monopoly
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Every Pokemon Card Runs Through a Belgian Town You've Never Heard Of
The name on the box is Pokemon, Hasbro or Disney. The company that actually prints, cuts and packs the cards is a 250-year-old Belgian manufacturer most players have never heard of.
Hasbro
How a Rhode Island textile-scraps business became the house that Monopoly, Nerf and Magic: The Gathering built - and why its future increasingly runs on dice, decks and download codes.
David Senra breaks down Peter Thiel's Zero to One
In this episode of the Founders podcast, David Senra revisits Peter Thiel and Blake Masters' book 'Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future' after a four-year gap, deliberately re-reading a fresh copy so his old highlights wouldn't influence him. He argues the book isn't a how-to manual but a prompt for your own thinking, whose central message is that founders should aim to build a 'creative monopoly'—a business so good no one else can offer a close substitute. Threading examples from Apple, Amazon, PayPal, Polaroid, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs, Senra explores Thiel's key ideas: thinking from first principles, the contrarian question, secrets, the power law, durability over growth, sales and distribution as product design, and the irreplaceable value of the founder.