The Conté Principle: Turning Scarcity into Strategy

The Conté Principle: Turning Scarcity into Strategy

In 1795, France ran out of graphite mid-war. What Nicolas-Jacques Conté did next created a process the entire world still uses 230 years later. This episode unpacks the Conté Principle — why the companies that survive supply crises find another source, but the companies that dominate the next era make the source irrelevant. With lessons from TSMC, Toyota, and a pencil.

What If You Stopped Designing for Who Your Customer Wants to Be?

Every product strategy framework tells you to build for your customer's aspirational self. The Snooze button never got that memo — and became one of the most-used features in human history. In this episode, we trace the surprisingly long history of not wanting to wake up, from medieval monks to Victorian knocker-uppers, and ask what it means for the products you are building right now.

The Tragedy of Analytical Correctness

Matt Maloney saw DoorDash coming. He predicted the losses, questioned the subsidies, and called the unit economics broken — years before the market proved him right. So why did Grubhub finish last? In this episode, we unpack one of the most underappreciated traps in business strategy: the difference between being analytically correct and being competitively correct. Being right about the market and winning the market are not the same thing — and the gap between them has killed more companies than bad strategy ever did. If you run a business, lead a team, or make decisions under competitive pressure, this one is worth your full attention.

The Ear Behind the Lens

For four hundred years, some of the greatest minds in human history could not figure out how to keep spectacles on a face. They tried hats, ribbons, wigs, handles, and nose bridges. The answer was sitting on the side of their head the entire time — free, available, perfectly shaped, completely ignored. In this episode, we trace why they missed it, what it reveals about how every business gets trapped staring at its product instead of watching its people, and what Andy Grove, IDEO, Kodak, and a pencil tucked behind an ear all have in common. The ear was always there. The question is whether your business is looking at it.

The Candle Strategy for Businesses

The candle should have died in 1879 when Edison lit the world. It didn't — and the reason why is one of the most overlooked strategy lessons in business history. In this episode, we trace how a simple stick of wax outlasted gas lamps, kerosene, and electricity by doing something most disrupted businesses never think to do: it stopped competing and started meaning something. From birthday cakes to Diwali to a ₹8,000 luxury candle that sells out every season — this is what product immortality actually looks like.