The vest has become a uniform in finance and tech because it's one of the few items of clothing that can be acceptably branded in a corporate setting. It acts as a "wearable business card," silently communicating one's company, industry, and status, fulfilling a deep-seated human desire to belong to a tribe.
A key driver of the corporate vest's popularity in finance was a regulation capping client gifts at $100. A high-quality, branded vest priced just under this limit (e.g., $95) became the perfect compliant, yet desirable, corporate gift, accelerating its adoption as an industry status symbol.
Sweetgreen sold its core robotic salad-making technology, the "Infinite Kitchen," to another company for a significant profit. Sweetgreen will now be a customer of the technology it created and sold. This strategic move allows it to focus on its core restaurant business while benefiting from a specialist company scaling the automation.
People are wary when AI replaces or pretends to be human. However, when AI is used for something obviously non-human and fun, like AI dogs hosting a podcast, it's embraced. This strategy led to significant user growth for the "Dog Pack" app, showing that absurdity can be a feature, not a bug.
When Duolingo paused its "unhinged" owl mascot social media strategy, daily active user growth saw its smallest increase in years. This direct correlation demonstrates that for some consumer apps, the social media team can be as crucial for growth as the engineering team, justifying top-tier compensation.
Duolingo CEO's internal memo prioritizing AI over hiring sparked a public backlash. The company then paused its popular social media to cool down, which directly led to a slowdown in daily active user growth. This shows how internal corporate communications, when leaked, can directly damage external consumer-facing metrics.