Business lessons & courses

The mechanisms behind how buyers decide, what drives demand, and what happens after the sale. Decision architecture (System 1/2, anchoring, prospect theory, defaults), motivation and identity (SDT, JTBD, hedonic vs utilitarian, signaling), and the journey beyond purchase (consideration sets, cognitive dissonance, satisfaction, loyalty mechanics). Each lens presented with its replication status, not as a marketing recipe.

The math and mechanics of venture-backed equity financing — ownership and dilution, priced rounds and anti-dilution, SAFEs and convertible notes, term-sheet structure, employee equity vehicles across jurisdictions, and the exit waterfalls that determine the per-share outcome. Six lessons of mechanics that apply across every cycle.

Money, inflation, central banks, and the business cycle — the structural concepts that appear in every economy, in every era. Six lessons, mechanism-first, without policy advocacy or predictions about specific outcomes.

Read the $180B+ global games market like an analyst: map the platform segments, understand how the developer-to-player value chain skims revenue, compare distribution channels across Steam, app stores, and mini-games, decode mobile F2P unit economics (CPI, LTV, ROAS), navigate China's ISBN system and Tencent/NetEase gatekeeping, and assess cloud gaming's economics through the lens of Stadia's 2023 shutdown.

After completing this path, you will be able to assess your organisation's true AI readiness, distinguish genuine P&L impact from pilot theatre, design a measurement framework that produces credible ROI verdicts, evaluate data infrastructure gaps before they sink a deployment, choose the right organisational structure and build-vs-buy posture, and govern AI systems as an audited, continuously monitored practice — not a one-time compliance checkbox. Built on peer-reviewed field studies, the MIT 2025 GenAI Divide, BCG/Harvard, and the EU AI Act.

Five advanced lessons on what is actually known — from peer-reviewed papers, regulatory filings, and primary disclosures — about AI agents in business. Customer service, coding, legal, scientific R&D, and agentic RPA, each anchored on verifiable sources rather than vendor case studies.

A seven-lesson path for SEO and content practitioners working in crypto. Starts with a working model of crypto and classical SEO/GEO foundations, then steps up to advanced operator work: programmatic SEO at scale, GEO measurement across AI engines, and E-E-A-T / entity SEO for YMYL content.

The structure of a purchase from first exposure through repeat. The classical funnel and its loyalty-loop extensions, consideration sets, post-purchase cognitive dissonance, the expectation/perception model of satisfaction, the retention vs acquisition cost asymmetry, and the actual mechanisms behind repeat buying — habit, switching cost, identity, and trust.

The motivation theories that try to explain consumer demand: Maslow's hierarchy and its critique, self-determination theory's three needs, the jobs-to-be-done reframing, hedonic vs utilitarian goods, identity signaling and Veblen demand, and the social-norm pull. Each presented as a lens with a clearly stated empirical track record.

The cognitive mechanisms behind consumer choice: dual-system thinking, the durable heuristics, anchoring, prospect theory's loss aversion and S-shaped value function, diminishing sensitivity, the contested choice-overload finding, and the default effect. Frames each as a mechanism with its replication status, not a marketing recipe.

How the proceeds of an acquisition or IPO are distributed across the cap table — the liquidation-preference stack from senior preferred to common, the participating-vs-non-participating choice, worked examples with multiple preferred classes, and why the same headline exit value can produce very different per-share outcomes.

How the employee option pool is sized and refreshed, what the 409A valuation determines about option strike prices, the tax-treatment differences between ISOs, NSOs, and RSUs in the US, and the parallel structures (BSPCE in France, EMI in the UK) that achieve similar incentive alignment.

What the specific clauses in a venture term sheet actually do — liquidation preferences and participation, board composition, protective provisions, pro-rata, drag-along, registration rights — and the difference between standard market terms and the 'dirty' terms that signal a stressed deal.

How convertible notes and SAFEs let early investors put in capital without setting a valuation, the math of the valuation cap and the discount, how the conversion at the next priced round actually computes, and why post-money SAFEs are now more common than pre-money.

How a priced equity financing actually closes — the price per share calculation, the relationship between pre-money valuation and ownership, the mechanics of anti-dilution provisions, and what 'full ratchet' and 'weighted average' mean for the cap table after a down round.

What a capitalization table records, the difference between issued and fully-diluted shares, how new issuance dilutes existing holders, and the math that makes 'I own 10% of the company' a more or less meaningful claim depending on which denominator you use.

The standard set of business-cycle indicators — leading, coincident, lagging — what each measures, the structural information content of the yield curve, the difference between NBER and technical recession definitions, and how to combine signals into a coherent cyclical picture.

How fiscal policy (taxation, spending, deficits) and monetary policy (rates, balance sheet) act on the economy through different channels, how they interact, what the debt-sustainability condition r < g implies, and where fiscal dominance constrains the central bank.

The conceptual difference between real and nominal quantities, how the Fisher equation links them, why real interest rates drive investment decisions while nominal rates appear in contracts, and the systematic mistakes that come from confusing the two.

The instruments a modern central bank uses to influence the economy — policy rate, open-market operations, reserve requirements, lender-of-last-resort facilities, quantitative easing, and forward guidance — and the transmission channels through which each affects inflation and employment.

How inflation is measured (CPI, PCE, GDP deflator), the demand-pull and cost-push mechanisms, why the modern Phillips curve depends on inflation expectations, and the structural reason 'anchored' expectations matter so much to outcomes.

The functional definition of money, the distinction between base money and broad money, how the banking system creates the latter from the former, and why the quantity equation (MV = PQ) relates money to prices only through variables that themselves move.

Understand how Valve's Steam became the default PC storefront, how its tiered revenue splits work, why wishlists and reviews govern discovery, and whether the Epic Games Store's 12% cut has actually threatened Steam's position.

Decode the economics of the world's largest games segment: why mobile is half the market, how the F2P funnel converts attention into revenue, and the LTV > CPI math every mobile studio lives and dies by — including what Apple's 2021 privacy shift broke.

Most AI ROI claims are marketing, not measurement. This lesson builds a rigorous framework: how to set baselines and counterfactuals, why RCTs beat vendor case studies, the real cost components of AI deployment, and how to avoid the attribution traps that make bad investments look good on paper.

Understand no-download game distribution: how HTML5 and instant games work, why WeChat and Douyin mini-games dominate in China, how Xbox Cloud Gaming and GeForce Now operate, and what Google Stadia's 2023 shutdown taught the industry about cloud gaming unit economics.

Understand where the $180B+ games market actually sits — mobile vs console vs PC — who skims the value chain, how the major revenue models compare, and why a tiny fraction of players drives most F2P revenue.

The model is rarely the bottleneck. This lesson examines why data readiness — quality, governance, lineage, and access — is the primary constraint on enterprise AI value, with a practical scorecard, and a clear-eyed comparison of RAG versus fine-tuning economics.

Navigate the world's most complex games market: Tencent and NetEase's dominance, the ISBN licensing system and its freeze years, the 2021 minors' play-time rules, how WeChat and Douyin mini-games work, and what it actually takes for a Western studio to earn revenue in China.

Strip away the hype. This lesson unpacks the real adoption and impact data: McKinsey's State of AI surveys, the MIT 2025 GenAI Divide, and why roughly 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots show no measurable P&L impact — plus where value has actually landed and what the pilot-to-production chasm looks like in practice.

The model is the least of your problems. This lesson examines how to structure the AI function (centralised, federated, hub-and-spoke), make defensible build-vs-buy decisions, design for actual adoption, and understand why change management — not the model — is the dominant failure mode in enterprise AI programs.

Responsible AI is a practice, not a slogan. This lesson covers the EU AI Act's four risk tiers and what each requires, model monitoring and drift detection, hallucination rates and human-in-the-loop design, guardrail KPIs, and how to run governance as a measured, auditable discipline rather than a compliance checkbox.

What measurable benchmarks say agentic software agents can actually do in 2026, what production deployments have publicly disclosed, the strongest skeptic case on the books, and how the EU AI Act reshapes the deployment math.

Where the evidence for AI in scientific discovery is strongest, where it is weakest, and how to tell them apart. Anchored on AlphaFold's peer-reviewed record, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and what AI-first drug-discovery companies have actually disclosed to investors.

Evidence on AI in legal practice: the Stanford RegLab hallucination benchmark of Westlaw and Lexis+ AI, the Mata v. Avianca and Park v. Kim sanctions cases, and what published ethics rules require.

Hard evidence on AI coding assistants: the Microsoft Research RCTs, METR's surprising 2025 slowdown finding, SWE-bench Verified, and why benchmark scores keep outrunning real-world value.

An evidence-led look at AI agents in customer support: the Brynjolfsson NBER RCT, Klarna's 2024 victory lap and 2025 walk-back, and what generalises beyond a single firm.

Crypto is YMYL — Google and AI engines hold these pages to a higher trust bar. How to build entity strength, structure Organization and Person schema, defend brand-name SERPs, and turn E-E-A-T into a flywheel that compounds in both classic SEO and GEO citations.

How to actually quantify your presence in AI answer engines in 2026: query banks, sampling at scale, citation attribution, llms.txt and Common Crawl tracking, and the KPIs that survive scrutiny from leadership without overclaiming precision.

How CEXs ship and rank thousands of asset, pair, and conversion pages without tripping Google's thin-content filters. Templates, canonicalization, crawl-budget control, and the quality metrics that catch problems before they bury your domain.

How SEO actually works in the crypto vertical: YMYL, the paid-search ban fallout, jurisdictional content, schema for asset pages, and the unusual link economy you have to navigate.

How AI engines decide which crypto sources to cite, and the on-page patterns that earn those citations. Aimed at SEOs who already do classical optimization and want the cross-over playbook for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

A working model of crypto for people who already write the content but have never actually used the product. Just enough blockchain, wallets, and exchange mechanics to stop guessing on the brief.

A pattern library for the single highest-leverage page on a centralized exchange: the asset / coin page. Anatomy, schema stack, internal-linking model, and the GEO additions that turn it into a citation magnet.