Tech Economics

Founders fixate on zero marginal cost as the magic of software. But the cost of acquiring, convincing, and keeping customers doesn't scale the same way the product does.

Acqui-hires are sold to employees as soft landings. For founders and investors, sometimes they are. For everyone else, the math is brutal.

High prices aren't a growth obstacle. For B2B software, they're often the engine. Here's why the math works the way it does.

Counterintuitive but consistent: higher API prices often attract more serious buyers, reduce support burden, and improve retention. Here's the mechanism behind each.

The software holding up the internet is often maintained by unpaid volunteers. Here's why that's a structural problem, not a gratitude problem.

The salary number on an offer letter is the least important variable in engineering economics. Most companies never learn this until the damage is done.

Most startups that survive their first product die on their second. It's not bad luck. It's a set of structural traps that repeat with eerie consistency.

When HashiCorp flipped Terraform to a non-compete license in 2023, it revealed a structural problem the industry has been ignoring for decades.

Salary is the wrong unit of measurement for engineering talent. The real cost is in what doesn't get built, what breaks, and what slows everyone else down.

The acquisition offer isn't always about ownership. Sometimes it's about neutralization. The economics of competitive suppression explain more tech history than most people realize.

Burn rate tells you what a founder believes about the future. Here is how to read the signal correctly.

The software powering most of the internet was written by people who weren't paid to write it. Here's why that's stranger than it sounds.

It's not the enterprise plan doing the heavy lifting. The real margin engine is one tier up from your cheapest option, and most founders never fully understand why.

SQLite is the most widely deployed database in history. Its creator spent decades making it correct, not fast. That sequence mattered.

The Nortel patent auction wasn't a sad footnote to a corporate collapse. It was the business model working exactly as intended.

The companies that give their core product away for free are now worth more than the ones who locked it behind a paywall. Here's why the math actually works.

The most valuable engineers at high-growth tech companies aren't the ones shipping the most code. They're the ones stopping the wrong code from being written.

When a VC backs your competitor, it feels like betrayal. It's actually a deliberate portfolio strategy with a specific financial logic founders rarely see clearly.