Business

How Wetherspoon’s Conquered Britain

This is the sort of business profile usually reserved for tech unicorns. It turns out that this billion pound company, built by selling a vast volume of cheap pints (and coffees, and curries, and breakfasts), shares many similarities with Silicon Valley disruptors. It starts with a maverick founder and a relentless culture of innovation and competition, leads to the criticism that inevitably comes with scale, and ends up with the mixing of business and politics.

Why Amazon is eating the world

A look at the radical way in which Amazon is systematically turning each component of its business into an productised commercial venture with external clients – starting with their technology infrastructure, then their fulfillment service and so on. The objective goes beyond revenues and profit (though they come – Amazon Web Services has a $14bn annual run rate) to building a “moat” around their market position and ensuring that the pressure of servicing external clients keeps all units in Amazon lean and competitive.