An operating journal from twenty years as product designer to CEO across Nike, JCPenney, and a $220M PE-backed DTC platform. The system is the work.https://satya.me/en-ushttps://satya.me/thoughts/amazon-and-walmart-are-not-retailers-anymore-they-are-ad/https://satya.me/thoughts/amazon-and-walmart-are-not-retailers-anymore-they-are-ad/Walmart and Amazon now make more money selling access to customers than selling to them. A retail CEO who sat on both sides explains the retail media tax.Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTCommercehttps://satya.me/thoughts/comfort-food-trap/https://satya.me/thoughts/comfort-food-trap/Six weeks into the CEO seat I was rewriting product copy at 11pm. The work that earns you the title is the work that can cost you the first year.Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTLeadershiphttps://satya.me/thoughts/amazon-is-not-a-channel-it-is-a-company-living-in-your/https://satya.me/thoughts/amazon-is-not-a-channel-it-is-a-company-living-in-your/Why Allbirds, Solo Stove, Outdoor Voices, Casper, and Saks Global all collapsed inside the same 24-month window, and what it says about Amazon seller margins.Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTCommercehttps://satya.me/thoughts/one-brand-three-surfaces/https://satya.me/thoughts/one-brand-three-surfaces/The customer stopped separating the store from the screen long before the companies did. The strongest consumer brands now run one brand across three surfaces.Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTCommercehttps://satya.me/thoughts/the-vibe-coding-trap-why-taste-is-the-only-skill-that/https://satya.me/thoughts/the-vibe-coding-trap-why-taste-is-the-only-skill-that/Why taste, not tooling, is the skill that survives the AI coding era.Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTAIhttps://satya.me/thoughts/why-95-of-enterprise-ai-pilots-fail-and-the-5-that-don-t/https://satya.me/thoughts/why-95-of-enterprise-ai-pilots-fail-and-the-5-that-don-t/MIT's 95% failure number is a process readiness problem, not an AI problem. The winners will have the cleanest operating systems, not the biggest models.Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTAIhttps://satya.me/thoughts/every-company-has-two-communication-architectures-a/https://satya.me/thoughts/every-company-has-two-communication-architectures-a/Ben Horowitz is right that designing the communication architecture is the CEO's most important operational job. He leaves out that every company has two, and the deeper job is keeping them aligned.Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTLeadershiphttps://satya.me/thoughts/inherited-problems/https://satya.me/thoughts/inherited-problems/A class action surfaced from a practice that predated me by years. The day you sign the offer, every legacy issue becomes yours.Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTLeadershiphttps://satya.me/thoughts/watching-three-companies-go-bankrupt/https://satya.me/thoughts/watching-three-companies-go-bankrupt/Art Van, JCPenney, and Conn’s. Three categories, three decades, one pattern: leveraged capital structures colliding with cyclical consumer demand.Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTCapitalhttps://satya.me/thoughts/care-without-truth-is-sentimentality-a-response-to-ben/https://satya.me/thoughts/care-without-truth-is-sentimentality-a-response-to-ben/Ben Horowitz says people, products, profits, in that order. He is right. He also leaves out the layer underneath the first one.Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTLeadershiphttps://satya.me/thoughts/the-china-supply-chain-in-2026-what-i-see-that-nobody-is/https://satya.me/thoughts/the-china-supply-chain-in-2026-what-i-see-that-nobody-is/Twenty-five years across footwear, mass retail private label, custom home goods, and leather goods. The trade press is missing six shifts already reshaping every China-sourced category.Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTSupply Chainhttps://satya.me/thoughts/hire-people-who-scare-you-the-first-time-ceo-s-hardest/https://satya.me/thoughts/hire-people-who-scare-you-the-first-time-ceo-s-hardest/Most first-time CEOs hire who they like. The job is to hire who they need. A retrospective on the moment my company started compounding.Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTLeadershiphttps://satya.me/thoughts/ebitda-is-a-moral-document/https://satya.me/thoughts/ebitda-is-a-moral-document/We doubled EBITDA from 10% to over 20% in three years. The work was not financial. It was the decision to say no to a hundred things that did not earn their oxygen.Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTCapitalhttps://satya.me/thoughts/the-day-the-craft-has-to-end-what-no-one-tells-first-time/https://satya.me/thoughts/the-day-the-craft-has-to-end-what-no-one-tells-first-time/Twenty years of design craft did not prepare me for the CEO seat. They prepared me for the seat I had to leave behind.Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTLeadershiphttps://satya.me/thoughts/the-board-is-leverage-not-oversight/https://satya.me/thoughts/the-board-is-leverage-not-oversight/First-time CEOs treat the board like a parent with a report card. The board is actually the most concentrated network and capital in the building.Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTCapitalhttps://satya.me/thoughts/decide-in-days-not-weeks-why-first-time-ceos-die-of/https://satya.me/thoughts/decide-in-days-not-weeks-why-first-time-ceos-die-of/Most CEO decisions are reversible. The cost of being wrong fast is almost always less than the cost of being right slow.Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTLeadershiphttps://satya.me/thoughts/i-gave-ai-my-lab-results-my-prescriptions-and-30/https://satya.me/thoughts/i-gave-ai-my-lab-results-my-prescriptions-and-30/I handed an AI my real health data and asked it to audit my supplement stack. What came back changed how I think about where the opportunity in AI really is.Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTAIhttps://satya.me/thoughts/what-it-would-take-to-make-eyewear-iconic/https://satya.me/thoughts/what-it-would-take-to-make-eyewear-iconic/A POV piece, not a retrospective. Written the week I applied for a job in a category nobody has cracked yet.Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTCommercehttps://satya.me/thoughts/loyalty-is-not-a-program-it-s-an-operating-system/https://satya.me/thoughts/loyalty-is-not-a-program-it-s-an-operating-system/For thirty years, retailers have called their loyalty work programs. That word is the problem, and that model is dead even if its budget is still funded.Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTCommercehttps://satya.me/thoughts/the-moment-i-stopped-thinking-like-a-designer/https://satya.me/thoughts/the-moment-i-stopped-thinking-like-a-designer/A VP's question at Nike pulled my eye off the interface and onto the system that had to sustain it.Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMTDesignhttps://satya.me/thoughts/what-i-misunderstood-about-scale/https://satya.me/thoughts/what-i-misunderstood-about-scale/By 2004 Nike's digital commerce platform was live, and I confused building it with scaling it. They are not the same discipline.Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMTCommercehttps://satya.me/thoughts/when-alignment-is-the-real-bottleneck/https://satya.me/thoughts/when-alignment-is-the-real-bottleneck/We blame speed, resources, and competition. But most companies stall because the people in the room cannot agree on what they are building.Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMTLeadershiphttps://satya.me/thoughts/architecture-decisions-that-outlive-teams/https://satya.me/thoughts/architecture-decisions-that-outlive-teams/The code you write today will be maintained by people you will never meet. Choose accordingly.Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTDesignhttps://satya.me/thoughts/channel-conflict-and-the-politics-of-direct-to-consumer/https://satya.me/thoughts/channel-conflict-and-the-politics-of-direct-to-consumer/In 2003, selling direct was an act of rebellion inside a wholesale company. The lesson: economics always wins arguments.Thu, 23 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTCommercehttps://satya.me/thoughts/influence-without-authority/https://satya.me/thoughts/influence-without-authority/For the first decade of my career I owned nothing: no P&L, no headcount budget, no final say. But I learned how to move things anyway.Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTLeadershiphttps://satya.me/thoughts/designing-for-behavior-before-growth-existed/https://satya.me/thoughts/designing-for-behavior-before-growth-existed/Before growth teams, before funnels, before A/B testing at scale, there was just watching how people actually used the thing you built.Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTDesignhttps://satya.me/thoughts/why-early-ecommerce-failed-and-what-survived/https://satya.me/thoughts/why-early-ecommerce-failed-and-what-survived/Between 2000 and 2006 most digital commerce initiatives died. The ones that survived shared patterns I did not recognize until years later.Tue, 07 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTCommercehttps://satya.me/thoughts/9-11-and-leading-through-uncertainty/https://satya.me/thoughts/9-11-and-leading-through-uncertainty/Twenty-five years ago, the world changed overnight. I was at Nike, building something unproven, when uncertainty became the only constant.Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTLeadershiphttps://satya.me/thoughts/building-commerce-in-a-post-dot-com-world/https://satya.me/thoughts/building-commerce-in-a-post-dot-com-world/Joining Nike's early ecommerce efforts when the question wasn't how fast to grow, but whether direct digital commerce deserved to exist at all.Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTCommerce