Informed i’s Weekly Business Insights

This is an economic revolution and we will win.” Donald Trump’s line on tariffs sounds like something from Robespierre or Engels. And as any revolutionary knows, to sweep away the old order it is not enough just to raise import duties. You also have to seize and refashion the institutions that control the culture. In America that means wresting control of Ivy League universities which play an outsize role in forming the elite (including Mr Trump’s cabinet). The MAGA plan to remake the Ivies could have terrible consequences for higher education, for innovation, for economic growth and even for what sort of country America is. And it is only just beginning.

The basic compact that exists between universities and the federal government: that taxpayers fund scientific research and provide grants for students from poor families, and in return, universities do world-changing research.  This deal has been the source of military as well as economic power. It has contributed to almost every technological leap that has boosted output, from the internet to mRNA vaccines and GLP-1 agonists to artificial intelligence. It has made America a magnet for talented, ambitious people from around the world. It is this compact—not bringing car factories back to the rust belt—that is the key to America’s prosperity. And now the Trump administration wants to tear it up.

His government has used federal grants to take revenge on universities: the presidents of Princeton and Cornell criticised the government and promptly had over $1bn in grants cancelled or frozen. It has arrested foreign students who have criticised the conduct of Israel’s war in Gaza. It has threatened to increase the tax on endowments: J.D. Vance (Yale Law School) has proposed raising it on large endowments from 1.4% to 35%.

What it wants in return varies. Sometimes it is to eradicate the woke-mind virus. Sometimes it is to eradicate antisemitism. It always involves a double standard on free speech, according to which you can complain about cancel culture and then cheer on the deportation of a foreign student for publishing an op-ed in a college newspaper. This suggests that, as with any revolution, it is about who has power and control.

So far, universities have tried to lie flat and hope Mr Trump leaves them alone, just like many of the big law firms that the president has targeted.  This strategy is unlikely to work. The MAGA vanguard cannot believe how quickly the Ivies have capitulated. The Ivies also underestimate the fervour of the revolutionaries they are up against. Some of them don’t just want to tax Harvard—they want to burn it down.

Resisting the administration’s assault requires courage.  If even the Ivies cannot stand up to bullying, there is not much hope for elite public universities, which are just as dependent on research funding and do not have vast endowments to absorb government pressure.

How, then, should universities respond? Some things that their presidents want to do anyway, such as adopting codes protecting free speech on campus, cutting administrative staff, banning the use of “diversity” statements in hiring and ensuring more diverse viewpoints among academics, accord with the views of many Republicans (and this newspaper). But the universities should draw a clear line: even if it means losing government funding, what they teach and research is for them to decide.

As geopolitical tensions continue to mount, governments around the world are expanding restrictions on what domestic companies can sell abroad. Most business leaders are familiar with export controls affecting military or dual-use items (those that have both military and civilian applications). What is harder to untangle are the complex export control restrictions that governments can implement, or have already implemented, to promote policy goals affecting their countries’ technological and economic security.

Multinational corporations and global exporters and importers face an increasingly complex trade environment. The three main causes are the proliferation of restrictions, the fracturing of alliances, and the growing application of extraterritorial authority.

The growing number and complexity of global export controls make it crucial for business leaders to assess the impact of such measures and mitigate any associated risk. They should also seek to identify potential competitive opportunities. To this end, companies should consider the following steps.

1. Adapt product design to account for export control risk.  Decision-makers should consider whether including sensitive technology in their products could make those products subject to export controls. They should also reexamine assumptions about target markets included in the original investment case in light of emerging trade restrictions. Since export controls can cover product inputs and components, and even the tools used in production, business leaders may need to make contingency plans across the entire product footprint.
2. Reassess the supply chains of existing products.  Executives should review their supply chains for dependencies on components and suppliers that could be subject to restrictions. They should also consider risks beyond regulatory compliance. Implementing software that checks whether customers are on export restriction lists, for example, will not highlight broader vulnerabilities in high-priority but potentially high-risk export markets. On the flip side, some companies may see opportunities emerge from new restrictions affecting foreign competitors.
3. Understand how export controls can affect your (and your competitors’) operations.  Keeping abreast of evolving trade controls, geopolitical alliances, and their respective impact on markets has become central to maintaining corporate resilience. Export controls’ impact can go beyond supply chains and the ability to export products to specific markets—it can also affect research and development, manufacturing, and people operations.
4. Ensure legal and compliance teams are up to the task.  The compliance function is critical to managing the impact of export controls—not only to avoid costly fines but to create potential competitive advantages. When legal and compliance professionals are properly trained on export controls, they can help their employers capitalize on new market opportunities by efficiently navigating complex regulations and license application processes.

One weeknight this past February, Wilson plugged her laptop into a projector that threw her screen onto the wall of a low-ceilinged loft space in East London. A small crowd shuffled in the glow of dim pink lights. Wilson sat down and started programming.

Techno clicks and whirs thumped from the venue’s speakers. The audience watched, heads nodding, as Wilson tapped out code line by line on the projected screen—tweaking sounds, looping beats, pulling a face when she messed up.  

Wilson is a live coder. Instead of using purpose-built software like most electronic music producers, live coders create music by writing the code to generate it on the fly. It’s an improvised performance art known as algorave. 

“It’s kind of boring when you go to watch a show and someone’s just sitting there on their laptop,” she says. “You can enjoy the music, but there’s a performative aspect that’s missing. With live coding, everyone can see what it is that I’m typing. And when I’ve had my laptop crash, people really like that. They start cheering.”

Taking risks is part of the vibe. And so Wilson likes to dial up her performances one more notch by riffing off what she calls a live-coding agent, a generative AI model that comes up with its own beats and loops to add to the mix. Often the model suggests sound combinations that Wilson hadn’t thought of. “You get these elements of surprise,” she says. “You just have to go for it.”  

Wilson, a researcher at the Creative Computing Institute at the University of the Arts London, is just one of many working on what’s known as co-¬creativity or more-than-human creativity. The idea is that AI can be used to inspire or critique creative projects, helping people make things that they would not have made by themselves. She and her colleagues built the live-¬coding agent to explore how artificial intelligence can be used to support human artistic endeavors—in Wilson’s case, musical improvisation.

It’s a vision that goes beyond the promise of existing generative tools put out by companies like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. Those can automate a striking range of creative tasks and offer near-instant gratification—but at what cost? Some artists and researchers fear that such technology could turn us into passive consumers of yet more AI slop.

And so they are looking for ways to inject human creativity back into the process. The aim is to develop AI tools that augment our creativity rather than strip it from us—pushing us to be better at composing music, developing games, designing toys, and much more—and lay the groundwork for a future in which humans and machines create things together.

Ultimately, generative models could offer artists and designers a whole new medium, pushing them to make things that couldn’t have been made before, and give everyone creative superpowers.

Digital platforms have been remarkably successful businesses for both native platform firms and traditional corporations. Seven of the world’s 10 most valuable companies have launched platform businesses, as have over 60% of unicorn startups. Many companies that didn’t start out as platform businesses—from retailers Walmart and Amazon to software providers Salesforce and ServiceNow—have also successfully accelerated their growth through platform strategies.  But numerous companies have missed out on growth opportunities.

Why does one platform company succeed at growth while another does not? The authors’ research on the paths of more than 50 platform companies, including several that have become platform giants, points to four main reasons: Unsuccessful firms don’t systematically consider all growth options; they mistakenly believe they must own the various kinds of interactions that occur on the platform, not realizing that huge growth often lies in not owning them; they overlook options to engage companies that can add value or even disrupt their businesses; and they don’t identify a compelling theme that broadens their scope.

The building blocks of platform growth are interactions (the types of actions or exchanges that take place between two or more users on a platform) and sides (unique user groups and complementors). For platform businesses, growth lies in four key areas: increasing engagement in existing interactions (growing the number of users on the platform and boosting the number of interactions per user), adding new interactions (add complementary interactions or substitute interactions to enhance growth), adding new sides (that share interests with existing sides or that can be served with existing platform resources), and adding new interactions and new sides simultaneously. Platform owners use the tools of architecture (the interfaces and technical design of the platform) and governance (the rules and incentives for participation) as levers to add and grow sides and interactions.

Share the Growth Opportunity.  Partner with complementary platforms or apps that are gaining traction and whose offerings align with the needs of existing users. Companies can identify those needs by asking users what’s missing, deploying data analytics to profile users and understand their activity, and tracking traffic on and off the platform to see where users are going and where they’re coming from. By forming partnerships, platform firms consolidate services into a single access point and generate network effects through shared users, data, and costs, thereby benefiting all parties.

Not owning` the various kinds of interactions that occur on the platform.  To profit from the innovations of numerous other players in an ecosystem, a platform doesn’t need to acquire or partner with them. Instead, managers can open the platform to arm’s-length affiliates that meet certain criteria and adhere to rules of governance. In this way platform managers can capture new ideas from people they don’t even know, lowering the risk of their own irrelevance. The strategy is especially useful when the variety and scale of use cases exceed what one company can build or even understand.

Define a Compelling Theme.  By focusing solely on core interactions, platform managers overlook other potential avenues of growth. Instead, they should strive to define a compelling theme for expansion in which platform interactions relate to one another in a coherent logic.  Platform owners should start by establishing a theme that is broad enough to contain many growth options.

Repeatedly employing the four growth mechanisms can lead a platform to become a “super app”—a platform that provides a single point of access to a multitude of related interactions.

Business-to-business marketplaces, like their consumer-facing cousins, help streamline purchasing by giving buyers and suppliers an online platform for conducting transactions. Once a company decides that it wants to create a marketplace to make transactions more efficient and extend its market reach, it must start by deciding on an ownership structure: Should the marketplace be kept in-house or spun out as an independent business? And is it worth bringing in partners or other owners?

Each type of structure has its advantages and disadvantages, and which is the best option will depend on several factors, including how fragmented the market is, the costs and benefits of independence from the parent company, and the value that outside investors or partners may bring.

The authors surveyed 200 B2B marketplaces to understand the key challenges and success factors they had encountered. The study found that such marketplaces are typically set up in one of three ways. Slightly more than half the respondents (51%) were pure startups, usually established by independent investors to serve highly fragmented markets. Nearly a third (30%) were owned and operated as internal company units, while about 1 in 5 (19%) were corporate spinoffs that started in-house and later separated as independent companies.

Companies considering which organizational structure is best for their B2B marketplace need to address three critical questions.

1. How fragmented — or concentrated — is the market?   In fragmented markets, “open” B2B marketplaces can deliver more value by connecting otherwise isolated buyers and sellers. An open marketplace accepts nearly all qualified participants and gives buyers and sellers a secure and trusted space to conduct transactions.  But for concentrated markets with just a few dominant players, there is little value in creating an open marketplace. A better alternative is a managed marketplace, where buyers and sellers are preapproved.
2. Does the marketplace’s connection with its corporate parent enhance or hinder potential participants’ attraction to it?  If the parent company can provide technology, skilled workers, capital, and other valuable resources, then it is worth operating a marketplace as an internal unit. If competitive or regulatory concerns are an issue, the company should consider spinning off the platform. If, however, the industry is dominated by many small suppliers, and none of them have sufficient resources to launch a B2B marketplace, the best option may be to form a startup.
3. Is the company open to partnerships — or a change in ownership?  As an online marketplace grows, its need for capital will increase. Often, the solution is to accept outside sources of capital in exchange for an ownership stake. However, any new ownership structure must also protect both the platform’s independence and the fairness of its operating model.

You’ve probably seen the victim mindset at work, both in yourself and others. Falling into a victim mindset is actually quite natural—it’s our brain’s way of protecting us from perceived threats and preserving our self-image when things go wrong. When we face challenges or criticism, our minds instinctively look outward for causes rather than inward for solutions. While this self-protective mechanism may feel comforting in the moment, it can ultimately hold us back from growth, resilience, and taking productive action.

Luckily, this mindset isn’t fixed. It’s something we can recognize and change with practice. Psychologist Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman has studied this pattern for years, drawing from both research and personal experience. His new book, Rise Above, offers evidence-based insights on how to shift from feeling powerless to taking meaningful action. Here are key takeaways from his work that can help you transform your approach at work.

1. Differentiate Between Victimization and Victim Mindset.  This distinction is crucial in the workplace. You might genuinely encounter unfair treatment—discrimination, working under a difficult manager, or dealing with unreasonable deadlines. But the problem arises when these experiences become the lens through which you view your entire work life.  Try a “yes, and” approach, acknowledging the reality of challenging systems while still asking yourself, “How can I as an individual make the most of my situation knowing I have to live within that system?” This doesn’t mean accepting unfair treatment or not working toward systemic change. Rather, it means refusing to surrender your agency and joy while navigating difficult circumstances.
2. Direct Your Thoughts.  When you catch yourself blaming external factors for your workplace challenges, create psychological distance from these thoughts.  You can also use a technique from psychologist Tasha Eurich of swapping why questions for what questions. Instead of asking, “Why does my boss always do this to me?” or “Why am I never recognized for my work?” to “What am I feeling right now, and what’s driving that feeling?” or, “What opportunities exist within this challenge?”
3. Develop Learning Hopefulness.  This earned hopefulness pairs perfectly with building emotional resilience. Many of us have become victims to our own emotions, believing we can’t take action until we feel comfortable or confident. But as Kaufman points out, “Sometimes the only way out is through.”  Learned hopefulness can be developed by:  Gradually expanding your “window of tolerance” by facing manageable challenges that stretch your comfort zone.  Practicing “bothness”—holding multiple emotions simultaneously: “I am frustrated and angry and I’m also excited and looking forward to completing this project”.  Remember that deep satisfaction often comes after pushing through difficulty, not from avoiding it.  Question the belief that you need to feel positive emotions to perform well.
4. Ditch All-or-Nothing Overgeneralization.  When one person or situation disappoints you at work, it’s remarkably easy to spiral into catastrophic thinking. A single critical comment from your manager can transform into “I’m never appreciated here.” One missed opportunity can become “I’ll never advance in this field.”  Remember most people aren’t actively conspiring against you. As Kaufman puts it, “The truth of the matter is that people just don’t care about you. They’re not actively conspiring against you. They’re just in their own worlds.”

His marriage suffered, and eventually ended. He gave up on hobbies and new friendships. “I sacrificed everything I felt I could,” Lore (pronounced “LOR-ee”) tells the author, sitting in a conference room at the R&D center of his meal-delivery company, Wonder, in Parsippany, N.J. Scribbled on a dry-erase board is a three-year timeline, building up to an IPO in 2027. “I had nothing else left to sacrifice, because when you do this startup thing, you can’t, like, dial it back or do it less. It just is what it is. You’re eating glass every day, you’re working 100 hours a week, and you’re all in on it. It’s the only way to make it work.”

Lore has made it work on a spectacular scale. His 2010 sale of Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com, to Amazon for $545 million netted him tens of millions of dollars. The $3.3 billion sale of another company he cofounded, Jet.com, to Walmart in 2016 resulted in a personal windfall that even his grandkids’ grandkids couldn’t spend. By the age of 45, Lore, raised in a tumultuous home on blue-collar Staten Island, had a CV that would surpass many of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs’ bucket lists.

And at 53—with a net worth estimated by Forbes recently to be $2.8 billion, including his ownership stake in the Minnesota Timberwolves NBA franchise—he’s far from done. In his latest big entrepreneurial bet, Lore has poured over $300 million of his own funds into Wonder, a virtual food hall for the digital generation with ambitions to become so much more. 

Lore’s grand vision is to build the app and business into the platform for all food delivery for your home—whether it’s a meal prepared at a Wonder facility or a Grubhub partner restaurant, a Blue Apron boxed kit, or a bag of groceries left on your doorstep—with an AI agent executing the experience. Eventually, he says, that AI might tell you exactly what to eat based on your tastes, dietary goals, and vital signs—then serve you those meals (as Lore’s personal chef already does for him). There may even be a robot making the food.

According to the author what drove him is to get to the bottom of a different question about the serial entrepreneur: Why is this billionaire, whose insatiable drive has already cost him his marriage of 22 years, still grinding through all those 90-hour workweeks? What more does Marc Lore have to prove? And to whom?

The author began reporting on Lore and his companies more than 10 years ago, and have long been fascinated by Lore’s myriad contradictions: He’s a ruthless corporate competitor, though most employees can’t recall him ever raising his voice to even a seven out of 10. He’s a brilliant mind who brags—often—that he doesn’t read anything beyond what’s directly necessary for the job at hand. And he’s a self-made billionaire who still doesn’t feel he has fully succeeded. He hears the industry whispers doubting whether he can ever build a profitable, long-term, independent business.  What would it take for Lore to rest content? A whopper of a public offering would be a nice start, he tells me: “If it’s an IPO and it’s tens of billions—10, 20, 30 billion—that would be the biggest entrepreneurial achievement of my career.”

In Lore’s telling, his sometimes combustible upbringing is the key to how he became the entrepreneur he is. Those years of loneliness and unhappiness left him with the habit of escaping into mental problem-solving—and perhaps living with uncertainty and risk gave him the “cognitive flexibility” that neuroscientists have observed in habitual entrepreneurs.

Over his career, Lore has raised more than $3 billion in venture funding across 15 fundraising rounds. He has been rejected at approximately 2,800 out of 3,000 pitches, by his own calculation—93% of the time.

This Black History Month, we can learn a lot about how to move through challenging times by looking back at leaders who have experienced their fair share of challenges, too. It takes bravery, stamina, guts and a vision to move through dark eras and emerge victorious. Frederick Douglass was one of such leaders who taught us what resilience looks like.  Here are three lessons that all entrepreneurs can learn when navigating trying situations in their professional and personal lives.

Choose the path of self-development.  In challenging times, sometimes our best teacher is ourselves. And no one knows that better than Frederick Douglass. Despite being born into slavery, Frederick Douglass knew his ticket to freedom was through education. At the age of 6, Douglass moved to the Wye House plantation, where he was looked after by Lucretia Auld, the wife of a recently deceased slave overseer. Later, she sent him to serve her family members, Hugh and Sophia Auld, in Baltimore. When Douglass was about 12 years old, Sophia Auld began teaching him the alphabet. However, her husband Hugh strongly disapproved as he felt that literacy encouraged enslaved people to seek freedom.  In secret, Douglass would teach himself to read and write and once said, “Knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom.” Douglass taught himself how to spell from Webster’s spelling books and began to read and write with inspiration from posters on cellar and barn doors. In his later years, he went on to write three bestselling biographies.  The lesson is this: When it’s time to evolve and change, choose the hard path of self-development for long-term growth and success.

Do and say what’s right — even if no one’s listening.  Douglass was known worldwide as a vocal abolitionist. He spent two years in Ireland and Great Britain, delivering lectures on the need to eliminate slavery in the United States. Sympathetic Europeans donated money to buy his freedom from the Auld family. When he returned to the U.S. in 1847, he started the first abolitionist newspaper, the North Star, where he advocated the abolition of slavery in writing. Here’s the lesson: Say and do what you know is right. In business, we often follow our competitors, copy what they do, iterate on it, and try to outdo them. But some of the best entrepreneurs chart their own paths, often swimming upstream, innovating along the way, and doing something that no one has ever done. In challenging times, these may feel like risky moves to make. But, these entrepreneurs focus on their vision for the future and do what they think is right, even if others aren’t bought in.

If you’re feeling alone, build coalitions.  When you’re stuck in a challenging situation — whether fighting to keep your business afloat or navigating an uncertain market — you can weather the storm by building coalitions and partnerships with those around you. Frederick Douglass did exactly that but with the women’s suffrage movement.  In 1848, Douglass was the only Black person in the room as he attended the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women’s rights convention in New York. When others couldn’t see the connection between women’s suffrage and abolition, Douglass spoke firmly in favor of a woman’s right to vote and equated the rights of Black men with the plight of women to vote. He often said that the world would be a better place if women had the right and power to participate in politics. For this era, this kind of partnership was revolutionary. Douglass wouldn’t be alive to see the 19th Amendment passed, but his allyship and advocacy for civil rights and liberty for all will never be forgotten.  The lesson is this: Build partnerships. No one in business can survive alone. If you haven’t built as many partnerships, alliances, and relationships as you’d like, now’s the time. Douglass understood that by leaning on a community of people who shared similar values and goals, he could elevate his cause and create collective growth. When times get hard in business, it’s the strength of your partnerships that will see you through.

Whatever you think of his policies, it’s impossible to deny that Barack Obama is one of the most gifted communicators of his generation. But he wasn’t always a riveting speaker.  How did the former president go from being a sometimes terrible communicator to a consistently excellent one?  In a recent conversation at Hamilton College, Obama put his transformation down to five very doable changes that anyone aspiring to improve their communication skills could make. If he can improve so much with just a few small shifts, maybe they can help you up your speaking game too. 

1. He practiced.  When Hamilton College president Steve Tepper asked Obama to share his communication secrets, the ex-president kicked off his remarks by telling: “At least when I started as a politician and public speaker, I was often terrible.” What changed? Obama’s first bit of speaking advice is as boring as it is essential. He practiced.   “I think that the first thing to know about speaking, writing, or communicating generally is if you practice, like everything else, you can get better,” he tells Tepper. “I’ve had a lot of reps.”
2. He focuses on conviction over rhetoric.  Is there an art and science to building a persuasive argument? Absolutely. You can find article after article full of advice and tips. Many are worthwhile. But according to Obama, none of those rhetorical tricks are as important as knowing your subject matter and truly believing in what you’re saying.   “I actually believe that the single most important thing about being an effective communicator is having conviction, believing what you say,” Obama insists. “If you know what you believe as a starting point, then you will naturally communicate that conviction to other people, and you will seem authentic.”
3. He writes it out.   After eight years of constantly communicating as the president of the United States, you might think that Obama has developed his communication skills to the point that he can wing a speech pretty well. I’m sure he’d do a lot better than most of us, but Obama insists that he still prepares his remarks in advance and writes down what he wants to say.  “Actually write out what you’re going to say,” he advises. “I don’t care how good you are, you’re probably going to be better if you actually sit down and try to figure it out ahead of time.”
4. He swapped stats for stories.   A lot of people labor under the misapprehension that you change people’s minds with facts and logic. But that’s not what science shows. People are far more likely to be swayed by stories and empathy than charts and statistics. It’s a lesson that was central to Obama’s transformation from sweating, stumbling community organizer to widely admired orator.   “I wasn’t necessarily as good as I should have been when I first started. It was usually because I was filling my speeches up with facts and policies. That’s not how most of us get information. We get information from stories about our own experience, about other people’s experience,” Obama says.   If you want to be an effective communicator, “talk like a normal human and not like a book,” Obama says.
5. He became a better listener.  When people are looking to improve as communicators, they usually focus on themselves. What should they say or do differently? But Obama closes with unexpected advice that flips that natural impulse on its head. To become a better speaker, you don’t just need to learn to speak well. You also need to learn to listen well.  “If you’re a good communicator, you should also be a good listener,” he claims. “When I first started on the campaign trail with all those facts and policies, etc., it was pretty flat and dry. What actually made me into a better communicator was when I started actually listening to the stories of the people I was meeting.”   Why does better listening lead to better speaking? Because when you really listen, you understand people better. When you understand people better, you’re far better equipped to speak to them in a way that will resonate with them.  “When you listen and you get a sense of other people’s priorities, lives, values. That means that you can reach a broader audience,” Obama says.