The Wall Street Journal covers companies. Pirate Street Journal cover categories.
Each week, we pick three headlines worth paying attention to and break down the category underneath. Live every Tuesday at 7 am PST / 10 am EST. See the news through a different lens.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Here’s what we covered in this episode:
1. Is New York being so smart they’re stupid?
On July 14th, New York became the first state in America to ban new hyperscale data centers. Governor Kathy Hochul signed a permit freeze of up to a full year, with calls to extend it. The stated reasons: power bills, water, grid strain.
Category kings bring more blessings than burdens, and New York only did half the math.
In 1978, four people started a memory company in the basement of a Boise dental office. That’s Micron. Today it’s the third-largest private employer in Idaho, and its newest expansion is $15 billion, the largest private investment in state history and the first new memory fab built in America in 20 years.
The choice governors keep missing is future versus past.
Shenzhen was a fishing village in the late ‘70s and is now 17 million people, proof there can be more than one Silicon Valley. The next Boise is wherever someone decides to welcome it.
2. Are Apple’s higher prices good long-term?
On June 25th, Apple raised prices across the line: the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra jumped $1,300, the M4 Max $500, even the entry MacBook $100. Tim Cook called the memory shortage a “100-year flood.” DRAM and NAND ran up about 60% last quarter, another 13 to 18% coming, and analysts say memory could double before it’s done.
Business Media reads a supply-chain story.
The category underneath is where your AI lives and who gets to watch.
On-prem is back, and the high-order bit is data ownership, not the sticker price.
For 30 years, the arrow pointed one way, into the cloud, ever since Benioff incorporated Salesforce in 1999. It’s swinging back, because when your data goes into someone else’s servers, they see what you’re doing and build the context layer on top of it. Ask Cursor, which grew into one of the fastest software companies ever on top of Claude, right until Anthropic saw the growth and shipped a competitor.
Play that out for the enterprise and the individual:
Goldman Sachs writing an S1 does not want an AI harvesting its intellectual capital.
Merck, P&G, Citibank. Every regulated giant lands on the same paradigm: I own my data, I own the context layer, you can’t compete with me.
Dell. Infrastructure growing 40%, consumer laptops 5%. On-prem drives both, and hardware prices with it.
Apple is a missionary on privacy the way Netflix was on binge-watching when Pirate Eddie got flamed for cheering its 2011 price hike. More memory on the phone means more AI on the device, plus the agency to route the right model to the right task instead of being beholden to one LLM.
3. Can Costco cashiers become millionaires?
The Wall Street Journal profiled a Costco cashier: $32.90 an hour, 60 years old, 40 years in, started at Price Club making $5.85. He owns a three-bedroom house with a pool and a 401k north of a million dollars. He’s not the exception. Costco’s own CFO says many thousands of hourly workers have crossed a million in retirement, and turnover runs 7% a year against a retail average of 60%.
That math only works one way.
The category makes the career, so find the category king before it’s crowned and ride the left side of the S curve. Costco marks everything up 15% when the rest of retail runs 35 to 40%, and that radical generosity is the tell. The pattern is everywhere once you stop looking at prestige:
US Robotics. The CEO’s secretary and janitor both hit millionaire on stock before the 3Com acquisition.
Chobani. Gave 10% of the company to its 2,000 early employees.
WinCo, Stewart’s Shops, waste management. Nobody’s dream résumé, stacked with millionaire employees anyway.
Then look at the other side. Xerox did almost $22 billion in revenue in 2011 and is on track for about $7 billion this year. You can be smarter and sharper than you were then and still be worse off, because Xerox operates in declining categories. The category made you a loser while you got better.
3 conversations to have about the news with the Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot
The Pirate Eddie Bot and the Pirate Christopher Bot are your 24/7 jamming partners on the Founding tier. They take the week’s moves and help you apply them to YOUR category. Three to run this week:
Count your blessings, not just your burdens. Hand the bots your industry, your city, or your company and ask what “yes to the category king” would pull along the way New York refused and Boise didn’t. Pressure-test whether you’re planning for the next 40 years or the last four.
Own your data and own the context layer. Ask the bots where in your business you’re handing your intellectual capital to someone who can turn around and compete with you, and what your on-prem version looks like. Cursor learned this the expensive way.
Find the category king before it’s crowned. Feed the bots your career or your next hire and score it on the S curve: is the category rising, does it treat its supers and investors well, is AI the co-founder? That’s the difference between a Costco and a Xerox.
The through-line across all three: the category makes the company, which makes the career, and the news keeps rewarding the people who reject the premise the press prints.
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What’s coming up on Pirate Street Journal
Tuesday episodes: three topics, thirty minutes, a couple of bongos. Mini-books and DDRs land every other Friday. Founding Members get the full DDR start to finish; everyone else gets the preview. Breaking News reports go to all paying subscribers.
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Recorded Friday, July 17th. 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.
Arrrrrrr,
Category Pirates
Eddie Yoon
Christopher Lochhead
