Welcome to Leftovers. This is a bi-weekly update, so I'm not spamming your inboxes. Leftovers are the forgotten scraps within the feed and Gmail. Including some Backbone coverage, non-business finds, culture riffs (not celeb stuff), and other pages I think are neat. I will also include the data dashboard, and memes; maybe I'll try to create some industry-related AI cartoons. Leftovers will be more personal pieces of content; it will help you learn more about me, but I also want to include business content so it adds a little value.

"They didn't just sponsor a race, they took over a town," This is an exciting piece on brand marketing and race sponsorships coming out a small mountain village in France. I have long been time fan of Hoka often buying two pairs of shoes at a time from them as I become attached to shoe designs.

Source - People, Brands and Things, Substack

Over the past few weeks while building up content for this newsletter I have subscribed hundreds of new blogs. Michael Wolfe ‘The Next Founder’ has been a great find me for. This blog falls right into this project so it came at a right time.

Source - "Be a 'Product Picker'": Uninvent argues the most important job at an early-stage startup doesn't have a title.

Over the past few days, I have decided that I am out on car collectors. So much so, that I think there is a small group of them that are pushing the green nonsense within the car world to increase the value of their ICE vehicles. This would be because if ICE vehicles are no longer made, I assume the value of many of the rare ones would see a price catalyst from that event. Anyway, Monterey Car Week set a record $762M in auction sales, including an all-electric Bugatti-style "Luce" that went for $40M — the classic-car market is going K-shaped right along with everything else.

Source - The Fast & The Fabulous (Puck) 

While singing up for hundreds of newsletters across the backbone industry, I thought to myself I needed a few palette cleansers. This newsletter that is centered around drinking is just that. While I am not a heavy drinker myself, I do appreciate meeting up with the lads for some beers.

Source - The Fingers Podcast interviews journalist Susannah Skiver Barton on American whiskey. (Fingers)

Base Power’s model sits squarely at the intersection of batteries, grid reliability, vertically integrated infrastructure and the question of whether the next utility gets built differently from the last one. Worth the full listen.

Source - David Senra interviews Zach Dell on Base Power (YouTube)

“Slowly than all at once” I believe is the saying. I am no expert on commodity trading but I do think the AI’s will be.

Source - "The Commodities Renaissance Is Here" argues the shift into real assets has already started in the ground but hasn't reached portfolios yet, calling that gap the opportunity. (The Merchants News, Substack)

I have been following Ana Andjelic for a long time. Her blog is great from what I can tell as a free user.

Source - "How brands make culture": five mechanisms, from repetition to organization, that brands use to build and hold culture together. (The Sociology of Business, Substack)

Didn’t see that one coming.

Source - The Taliban told the Financial Times it would "absolutely" welcome US investment in Afghan mining, infrastructure, and agriculture, framing it as a break from 20 years of war. (Heatmap News)

Imagine walking along a road and finding a fence standing in the middle of an open field, with no wall, no hedge, and no obvious reason for it to exist. A certain kind of reformer sees this and says: I don't see the point of this fence, let's tear it down. A more careful thinker says: if you don't see the point of it, that is exactly the reason you should not touch it yet. Go away, think about it, and only when you can explain why the fence was put there in the first place do you earn the right to say whether it should come down.

The idea comes from G.K. Chesterton's 1929 essay collection "The Thing," where he was arguing against reflexive reform more broadly rather than describing a literal fence; the tidy field-and-fence version people quote today is a later paraphrase that captures his point cleanly enough to have stuck. It gets invoked constantly in engineering, law, and corporate strategy as a caution against stripping out anything labeled legacy, redundant, or bureaucratic without first understanding what problem it was solving, since removing it often just re-imports whatever failure it was built to prevent. It's also frequently misused as a blanket argument against any change at all, which is not what Chesterton was making the case for; his point was about earning the right to remove something through understanding, not about never removing anything.

We’ve got exciting updates, fresh faces, and some serious miles ahead. Whether you’re training for your next race or just getting started, we’ve got something for everyone.

This blog runs on caffeine and 10-k’s. Send a cup of joe my way to keep the words flowing

I am currently working on an Episode about Dominos Pizza. They are a yummy pizza company. The genius cofounder sold his stake just after being founded for a used WV bug probably worth a few hundred at the time.

Thank you and may the force be with you,