What Caught My EyeCulture · Brands · Design · BuildingWeekly Links by Mike LitmanIssue #003Ten Links. No Filler.Curated, Not AggregatedWhat Caught My EyeCulture · Brands · Design · BuildingWeekly Links by Mike LitmanIssue #003Ten Links. No Filler.Curated, Not Aggregated
Weekly Links
What Caught My Eye
Curated links on culture, brands, design and building.
Week of 27 March 2026 · Issue #003
↓ ten links. no filler. your tabs are safe.
AI & BuildingCulture & BrandsDesign & ProductStrategy & BusinessWild Card
Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, in conversation with Every. His case: more capability doesn't mean more clarity on what to build. Better tools surface the real difficulty – knowing what matters.
Krieger built one of the most used products in history and still talks about the work like it's genuinely hard. Because it is. The illusion AI creates – that building is now the easy part – is the most dangerous thing in product right now. This is the antidote.
^ the thing everyone needs to hear
Send to:every PM who thinks AI has made product strategy redundant
Granola's Series C announcement from the company itself: $125M at a $1.5B valuation. Their thesis is that conversations are a company's most underused asset – and AI should work around meetings, not demand you change because of them.
The Granola story is interesting not for the number but for what it validates: AI that disappears into your workflow beats AI that demands you change your workflow. The product is almost invisible, which is exactly why it wins. Used by Cursor, Lovable, Mistral. That's a telling customer list.
invisible AI = good AI
Send to:every SaaS founder whose product has 14 onboarding steps
M.G. Siegler's breakdown of OpenAI quietly pulling the plug on Sora – a product it had publicly hyped as the future of video generation. The fallout with Disney reveals the tension between PR ambition and product reality at the world's most-watched AI company.
Sora was announced as a category-defining product. It disappeared when the business case didn't hold. The lesson isn't about AI video. It's about not letting your announcement become your product strategy. OpenAI is becoming more commercially minded. That's necessary and disappointing in equal measure.
hype cycles need exits
Send to:the brand team still waiting on the Sora integration they promised their client
Meta has launched AI-powered selling tools across Facebook Marketplace – automating listings, descriptions, and price suggestions. It's framed as a seller convenience feature. It's actually the beginning of a different kind of commerce layer.
When the feed recommends the product, writes the listing, suggests the price, and handles the negotiation – the human decision is increasingly peripheral. Marketplace is a test bed. Instagram and WhatsApp Commerce are where this lands at scale. Watch this space.
the algorithm goes shopping
Send to:the e-commerce director who thinks social commerce peaked with Instagram Shopping
Two academics unpack the standoff between Anthropic and Pete Hegseth's DoD – the ultimatum to relax ethical policies or face seizure under the Defense Production Act, the reported Maduro incident, and why Google, OpenAI and xAI have already caved.
The ethics question in AI is no longer philosophical. It's commercial. When the choice is "relax your principles or lose your government contracts," most companies choose contracts. Anthropic is the interesting test case because they built their identity around safety. Watching them navigate this tells us something real.
principles meet balance sheet
Send to:anyone who still thinks AI companies will self-regulate
My Mind's thesis: a generation raised on infinite scroll has outsourced its preferences to platforms – and now struggles to locate them again. The piece offers a practical framework for rediscovering genuine taste versus algorithmically assigned identity.
This lands differently when you're building anything taste-first. The people who can articulate what they actually like – not what the algorithm surfaced – are a shrinking group. That's the audience worth serving. And the market gap worth building for.
taste is a muscle
Send to:the strategist building a personalisation engine without asking what the person actually wants
For the World Baseball Classic in Puerto Rico, Burger King and De La Cruz Ogilvy rotated the Whopper 90 degrees and rebranded it a hot dog. Social teasers, flipped outdoor logos, a special cart outside the stadium. One smart observation, executed with total confidence.
There's a version of brand creativity that needs enormous budgets and complex production. Then there's this: a single insight about context and the conviction to act on it. The idea came first. Everything else followed. This is how you make people actually look up.
rotate the burger, win the match
Send to:the brand manager whose next campaign needs three rounds of concept development
Sephora has launched its app inside ChatGPT, giving customers AI-powered beauty guidance and personalised product recommendations through conversation. The first major beauty retailer to make this move at this scale.
Every retailer will do this eventually. Sephora just proved it works in a category that's tactile, personal, and deeply human. If beauty can translate to AI conversation, everything can. The store without walls is becoming the store without a screen.
the store without walls
Send to:the retailer whose digital strategy still starts with "the app"
SparkToro analysed the 5,000 most-visited sites on the web and found influence is distributed across the entire internet – not concentrated in search results or social feeds. The implications for brand strategy are significant and largely ignored.
Everyone is chasing the algorithm. This research says your audience is everywhere else. It's an argument for editorial presence, community, niche authority, and showing up in unexpected places – over endlessly optimising the channels everyone else is already crowded into.
the long tail is very much real
Send to:the performance marketer still convinced search is the only channel worth funding
Maria Popova on Terry Tempest Williams's memoir and a painted bunting blown off its migration path – a metaphor for how meaningful change arrives unexpectedly rather than through deliberate choice, and why our conditioning needn't be our destiny.
I include one piece like this every week because the best ideas don't always come from industry. The reminder that we can choose fluidity over rigidity is, right now, a professional note as much as a personal one. Read it slowly.
slow down a minute
Send to:anyone who hasn't looked out the window today
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