Welcome to the Pirate Street Journal. The business press covers companies. We cover categories. Each week, we pick three headlines worth paying attention to and break down the category underneath. Read the news through a different lens.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Gartner grew its revenue again last year.
Yet investors wiped out more than $30 billion of its value anyway.
The stock fell from $551 to $155 in about twelve months.
Still profitable. Still growing. Still the name every CIO knows.
Wall Street just stopped believing it has a future worth paying for.
The business is fine. The future got repriced.
Here’s what we covered in this episode:
1. Gartner is Going Through the Grinder
For 40 years, Gartner was the company you paid to tell you what tech to buy. It peaked at $551 a share in November 2024. This week it trades around $155, a 70% collapse, with market cap down from roughly $42 billion to about $10 billion.
Within consulting, true strategy work is about seeing the future and taking action.
Roger Martin pegs true strategy at about 3% of what the big consulting firms sell.
The vast majority of consulting is copying and pasting the past. Also known as benchmarking. Or best practices. Or gap analysis.
It is formulaic. It is paint by numbers. It’s monkey see, monkey do.
And why AI does it 10x better, faster and cheaper.
That is why Gartner’s future has less value.
2. OrangeTwist’s Lightning Strike Printed Profits
A top medical spa company called Orange Twist ran a Lightning Strike in Newport Beach called TwistX.
It was a mid-six-figure event at the Hyatt that turned a profit. Vendors covered about a third (30 brands paying to get in front of buyers), consumers covered about a third ($250 a head at the door), and on-the-spot treatment bookings covered the rest.
A Lightning Strike concentrates a year of marketing budget into one moment instead of spreading it thin across twelve. Pulled off right, it pays for itself, which flips marketing from cost center to profit center.
OrangeTwist’s TwistX was a massive hit.
And it’s only going to get bigger and better.
Learn how they did it.
3. Teen summer jobs are declining. That’s ok.
Teen workforce participation peaked near 58% in 1979, and the share holding a job has fallen from 49% to 31%.
The decline is almost entirely teenagers opting out of jobs that make a buck, but don’t prepare them for the future.
Smart teens are trading out retail jobs for AI native jobs.
Jobs that don’t pay minimum wage, but show you how to make $30,000 before you turn 18 use AI skills adults don’t have today.
3 conversations to have about the news with the Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot
We just told you what is happening to three categories. The bots help you figure out what it means for yours. Reading the news is the easy part. Turning it into a move you can make this week is the part most people skip, and it is exactly what The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot are built for. They jam with you 24/7, they come with the founding tier, and they never get tired of your follow-up questions.
Take this to them this week:
Find out what your knowledge work is actually worth. Ask the bots which parts of your job repackage existing knowledge and which parts create net-new. Gartner just lost $30 billion proving the market only pays for one of them.
Spec a Lightning Strike for your category. Tell the bots what you sell and have them design one concentrated moment that could pay for itself, the way TwistX did. Then ask them where it would break.
Run the teenager’s playbook on yourself. Hand the bots $30,000 and a laptop and have them build a net-new business using the Four Capitals. The 18-year-old’s edge works at any age.
Not a founding member yet? You can join here.
What’s coming up on Pirate Street Journal
Every week, we drop the podcast. Three topics, thirty minutes, one cowbell.
Once a month, we publish a written deep dive, the kind of category analysis you cannot get anywhere else. That one is for paying subscribers only, monthly and founding.
Two ways to climb aboard now:
Monthly subscriber: $20/month. You’ve done dumber things with $20.
Founding subscriber: $375/year. For about a dollar a day, you get every mini-book we’ve ever written (300+), every audiobook (30+), digital copies of all seven of our Big Books, and unlimited access to The Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot, your 24/7 AI jamming partners for category building.
Subscribe today and start jamming with the bots.
Recorded Friday, June 12. Every number above is as of that morning.
Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).
Stay tuned for next week’s episode.
Hey Ho, Let’s Go!
Arrrrrrr,
Category Pirates
Eddie Yoon
Christopher Lochhead
