Warby Parker Broke Up a $58 Billion Monopoly
If you've ever bought prescription glasses, there's a good chance they were made by Luxottica, a company you've probably never heard of.
Ray-Ban? Luxottica. Oakley? Luxottica. Chanel eyewear? Also Luxottica.
The Italian giant controls most of the global eyewear market, generating $11 billion annually with a $58 billion valuation. With this market control, they are able to charge $300 for a $13 frame, 20x the cost.
Then Warby Parker arrived.
The Problem
Shopping for glasses was a social experience. People tried on frames, asked friends for opinions, and posted photos. But online shopping killed that ritual, and retail monopolies kept prices absurdly high.
Warby Parker saw the gap: replicate the social experience online while slashing prices.
The Strategy
Home Try-On. Order 5 frames, try them for 5 days, return what you don't want. Shipping covered. Customers loved it, posted it on social media, and created free marketing.
Positioned as lifestyle, not discount. Targeted millennials (25-34): online, socially active, fashion-conscious. Partnered with GQ and fashion editors. Their quirky, honest marketing made them cool, not cheap.
Cause marketing. Buy a pair, give a pair. Over 7 million glasses donated through their program. Millennials didn't just buy glasses, they bought into a mission.
The Result
Luxottica's market share dropped from monopoly status to 28%. Warby Parker now holds 7.2% and is valued at $3 billion. Customers average 1.4 orders per year, unheard of for eyewear.
They created the blueprint for breaking monopolies through experience, not just price.
Stripe Built an AI That Writes Code. Here's What That Means for Engineers.
Stripe processes over $1 trillion in payments annually. Their codebase spans hundreds of millions of lines of code. It's one of the most complex software systems on earth.
So when they built an internal AI agent called "Minions" to write code autonomously, the engineering world paid attention.
Here's how it works. An engineer describes a task in Slack. Minions spin up in an isolated environment, read internal documentation, search the codebase, run linters and tests, then submit a pull request - all without human intervention. If tests fail, it fixes them. If something's still broken, it flags it for a human engineer.
Minions are essentially junior+ engineers that never sleep.
But here's what's interesting: Stripe didn't replace their engineers. They made them faster. The best Minions runs still get reviewed by humans. Engineers still make architectural decisions. The agent handles the grunt work - the boilerplate, the bug fixes, the repetitive tasks.
The engineers who thrive aren't the ones who write the most code. They're the ones who know how to direct agents effectively, review AI output critically, and focus on problems machines can't solve yet.
AI won't replace software engineers (at least not in the near term). It'll replace engineers who refuse to work with AI.
And this isn’t just Stripe. Across enterprise software, agentic AI is quickly becoming a competitive necessity, meaning engineers everywhere will need to adapt.
🍌 Just Bananas: McDonald's Drops Caviar McNugget Kits for Valentine's Day
McDonald's made TikTok Valentine dreams come true with free McNugget Caviar kits that dropped February 10th at McNuggetCaviar.com.
The giveaway included a one-ounce tin of Siberian sturgeon caviar (worth $85), a $25 gift card, crème fraiche, and a caviar spoon. They ran out of stock within minutes.
McDonald's wasn't alone in V-day festivities. White Castle hosted its 35th annual "Love Castle" experience, while Chick-fil-A, Papa Johns, and Pizza Hut all served heart-shaped everything.
Fun fact: Valentine's Day is the second-biggest restaurant holiday after Mother's Day.
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