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NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Stripe Wants to Buy PayPal. The Real Prize May Be Hiding in Plain Sight

Stripe’s $53 billion bet reveals a brutal truth about the tech Industry.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Jul 21, 2026

One of the oldest ideas in the technology world is that most of the competitive races among new entrepreneurial entrants that are proposing to provide various novel products and services will eventually resolve themselves into markets and verticals dominated by one (or at most two or three) very large and successful players while the rest of the also-rans and wannabes share the crumbs left on the table, until they eventually fold up their tents and pack it in.

It’s a cyclical circumstance in the tech industry and we’re seeing it again today in the AI frontier engine competition with the clear dominance of a few major platform players. Technology is a “winner take all” world driven by several practical and structural considerations that typically drive this kind of concentration conclusion. Some of the key contributing factors to this recurring outcome: demonstrated economies of scale, market-dictated centralization and standardization requirements, the herd mentality of large technology purchasers—believing that you can’t go wrong or lose your job if you’re buying what everyone else is using—and the power of Metcalfe’s Law, which describes and defines the exponential growth characteristics of networks.

And, of course, when you have a passive and forgiving regulatory environment and an utter lack of enforcement of antitrust laws aided, abetted and actively encouraged (if not directly ordered and demanded) by an easily bribed and corrupt administration, it becomes easier and easier to consolidate even traditional industries into the hands of a few powerful players aiming to crush their competitors as we see every day now in the broadcast, entertainment and media sectors. The message to the insiders and the sharks is pretty clear—the gloves are off, join the crooks in the White House in grabbing whatever you can, and worry about the consequences way down the line—if ever.

So, it comes as no great surprise that PayPal, which really started the whole online payments business in 1998, is once again being tossed around and targeted by Stripe. Founded more than a decade later in 2010, Stripe has just made an offer to buy PayPal for about $53 billion, about one third of Stripe’s most recent valuation. More interesting, in the manner of the minnow swallowing the whale, PayPal handled over $1.8 trillion in payments, which completely dwarfs Stripe’s current operations. But with its stock under tremendous negative pressure, PayPal makes a very attractive target for a business like Stripe, which has been trying to consolidate and control the overall e-commerce processing space since its inception.

PayPal was bought in 2002 by eBay and pretty much moldered in the shadows there until it was spun off as its own entity in 2015. Earlier this year, the CEO was fired, the stock being down more than 25 percent, and, more recently, PayPal split itself into 3 divisions—one of which is its rapidly growing Venmo division (acquired by PayPal in 2013) which processed about $300 billion in payments last year. Stripe—which in its own operations is clearly best of breed—certainly sees the Venmo division as a great add-on.

Of course, this would represent a very substantial contraction of the overall consumer payment space even though Apple Pay is growing quickly and other programs like Zelle are also gaining some modest traction. In the old pre-Trump days, this kind of a proposed deal—especially on this scale—folding together the two leaders in the space would be highly suspect from a regulatory standpoint. But in today’s laissez faire environment, you secure the Orange Monster’s blessing (often under the table), and then this kind of deal simply becomes business as usual.

In all fairness—and putting aside the fact that this smells like another Lutnick self-dealing special that we’ll only learn about a year from now—the truth is that PayPal may have committed the cardinal Silicon Valley sin of becoming boring and passé, unduly complicated in a world seeking speed, convenience and ease of access; and ultimately being perceived as behind the times, especially when compared to the simplicity of players like Stripe. While we might gripe about the concentration issues, the fact is that PayPal largely brought all this attention and grief on itself. It had a diamond in Venmo buried within a corporate bureaucracy that should have been exploited, promoted, and accelerated. Instead, in a final fit of accelerating its own demise, PayPal split itself into distinct parts that highlighted and identified the old news and the new value embedded within. This wasn’t lost on some of the bankers whose earliest analysis and comments were around the idea that Stripe might very well be able to make more profit and drive more growth for Venmo than PayPal ever could at this point.

Joseph Schumpeter may have died in 1950, but his doctrine of creative destruction lives on. Founders and market leaders aren’t entitled to persist indefinitely and it’s the regular emergence of new entrepreneurial companies with better technology, ideas and resources that eventually spurs change, innovation and growth. Sometimes it doesn’t hurt in the long run to be the second mover rather than the first.

PEDALDO

 

There’s an Ancient Solution to Our Modern Crisis of Attention

 There’s an Ancient Solution to Our Modern Crisis of Attention

July 12, 2026

By S.J. Murray

Dr. Murray is a professor of great texts and creative writing at Baylor University.

About 2,000 years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca warned of a crisis of attention. The problem wasn’t caused by smartphones or TikTok; it was because papyrus had become more widely available. As a result, scrolls became plentiful and wealthy readers had access to more texts than ever before.

Seneca observed that the minds of those who read too many scrolls too quickly became restless and unsteady. This kind of mind was less able, he noted, to “stay in one place and spend time with itself.”

The lesson then was no less true than it is now, in our perpetually distracted, screen-addled, multitasking age. When we allow ideas to come and go in rapid succession, we keep our minds too busy and wear them out. Nothing sticks. “One who is everywhere is nowhere,” Seneca cautioned.

Seneca did not have access to modern scientific studies or survey data, but he would not have been surprised by our plight. Professors report that students now have difficulty watching feature-length films, let alone finishing books. On average, we check email 77 times a day, and often it’s not because of a notification — we interrupt ourselves. We’re not even able to focus on our devices: Two decades ago, a given task could hold our attention for two and a half minutes; today, research shows, we make it only 47 seconds on one screen before succumbing to the itch to switch.

Our society tends to view this as a technological problem that demands technological countermeasures: anti-distraction apps that act like digital wardens and lock us out of our other apps; plastic phone jails equipped with kitchen timers; $500 minimalist phones that have the revolutionary feature of having no features at all.

But we’re overcomplicating a very old challenge that is more moral than digital. Seneca rightly saw distraction as a failure of character. We don’t need another algorithm or gadget to stop our minds from running around like unruly children, he would have argued. We need to relearn how to sit still with our own thoughts.

How exactly do you do this? Seneca had some practical advice, which he outlined in his “Letters From a Stoic”: Devote your attention to one idea a day.

For the past 20 years, I’ve practiced a simple discipline inspired by this advice. First thing in the morning, I forage in a book for my one idea. Typically, it takes about three to four pages (less than 10 minutes) to find one. I’m not looking for a memorable quotation or aphorism; I’m looking for a passage that challenges or better illuminates how I see the world.

Recently, for example, I was struck by a tragic realization near the end of Tolstoy’s novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” On the brink of death, Ivan cannot escape the feeling that life has passed him by. And yet he had achieved all the “right” things — the good job, the nice house, the fancy friends. It’s a sobering reminder that social standing and worldly goods are fleeting. Friendship, love, a deep sense of purpose beyond oneself, a connection to the transcendent: These are what matter in the end.

Having found my idea, I took the next step Seneca advises: “to ponder that day and digest.” So I took Ivan’s realization with me while I drank my morning coffee. Three sips in, I began auditing my own priorities. I found myself wondering: How was I nurturing the relationships that sustain me? Learning to love people better was a challenge I needed to face. I committed to reaching out that week to three friends with whom I’d fallen out of touch.

At lunchtime and again during my afternoon coffee break, I pondered Ivan’s question and directed my attention to the life around me. Walking my dog later, I stopped on a bridge over the Colorado River and listened to the birds sing. By bedtime, I wasn’t fretting about the messages piled up in my inbox.

Seneca compared the benefits of deep reflection to the alchemy by which bees transform nectar into honey. In the hive, bees repeatedly pass the nectar they gather among themselves, mixing it with enzymes that alter its chemical composition. Think of the nectar as information and the honey as wisdom. Whereas nectar sours within a matter of days, honey doesn’t spoil — not even after being buried for thousands of years in an Egyptian tomb.

Seneca’s honey metaphor corresponds to what psychologists call deep processing: By returning to the same idea repeatedly, we signal to our brain that the idea is worth moving into the architecture of long-term memory. Each time we retrieve an idea from memory, we also wrap it in new associations (a process known as reconsolidation), which ensures that those ideas remain relevant to our life as time goes on.

That is what was happening as I churned Ivan Ilyich over in my mind throughout my day. My own experiences and thoughts alchemized Tolstoy’s warning into a personal conviction that would start to form part of my character.

I am hardly the first person to appreciate Seneca’s insight that a crowded library is no match for a curated portfolio of deeply assimilated wisdom. Marcus Aurelius tested one Stoic principle a day against the chaos of war. Elizabeth I drew on a well of carefully digested wisdom from Seneca and Cicero to handle the pressures of ruling. Abraham Lincoln owned few books but mastered them all. By reading aloud and chewing on the likes of Aesop and Shakespeare as a young man, he forged a mind he compared to steel: “very hard to scratch anything on” but “almost impossible, after you get it there, to rub it out.”

I thought of Lincoln the other day as I pondered the character called the Autodidact in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel “Nausea.” This strange fellow haunts the local library with the goal of reading every book in alphabetical order. Stuffed with facts but starved for meaning, he embodies the belief that volume of information is a substitute for depth of understanding.

By anchoring each day in a single idea, I’ve spent 20 years trying to avoid the Autodidact’s hollow fate. I no longer chase the endlessly receding horizon of staying informed. I’ve traded the anxiety of the shallows for the untapped wisdom of deep waters.

We are often told that more information is the answer, but Seneca knew better. Wisdom is found not in the nectar we gather, but in the honey we take the time to make with it.

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Microsoft’s Massive Xbox Downsizing Signals the Brutal Reality of the AI Revolution

We’re beginning to see the secondary and other follow-on impacts of AI.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Jul 14, 2026

 

Sony’s PlayStation has been the global market leader for years, while Microsoft’s Xbox has been a distant second even after failed attempts by Microsoft to make its games a visible presence in the desktop world, where it clearly dominates the office installed base worldwide. Both Sony and Microsoft missed the migration of gamers to small mobile devices, where Nintendo prospered for a while—even before the phone revolution completely changed the video gaming space.

Now, we’re in the early innings of another sea change where the major tech players in the gaming industry are realizing that they no longer need armies of programmers, designers and developers to build and deliver the next generation of games. This is due to AI, of course, but also because the new games—mainly mobile—will be so lightweight and rapid as a result of the AI enhancements that there will be no need for any kind of bulky and costly game boxes or platform devices. Finally, as is the case across dozens of industries these days, the cost of the chips used in these boxes has been driven skyward by the adjacent and competitive demands of the AI companies for product that has cut into margins and may ultimately result in price increases at the worst possible time.

The latest salvo in this latest war of enforced attrition was last week’s announcement that Microsoft was making major changes in the Xbox video game business which entailed specifically cutting the Xbox workforce by 20 percent—about 1,600 employees now and another 1,200 plus over the next year. More importantly, the company is largely exiting the studio space, where it spent billions on expensive acquisitions not too many years ago.

The personnel growth in the MSFT games division was massive while the overall demand, player base and playtime all decreased substantially. It turns out—as with many other pre-phone and streaming activities—that millions of gamers would rather watch the play of truly talented players on YouTube than be second-rate participants in multiplayer competitions or simply play older games at home by themselves.

As far as the various studios are concerned, a few big ones like Activision Blizzard will shrink but remain, some others will simply be shut down, some are being encouraged to spin off and go off on their own with temporary support and assistance from Microsoft, and a few will remain until they too can be responsibly booted one way or another or quietly sold off to other buyers who right now seem to be few and far between.

But the most important takeaway from this highly visible and intentional effort at downsizing one lagging division to help offset enormous commitments and investments elsewhere in the enterprise—particularly in AI capabilities—is that we’re beginning to see the secondary and other follow-on impacts of the AI revolution. Thousands of Microsoft employees didn’t just lose their jobs because the AI tools could build new games, faster, cheaper and even more compelling than the former workers, they were also directly dismissed because the sales, marketing, manufacturing and promotion efforts of the entire video game division were shrinking and Xboxes were losing share and playtime as the gamers went elsewhere and the old boxes lost their sway and value.

This is only a single example, but I fully expect that we’re about to see many other industries rapidly roiled by similar advancements in process and speed or response time which will permit—in the name of speed, efficiency and massive cost savings, the wholesale elimination of entire groups and departments in businesses which will simply no longer be necessary because all of their functions in the value-creation chain will be substituted for with new AI-infused technologies. I’ll be writing shortly about a staggering combination in the advertising industry that brings together two powerful technologies and will completely upset and reorganize the ad creation business into a faster and cheaper system, which will also create more engaging and effective products.

It’s clear that a new form of M&A is already actively helping to connect and combine disparate companies with tools and services that are addressing common overarching problems in industries like advertising, and it’s also clear that these individual companies aren’t likely to build end-to-end systems by themselves in a timely fashion whether through lack of capacity or all the necessary resources or because they have been so deeply focused on solving their segment of the overall solution that they didn’t realize that a better and more robust and compelling solution could be offered by combining multiple offerings into a single comprehensive process.

 

Heather

 July 12, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 13, 2026

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The United States is currently in the grip of an outbreak of the Cyclospora parasite, which causes severe diarrhea and has sickened more than 3,000 people across the U.S. Last August, Aria Bendix of NBC News reported that on July 1, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), overseen by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., would no longer track infections caused by cyclospora and five other common causes of foodborne illnesses.

The CDC, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and ten state health departments covering about 54 million people have run a program called the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet, since 1995. Until last July 1 it monitored eight pathogens. Now it monitors only salmonella and toxin-producing E. coli.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai said then: “The health and safety of the American people is the Administration’s utmost priority. USDA, HHS, FDA, and the CDC will continue to cooperate and maintain the highest vigilance to safeguard our food supply against pathogens.” But director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University Barbara Kowalcyk called the decision to reduce FoodNet surveillance “very disappointing,” saying, “A lot of the work that I and many, many, many, many other people have put into improving food safety over the past 20 or 30 years is just going away.”

Meanwhile, the New World screwworm continues to spread in the U.S. and Central America, where Melody Schreiber of The Guardian reported today conservation cameras are showing the infestations spreading rapidly in deer, jaguars, peccaries, and even porcupines.

While Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has repeatedly blamed former president Joe Biden for the arrival of the flesh-eating maggots, three former officials from the Agriculture Department, as well as another source, told Marcia Brown of Politico in June that Trump administration officials held up funding for the construction of a facility crucial to slowing the spread of the pest and also delayed funding for a $100 million research initiative to find new ways to stop the screwworm.

Trump administration cuts to staffing at the USDA meant that in 2025 the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service staffing dropped by 25%. More than half of the area veterinarians retired or resigned.

Things aren’t going terribly well internationally, either.

Despite the repeated assertions of administration officials that the U.S. “holds all the cards” in its war with Iran, Edward Wong, Michael Crowley, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported today that the memorandum of understanding Trump signed on June 17, 2026, formalized Iran’s power over the Strait of Hormuz. Former U.S. analysts and officials told the reporters that the agreement was dangerously vague and that Iran has interpreted its provision saying that Iran would “make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels” through the strait as giving Iran control of the waterway.

As Iran has attacked ships trying to get through the strait near the Oman shoreline, Trump has ordered airstrikes on Iran. Over the weekend, Iran’s Navy said it was closing the strait “until the end of U.S. interference in the region.”

Today Tara Copp and Alex Horton of the Washington Post reported allegations from soldiers who survived the Iranian attack on Port Shuaiba in Kuwait that killed six U.S. military personnel and wounded dozens more that the generals in command ignored intelligence that Port Shuaiba was a probable target. The site was not adequately protected against drones, as scouts noted before the war when the Pentagon began to move troops off large bases onto smaller facilities to make them harder for Iran to target. Port Shuaiba’s emergency warning system wasn’t working, and the facility had no coverings to conceal personnel or hamper drones. Then troops were deployed there without weapons.

After the strikes, wounded soldiers sent to Germany’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center discovered that they had neither been listed in the military’s database as seriously injured nor been recorded on the flight manifest as medical evacuees, so could not be admitted as patients. Doctors treated them as outpatients and sent them to barracks where they waited a week to be sent back to the U.S.

In June, Jonah Kaplan and Michael Kaplan of CBS News reported that wounded soldiers and their families say the Army downplayed their injuries. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters in March that almost 90% of the injuries 400 service members had sustained had been minor and that the wounded soldiers had returned to duty. One man the Army classified as “not seriously injured” sustained extensive shrapnel wounds, a concussion, hearing and vision loss, and lung damage. Another underwent multiple surgeries to remove shrapnel.

Wounded soldiers told Kaplan and Kaplan that the duty for which they had been cleared was an active order to recuperate from injuries in a specialized recovery unit.

An Army spokesperson explained that the classifications were military designations. The spokesperson explained that the Army classifies soldiers as “seriously injured” or “very seriously injured” only if they are at risk of dying from their wounds within the next 72 hours.

Tonight the U.S. military launched new strikes against Iran. In a brief interview with Reuters over the weekend, Trump said: “We’re beating them up.”

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died Saturday night at age 71, apparently from a rupture of his aorta due to cardiovascular disease. Graham had just returned from a trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, where he met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. A former officer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG Corps) in the U.S. Air Force, Graham was a staunch supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and of Ukraine. In that, he stood apart from Trump.

In his earlier years in Congress, Graham was an establishment Republican who pushed for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton but was willing to work with Democrats personally. He once said of then-senator Joe Biden of Delaware: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.”

He objected to the takeover of the Republican Party by the MAGA Republicans. In December 2015 he called then-candidate Donald J. Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” and said: “He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.... I don’t think he has a clue about anything. He’s just trying to get his numbers up and get the biggest reaction he can.” “You know how you make America great again?” he said, “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

In 2016, Graham said he voted for Independent Evan McMullin because “Voting for Hillary Clinton was always a non-starter and I couldn’t go where Donald Trump wanted to take the USA & [the Republican Party].”

But after a meeting with Trump in March 2017, Graham became a loyalist. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he ushered through Trump’s judicial nominees, and his fierce defense of Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings for a position on the Supreme Court has been credited with enabling Kavanaugh’s nomination to go through despite accusations of sexual assault.

Graham was a staunch enough Trump supporter that he urged Trump not to concede the 2020 presidential election because “[i]f Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again.” He called Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger over the votes in Georgia; Raffensperger believed Graham was suggesting he should throw out legal ballots.

Graham briefly turned against Trump after the president tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, but then he came around to Trump again, supporting his 2024 presidential run.

Graham’s sudden death came as a surprise, but Trump was able to find Graham useful one last time. Although Graham’s top priority appears to have been working with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) to push more stringent economic sanctions on Russia, Trump told Kristen Welker of Meet the Press that he had spoken to Graham just before he died. According to Trump, Graham “said, ‘We’re all set for the SAVE America Act,’” the voter suppression act that Trump wants so badly. Trump continued: “He was pushing the SAVE America act like crazy…. And I said, ‘Well, we’re gonna get it done, Lindsey. We’re gonna get it done.’”

On May 3, 2016, Senator Lindsey Graham posted on social media: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”