by Ekrem Duman | Aug 5, 2026 | Software, Tech & Digital Platforms, Startup
⚡ TL;DREurope runs its economy on cloud infrastructure owned by three American companies, and has spent a decade trying to change that. Federated data initiatives, sovereign cloud regions operated under European control, and procurement rules favouring local...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 5, 2026 | Software, Tech & Digital Platforms, Startup
⚡ TL;DRRocket Internet built companies by identifying proven business models elsewhere, replicating them in markets where they did not yet exist, staffing them from a central pool and financing them from a central balance sheet. It produced several genuinely...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 5, 2026 | Software, Tech & Digital Platforms, Startup
⚡ TL;DRZalando and Delivery Hero are Europe's two largest consumer platform companies and they demonstrate opposite outcomes from the same playbook. Zalando shifted from buying and reselling inventory to operating a marketplace, which improved margin and...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 5, 2026 | Software, Tech & Digital Platforms, Startup
⚡ TL;DRWirecard reported nearly two billion euros of cash in Asian trustee accounts that did not exist. The company entered the DAX, was defended by regulators against journalists who questioned its accounts, received clean audit opinions for years, and...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 5, 2026 | Software, Tech & Digital Platforms, Startup
⚡ TL;DRSAP sold perpetual software licences with maintenance contracts for four decades, then converted the entire model to cloud subscriptions, accepting years of optically worse revenue in exchange for recurring income. By 2026 current cloud backlog had...
