This article explains how an energy business founded in 2000 transformed into global financial company the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), whose assets include the New York Stock Exchange. One key to the transition was founder and CEO Jeff Sprecher's appreciation that he could significantly boost trading capacity by turning the old open outcry system into fully electronic markets – something that occurred not that long ago. Those who criticize the financial industry for being slow moving might look to the disruptive influence of ICE, whose most recent expansion move was the announcement that it is buying electronic mortgage platform Ellie Mae. The author argues that this acquisition follows two key themes of Sprecher: the switch to digital from analog and the increasing importance of data. "The conversion of the mortgage process to digital is still in its early stages," the article says. "Like in other areas, Covid is accelerating it. Electronic mortgage closings (eNotes) have been available in the US for a while; adoption recently jumped to 3% from 1% a few quarters ago. But for the most part mortgage transactions are still largely paper-based and can take months to settle. Venture capitalist Josh Wolfe likes to talk about 'directional arrows of progress'. This seems like one of them, and Sprecher has the track record to do it." Post Ellie Mae, ICE will be a significantly larger company with an even broader revenue base.

The Financial Times did an incredible job helping to uncover the fraud at Wirecard. This looks to be the last installment on what happened – and it's a wild read. To summarize: "The Financial Times talked to more than a dozen people involved and reviewed hundreds of pages of internal documents to reconstruct the final months before Wirecard's collapse. They reveal a desperate effort stretching from Munich to Manila to cover up the fraud and to hoodwink the company's auditors that continued right up to the very end." The global nature of the organization's fraudulent activities become even more absurd when one considers that Wirecard was looking to purchase Deutsche Bank prior to the truth getting out: "A deal to acquire Deutsche Bank would have been the crowning achievement for a company which within a few years had become one of the most valuable in the country." This wasn't just an expansion plan: "A deal offered the prospect of a miraculous exit from the massive fraud Wirecard had been operating. Around €1.9bn in cash was missing from its accounts and large parts of its Asian operations were actually an elaborate sham. By blending Wirecard's business into Deutsche's vast balance sheet, it might be possible to somehow hide the missing cash and explain it away later in post-merger impairment charges." The scale and audacity of Wirecard's efforts to deceive are striking – and the second in command is still on the run!

Maybe I live under a rock, or maybe this Substack is living up to its name. Either way, I had never heard of L.O.L. Surprise dolls before, or the company that produces them, MGA Entertainment, an under-the-radar private company that had more than $5B of sales in 2019. Perhaps better known as the producer of Bratz dolls, MGA appears to use innovative, non-traditional marketing strategies to grow the reach and relevance of its toy brands. For example, L.O.L. Surprise dolls appear to be designed explicitly to cater to the unboxing trend on YouTube: "When the dolls first hit shelves in 2016, MGA sent the product out to some of the top unboxing channels," the article says. "They also released a series of stop-motion unboxing videos. In 2017/2018, they launched a new series on their own channel called 'LOL Surprise! Unboxed'." Beyond YouTube, MGA appears to be moving into the metaverse: "This past July, MGA announced that they had licensed out the LOL IP to create a game that will be exclusively available on Nintendo Switch." This furthers MGA's ability to deepen customer relationships with their IP: "The characters we know and love can live on many platforms concurrently. We familiarize ourselves with these worlds, and we watch narratives play out, to some degree, with our own time and space." If MGA is successful in furthering its IP's relevance outside of YouTube, it could potentially help write the playbook for how IP should be translated across mediums.

CEO Brian Chesky provides a good overview of where Airbnb has been and where it is going post-COVID in this interview. I didn't realize how close the company was to going public prior to the pandemic. In the interview, Chesky says: "In January this year, I came back from the holidays expecting for us to go public this year. And as recent as March we were working on the S1." IPO plans appear to be back on, according to the WSJ, perhaps because of an incredible snap-back in demand, even better than Chesky imagined: "That has been a surprise to us, maybe the extent that we've seen demand come back," he says. "The last few weeks we've seen volumes of business that are actually the same size volume as a year ago. When it was April, or even beginning of May, I could have never, ever imagined that it would have been that resilient." Chesky also covers how the company has gone back to its roots and is more focused on its core community and offerings, pulling back from ancillary projects. This is at least in part because of a new travel paradigm that Chesky sees emerging: "It's going to go from primarily business travel, going to big urban areas, staying in big central districts, to people traveling more for leisure to smaller communities near them. And I think this is an unmistakable trend." With Airbnb housing covering urban and rural areas, I'm curious how the company will further take advantage of any potential travel behavior changes.

Long time subscribers have likely noticed a number of references to "the Airbnb aesthetic." Recently, the Financial Times' architectural critic provided his opinion on what this style is and what it means more broadly for design, travel, and society. Let's just say he's not a fan: "The greatest irony is that flat-sharing sites have squeezed the spectrum of dwelling into a few instantly recognisable and easily reproducible tropes and made the average the aspiration. We scroll through these images on Airbnb or Instagram and we, albeit unconsciously, absorb it. It becomes an orthodoxy. We long for escape and travel, for a different city, for new experiences and we have ended up remaking the world in a continuous landscape of comfortable banality. The freer we are to roam, the more we browse; the more we yearn for a change, the more we have ensured that everything becomes the same." If we were to invert this, I wonder what answers or further question would arise. Meaning: why do we aim for standardization in our travels? Why is familiarity comfortable?

I have not yet read the 2005 book "One From Many" by Visa founder Dee Hock but this synopsis of sorts has fast-tracked it to the top of my list. Hock appears to have an incredible mind for leadership, people, organization, and, for lack of a better term, complexity theory (see article below). In describing the namesake of the book, Hock writes: "The theology of chaordic organization writ simple. Heaven is purpose, principle, and people. Purgatory is paper and procedure. Hell is rule and regulation." For many, this likely strikes close to home. Before lean was cool, fail fast and fail forward were in vogue, and culture mattered, Hock grasped fundamental truths as illustrated above, which helped him build VISA by educing behaviors from his peers. Much of this was grounded in simplicity: "Restraint went into the garbage can as I pleaded with Bob to abandon tradition, throw detailed planning to the winds, rely on a clear sense of direction, a few simple principles, common sense, trust in the ingenuity of people, and let the answers emerge." Finally, I found it interesting how Hock described community and its importance to individuals and businesses: "The essence of community, its very heart and soul, is the nonmonetary exchange of value. The things we do and the things we share because we care for others, and for the good of the place...The nonmonetary exchange of value does not arise solely from altruistic motives. It arises from deep, intuitive, understanding that self-interest is inseparably connected with community interest; that individual good is inseparable from the good of the whole; that all things are simultaneously independent, and intradependent—that the singular 'one' is inseparable from the plural 'one'."

This article, published in Aeon in association with the Santa Fe institute, is a titillating real world study of complex systems. The authors provide examples of complex systems in nature and in the man-made world, spanning financial markets, social structures in groups of monkeys, and global pandemics. They argue that in the man-made world, reactions to complex systems are often short sighted and fail to solve problems. This is at least in part due to a form of hindsight bias: "Fiascos happen when we use crude data to make qualitative decisions. Other reasons include facile understandings of cause and effect, and the assumption that the past contains the best information about the future. This kind of 'backward looking' prediction, with a narrow focus on the last 'bad' event, leaves us vulnerable to perceptual blindness." To better adapt to complex systems, the authors suggest "designing systems that favour robustness and adaptability – systems that can be creative and responsive when faced with an array of possible scenarios. The COVID-19 pandemic provides an unprecedented opportunity to begin to think through how we might harness collective behaviour and uncertainty to shape a better future for us all. The most important term in this essay is not 'chaotic', 'complex', 'black swan', 'nonequilibrium' or 'second-order effect'. It's: 'dawn."