Weekend Briefing No. 623
IKEA! -- Patagonia's Donations -- Housing Breaks Everything
Welcome to the weekend.
This week in my other newsletter, Acquired Briefing, I’m covering one of my favorite companies of all time. It’s also, in my opinion, Acquired’s best episode ever. I’ve been looking forward to sharing this one with you for months. If you aren’t subscribed yet and you love business deep dives, join our rapidly growing community and subscribe below to get these directly to your inbox every Thursday.
Prime Numbers
762,400,000 — Print book sales at tracked U.S. outlets reached 762.4 million units in 2025, up 0.3%, sustaining post pandemic gains but remaining well below the 2021 peak of 839.7 million copies when pandemic reading habits drove a publishing boom.
19,000,000 — U.S. Bible sales hit 19 million units in 2025, marking a 21-year high with a 12% jump from 2024 and double the 2019 figure, as people increasingly seek spiritual anchors amid global uncertainty and social upheaval.
200 — A study of nearly 200 working adults found that intentionally shaping hobbies through goal-setting and learning boosted workplace creativity and meaning more than personal life satisfaction, suggesting organizations should support employees’ leisure activities through development funds and recognizing “me-time” commitments.
IKEA!
IKEA may be the most singular company in business history. A globally scaled, $50B revenue business with no direct competitors, yet only ~5% market share. One of the world’s largest retailers, yet selling only their own products. Generating billions in free cash flow annually, yet having no shareholders. Ingvar Kamprad’s vision and discipline are extraordinary. He had a clear mission to bring well-designed furniture to the masses and executed flawlessly, building a $50 billion empire purely off profitability without ever taking external capital beyond an initial 500-krona loan. The evolution from matches and pens to global furniture dominance is remarkable. Kamprad’s strategic frugality and long-term thinking created a company that defies conventional business logic at every turn. This folksy Swedish mail order business ended up in living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, and garages around the globe. And yes, they even sell hot dogs cheaper than Costco. IKEA is a masterclass in counterintuitive strategy executed with relentless consistency. Check out my briefing on the Acquired episode that covers this enigmatic company. Acquired Briefing (23 minutes)
Patagonia’s Donations
Patagonia famously “made earth its only shareholder” over a year ago. In doing so they dedicated their profits to a non-profits working on environmental issues. Patagonia sent $80 million to the Holdfast Collective in 2024—a network of five trusts that funnel the company’s profits to environmental causes instead of shareholders. The filings reveal something odd: Holdfast took in $80 million but only gave away $41 million, with $20 million going to a philanthropic middleman where the trail goes cold. The biggest named recipients were The Nature Conservancy ($7.2M), a Patagonia-linked political group ($7.5M), and Leonardo DiCaprio’s rewilding nonprofit ($3.25M). If you’re building a business where purpose matters, here’s the tension: the structure lets you avoid being a billionaire while controlling exactly where the money goes—but transparency lags a year behind and some destinations stay hidden. David Gelles (7 minutes)
Housing Breaks Everything
The median first-time homebuyer aged from 29 to 40 since 1981, but the real damage isn’t about real estate—when young people can’t achieve the life-defining step of having their own place, they don’t marry, don’t have kids, experience worse mental health, and adopt extreme politics because they’re not financially invested in their community’s future. The insight: virtually every social pathology we’re dealing with flows downstream from this one constraint. For builders, the implication is stark: we should be constructing millions of homes as fast as possible, because no other intervention has this much leverage on societal wellbeing. Collaborative Fund (4 minutes)
Debt as Dissociation
Gen Z’s consumer debt surged 30% last year—not because they’re reckless, but because they’re watching the traditional markers of adulthood (homeownership, job security, retirement) recede into impossibility while algorithms show them the top 1% of lifestyles as baseline expectations. The insight: doom spending isn’t irrational consumption, it’s a trauma response—when you’re told to make decisions for a future that’s been “pulled out from under you,” buying the $80 manicure or the concert tickets becomes an act of claiming agency in the only timeframe that feels real. For anyone building consumer products or financial services, understand that you’re not competing with rational cost-benefit analysis—you’re up against existential hopelessness, and “spend-less-save-more” advice lands like telling someone to budget for a house that would take 40 years to save for. Maclean’s (15 minutes)
Ice Thicker Than Satellites
Antarctica’s sea ice has hit near-record lows three years running after decades of stability, and scientists still aren’t sure why—partly because satellites can tell us the area covered by ice but struggle to measure thickness and volume, leaving crucial gaps in understanding heat and water movement through polar oceans. The breakthrough work: collecting cylindrical ice cores near Thwaites Glacier to create better methods for inferring thickness from satellite data, essentially teaching orbital sensors to see in three dimensions. For anyone building climate tech or working with remote sensing, this matters because without volumetric data we’re flying blind on a system that reflects sunlight, regulates ocean heat absorption, and anchors the entire Antarctic food chain—measuring surface area alone is like tracking your bank account by counting credit cards. NYT (4 minutes)
Small Modular Nuclear
Every nuclear plant today is custom-built for its site, which makes them ruinously expensive and slow—but small modular reactors could bring factory production to an industry that’s been stuck in bespoke mode since the 1950s. The shift that matters: combining smaller size with HALEU fuel (5-20% uranium-235 instead of 3-5%) and alternative coolants like molten salt, which run at 500°C instead of 300°C but near atmospheric pressure instead of 100x, eliminating the need for massive high-pressure containment while extending refueling intervals. If you’re building anything in energy or climate tech, this matters because standardization is how costs collapse—but the real test isn’t whether these reactors work, it’s whether they can operate safely and economically for decades after bypassing all the hard-won lessons embedded in water-cooled gigawatt behemoths. MIT Technology Review (7 minutes)
The Productivity Mirage
US GDP per capita is 35% higher than the EU’s, but this gap isn’t productivity—Europeans work fewer hours, take more vacation, and produce $71-83 per hour worked versus America’s $81.80, meaning the difference is leisure time, not output. The shift: once you adjust for cost of living (which has exploded in the US, fueling Trump’s rise and fall), US and EU GDP per capita have grown at virtually identical rates since 1990—1.6% versus 1.5%—and both have seen their share of global GDP fall from 20% to 15%. For builders, the stakes are existential: if you’re optimizing for GDP growth while sacrificing health outcomes, equality, carbon emissions, and free time, you’re not winning—you’re just measuring the wrong thing, and the deregulatory agenda built on “American miracle” mythology is solving for a problem that doesn’t exist while ignoring the investments (education, infrastructure, energy transition) that actually drive lasting prosperity. Le Monde (3 minutes)
Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.
Weekend Wisdom
Time is your most important resource. You can do so much in ten minutes. Ten minutes; once gone is gone for good. - Ingvar Kamprad