" Is Not "Registered" — AI has made drafting a trademark application easy, but the gate that decides registration lies elsewhere. Here are the f
• A Tour of Defamation Case Law — How Far Can an Online Review Go Before It Is a Crime? — Where the line falls between reviews that were punished and reviews that were acquitted, drawn from actual Supreme Court
• What Happens When Someone Else Registers Your Brand Name First — A Survival Guide to First-to-File — A competitor's land grab, a filing in a partner's name, a trademark squatter. Three ways to lose your brand name, plus a
• Giving Employees Equity: What Founders Must Lock Down — Stock Option Vesting vs. Shareholders' Agreements — A founder's-eye breakdown of stock options (vesting) versus actual shares (rights of first refusal, call/put options).
• Five Minutes Before You Sign: A 7-Point Toxic Clause Checklist — Five minutes before signing prevents five months of disputes. Here are the toxic clauses that show up most often and how
• Customer Data Breaches: Small Businesses Are Not Exempt — Korea's Personal Information Protection Act applies regardless of company size. Here are the 72-hour notification and re
• The Money Quietly Leaking Out of Your Taxes as Sales Grow — 3 Things Online Sellers Miss — In online retail, the tax rules change wholesale the moment revenue crosses certain lines. Simplified-to-standard VAT co