Marcellus Insights
Short read: The Dialogue Dividend
In his book , the Foundations of Corporate Success, Sir John Kay had highlighted architecture, referring to a firm’s internal and external networks, as one of its key sources of competitive advantage. Whilst the external network of customers, distributors, suppliers, etc are well understood, the internal networks involving the informal relationships between its employees which […]
Short read: India’s new class war is on display in airport lounges
A lifetime of dragging our bags around India’s airports has made us professional experts on using airline lounges. In the last couple of years however we have noticed that the lounges in India’s airports are among the busiest in the world with a long queue to enter the lounge being par for the course. Often […]
Short read: Australia Banned Social Media For Under 16s. Did it Work or Fail?
“When Australia banned under 16-year-olds from using social media in December 2025, it became a test case for a policy now being pursued by governments around the world.” This piece examines the impact of the social media on Australian youngsters with inputs from “Susan Sawyer, a professor of adolescent mental health at the University of […]
Long read: Why Token Optimization Is a Gift to the Hyperscalers
Rihard Jarc is a former CEO and founder of an AI startup and now a tech investor. In this two part essay, he talks about the recent development where many enterprises have blown up their AI budgets (often referred to as token maxxing) without much to show in terms of benefit and what that means […]
Long read: The Beijing Pivot
Whilst America surely needs to sort out its balance between capital and labour, there is another balance it needs to rework – its dominance in high tech with reindustrialisation. And China is not helping with the latter. Trump’s recent visit to China with an entourage of top American business leaders gave a sense of the […]
Long read: The Great Compression and How to Get It Back
Tony Scaramucci runs an investment firm in New York called SkyBridge. In this thought-provoking piece on the US economy, he explains why America had it so good for a generation or so post-World War II, why things went south for the American working class thereafter and what can be done to put the US working […]
Short read: The Roger Bannister Effect: The Myth of the Psychological Breakthrough
We finally had the 2hour marathon barrier broken earlier this April, not once but twice in the same race. Kenya’s Sebastian Sawe and Ethiopian Yomif Kejelcha both finished the London Marathon in under two hours. The previous record stood for less than three years. But the more famously stubborn barrier in running history has been […]
Short read: Billionaires’ Billions Are Increasing Faster Than Ever
In our Global Compounders Fund, we have been invested into the European luxury goods sector, not just for its fabulous heritage brands but also the fast-growing market they cater to – billionaires. As unfortunate as it might seem, the world is indeed getting more unequal when it comes to wealth and the uber-rich are letting […]
Short read: Bullets, Thars and toppers: Inside Bihar’s crazy coaching wars
Over the past two decades, higher education in India has been turned into a commercial racket focused on squeezing ever larger sums money out of desperate job seekers on the premise that if they spend big amounts on test prep, they might just land the government job (not just UPSC but also more most modest […]
Long read: Why Japan has such good railways
Among many things that impressed us in China, the high-speed rail stood out – 50,000km of network all built over the last 15 years where train speeds go north of 350kmph routinely. Japan’s historically famous high-speed rail or the Shinkansen network (~3,000km) might now pale in comparison. Leaving aside the scale given the sheer difference […]
Long read: ‘Among Informal Workers, The Less Educated Travel The Farthest’
The article is based on an interview conducted by IndiaSpend with Tamoghna Halder, co-author of the “State of Working India report 2026” (SWI). Halder has a PhD from the University of California, Davis and teaches economics at Azim Premji University. Dr Halder’s view as summarised by us below are based on the remarkable SWI report […]
Long read: Review of Sebastian Mallaby’s book “The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence”
Inspite of the current hype around AI, most people we meet seem to misunderstand AI (often viewing LLMs and AI or machine learning and AI interchangeably). Sebastian Mallaby’s book (coming in the wake of his outstanding books on Alan Greenspan and VC investing) not only gives the reader a deep dive into the remarkable mind […]
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