Berkshire Hathaway
Warren Buffett · 1955
Berkshire Hathaway is a holding company built on arbitrage, insurance float, and concentrated control — not innovation or disruption.
Decision-making
How people choose, and how those choices go wrong.
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Visa Inc.
Dee Hock · 1958
Visa is a payment infrastructure built on delegation: banks issue cards, Visa provides the rails and branding, and consumers pay fees embedded in every transaction. Its 1970 restructuring into a member-owned, decentralised association — conceived and led by Dee Hock — was a deliberate rejection of hierarchy. Yet its 2025 volume ($14.2 trillion) reflects not distributed decision-making but tightly coordinated standards enforcement. The ‘chaordic’ ideal remains descriptive, not operational.
Warren Buffett
Buffett didn’t build Berkshire by spotting winners—he seized control, revalued assets on his terms, and walked away from the original business without apology.
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Meituan
Wang Xing · 2010
Meituan is a Chinese technology company headquartered in Beijing that operates a platform for local services, including on‑demand food delivery, in‑store services, consumer reviews under Dazhong Dianping, hotel and travel bookings, and instant retail. It monetises through fees on its platform, taking a commission on food delivery orders and charging merchants for booking and in‑store services. Meituan’s rapid user growth is driven by its extensive coverage of local services, its integration of food delivery, in‑store services, and hotel bookings creating a one‑stop shop, and its large merchant base of 14.5 million active merchants providing network effects. Meituan faces regulatory scrutiny in China, its 2021 post by Wang Xing triggered a 7.1 % share plunge and anti‑monopoly investigation, and the company has been subject to scrutiny by Beijing Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau. Meituan demonstrates the power of a diversified local‑services platform, its ability to scale across cities and internationally shows the importance of network effects, and its regulatory challenges highlight the need for compliance awareness. Meituan offers a case study in rapid scaling and diversification, but its regulatory risks caution investors.
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ABB
Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown · 1988
ABB is a post-merger industrial incumbent whose value lies in proven, regulated, physical infrastructure — not software, platforms, or scalability stories.
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AbbVie
AbbVie didn’t win the autoimmune market with science — it won with patents, pricing, and settlements.
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Abu Dhabi National Oil Company
ADNOC is expanding oil production while the rest of the industry retreats — not because it ignores climate change, but because it answers to no one but Abu Dhabi.