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DEEP DIVE: IS CHIP WILSON RIGHT?
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Recent Memos

Deep Dive: Is Chip Wilson Right?

On brand harvesting, the lululemon proxy fight, and the rebuild the AI age requires. Chip Wilson’s April 29 letter to lululemon shareholders is the most coherent statement of his case to date. The campaign that preceded it has produced trucks parked outside the Vancouver headquarters, a full-page Wall Street Journal advertisement, a website called CreativityFirstlulu.com,… Continue reading →

May 4, 2026

Web Smith

NATSEC Roundtable No. 11: The Drop Economy

Palantir turned a merch store into the most important brand-equity case study in commerce; Shopify was pivotal. This essay is a feature post in an upcoming edition of the 2PM Newsletter. It’s cool to hate Palantir. The brand operation suggests that there is a silent majority of those who cheer on the brand, its CEO,… Continue reading →

April 17, 2026May 8, 2026

Web Smith

Deep Dive: No Brand’s Demo

Over the past several months, a few in the running community have reached out to invite me onto podcasts to discuss a goal that I have begun to make public. The goal is to reach day 1,108 of running a 10K or longer. The streak began to celebrate a reconstructed knee that recovered faster than… Continue reading →

March 28, 2026March 29, 2026

Web Smith

Agentic: Shopify and Google’s UCP Will Democratize Commerce

But only for the brands and retailers that understand the new rules of the agentic commerce era. I spent the better part of fourteen hours reading every page of Shopify’s Universal Commerce Protocol announcement. Not skimming it; not headline parsing it. I read the product notes, the architectural explanations, the developer implications, the platform logic,… Continue reading →

January 11, 2026January 11, 2026

Web Smith

New to 2PM? Here is place to start.

The Early Library

Recent Member Briefs

Member Brief: Monitoring The Situation

There is a meme, and then there is what the meme actually marks. This member brief is designed exclusively for Executive Members, to make membership easy, you can click below and gain access to hundreds of reports, our DTC Power List, and other tools to help you make high level decisions. Join Here

May 8, 2026May 8, 2026

Web Smith

Member Brief: The Thinker’s Machine

Most of us have been the person in the room who can see the system. You can map the logic of a pipeline or a competitive landscape or a market entry on a whiteboard in fifteen minutes and everyone in the room nods because the structure is right. But then the meeting ends and someone… Continue reading →

March 29, 2026March 30, 2026

Web Smith

Member Brief: The Executive Order That Will Never Come

I was at a hotel off Zilker Park, early enough that the coffee shop was still quiet. Austin has this quality where even the lobby of a nice-tier hotel feels like a coworking space by 8 AM. Laptops materialize. Quarter-zips appear and conversations drift from weekend plans into quarterly targets without anyone noticing the transition.… Continue reading →

February 8, 2026February 8, 2026

Web Smith

Member Brief: Why Shopify Should Acquire BigCommerce

When eCommerce entrepreneur and venture investor Jeremy Horowitz joked on LinkedIn about buying BigCommerce and putting it out of its misery, the post went viral because it captured something real about the current platform imbalance. But what made the moment more interesting was not the joke; it was that Shopify COO Harley Finkelstein liked the… Continue reading →

December 28, 2025December 29, 2025

Web Smith

The Monday letter. Join your colleagues.

COMMERCE SYSTEMS THINKING