Recent Activity

July — Issue #3

Anchor manages articles, but four customers depend on sub-article fragments with their own validity windows, permissions, and extraction needs.

June — Issue #2

The Replacement Test

On Signal and The Context Window Are Solving a Problem Okta Already Solved

Okta's marketing machine shipped the vocabulary these publications were built to pioneer, leaving only outside-in objection intelligence as an irreplaceable job.

June — Issue #1

The Causal Chain

When Your Source Is Your Customer's Press Release

Traces Okta's June MCP announcements through a source-dominance stress test to a product verdict: encode source-authority hierarchy per deployment.

Rafe Sundaram

Rafe Sundaram spent a decade in Singapore before returning to the United States, writing the newsletter that became the standard for independent technology strategy analysis. His formation was deliberately cross-disciplinary: a political economist's training at the University of Minnesota, an MBA at Chicago Booth, product management inside Oracle during the cloud transition, and a front-row seat to platform commerce from inside a Singapore-based infrastructure company. What makes him distinct is the combination of insider calibration and outsider position — he knows how platform strategy feels from inside a large company, and he has written about it from outside one for over ten years. He is the originator of the Demand Layer thesis, the framework that explains why internet-era markets reward demand aggregation over supply control. He is as willing to name what his framework cannot explain as to extend what it can. He commits to verdicts. He is not interested in balance for its own sake.