Why Some Growth Strategies Create Value (and Others Destroy It) In 2000, General Electric was the most valuable company in the world. By 2024, it had been broken into three separate businesses after decades of underperformance. At the same time, Amazon made one of the most important capital allocation decisions
In 2014, Microsoft wasn’t a failing company, but it was a stagnating one. It had scale, distribution, and cash. What it didn’t have was momentum. * Cloud? Amazon was miles ahead. * Mobile? Google had already won. * Culture? Internally described as political, siloed, and risk-averse. Most incumbents in this position
What Was the Global Financial Crisis? The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2009 was the most severe financial and economic catastrophe to strike the developed world since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Originating in the US subprime mortgage market—a sector that in 2006 accounted for about 20% of
Executive Summary Between June 1921 and November 1923, the German Papiermark lost virtually all its purchasing power, collapsing from 60 marks per US dollar at the end of the war to 4.2 trillion marks per dollar at its nadir. This is the most consequential currency destruction in modern economic
Most deal teams spend disproportionate time negotiating warranties and disclosure letters. But the real economics of post-closing risk are not determined there. They are determined in the liability limitations section of the SPA. A warranty is only as valuable as the mechanism that governs whether a breach results in recovery.
In September 2021, Intuit paid $12 billion in cash and stock for Mailchimp — an email marketing platform that had never raised a single dollar of outside capital. Co-founders Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius had spent twenty years building the company from a side project into a machine generating $800 million
In M&A, the headline price is rarely the final price. Between signing and closing, the target keeps operating: receivables are collected, payables come due, inventory turns, and accruals change. A working capital adjustment exists to account for that movement. That sounds technical. It is not. In many private
Most deal teams treat the choice between locked box and completion accounts as a drafting preference. It isn’t. It’s a structural decision about who bears economic risk, who controls financial information, and how much trust exists between buyer and seller. Choose the wrong mechanism—and you don’t
In March 2000, the dot-com bubble hit its peak. Investors believed the internet had made old valuation rules obsolete, and the NASDAQ Composite had surged from 1,006 to 5,048 in less than five years. Two and a half years later, it had fallen 78%. So what caused one
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was a leveraged collapse that wiped out nearly 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and helped usher in the Great Depression. In this guide, we break down what caused the 1929 crash, how Black Thursday and Black Tuesday unfolded, why leverage turned panic
In July 2025, a UK High Court judge ordered Mike Lynch's estate to pay Hewlett Packard Enterprise $945 million — the culmination of a 14-year legal battle rooted in the question of what Autonomy's sellers had represented about the business they were selling. HP had paid $11.
Over the past 250 years, the biggest fortunes were built not by the inventors of breakthrough technologies, but by the companies that industrialised them at scale. From Arkwright’s mills to Standard Oil’s refining empire to Nvidia’s AI chip ecosystem, the winners controlled the chokepoint that competitors could
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