Why JansBrief exists
Jan Stenbeck was the smartest person I ever met. Not smart in the way academics are smart. Smart in the way that changes the world. He saw what nobody else saw. He understood that mobile telephony would revolutionise countries that hadn't even laid copper wire yet. He broke state socialist monopolies when everyone said it was impossible. He built empires out of ideas.
Every day Jan received a binder. Two people read all the world's important newspapers and magazines for him and pulled out what mattered. The things others missed. The faint signals that foreshadow great change.
I worked with Jan. I learned from him. And I have never forgotten that binder. JansBrief is my tribute to him, a modern version: global, AI-driven, available to everyone with ambition.
In memory of Jan Stenbeck
1942 — 2002
Jan Stenbeck
Tele2, Millicom, MTG, Metro
In today's edition · 24 May 2026
Something is crystallising in the food-delivery industry. Uber Technologies has proposed a takeover of Delivery Hero, the Berlin-based platform, at a valuation of approximately €10 billion ($11.6 billion). If completed, the deal would represent the largest consolidation move in the global delivery sector since Uber acquired Postmates in 2020 — and it would redraw the competitive map outside the United States, where DoorDash has been steadily gaining ground.
Delivery Hero operates in over 70 countries, with its strongest positions in the Middle East, Asia and Europe. It owns Talabat, the dominant platform across the Gulf states, and holds stakes in a constellation of regional players. But the company has struggled to achieve consistent profitability, and its share price has languished since the pandemic-era highs. Uber's approach comes at a moment when Delivery Hero's board is under pressure from investors who have grown impatient with the promise of scale without returns.
Uber's logic is straightforward. The company's mobility business — ride-hailing — generates healthy margins. Its delivery arm, Uber Eats, is profitable in mature markets but faces a grinding war of attrition in newer ones. Acquiring Delivery Hero would give Uber instant dominance in markets where building from scratch would take years and burn cash it would rather deploy elsewhere. It would also deny those markets to DoorDash, which has been expanding internationally through its own acquisition of Wolt.
The broader signal is that the food-delivery industry is entering its airline phase: a period of forced consolidation where too many players with too-thin margins merge until only a few survivors remain. The economics of delivery are brutally simple. Each order generates a small fee. The platform must pay riders, subsidise restaurants, and absorb customer-acquisition costs. At scale, the math works. Below scale, it doesn't. And scale, in delivery, is local — you need density in every city, not just aggregate volume across a continent.
What makes this deal worth watching is what it reveals about the limits of venture-backed growth in asset-light marketplaces. Delivery Hero raised billions on the promise that growth would eventually produce margins. It didn't — or at least, not fast enough. Uber, which went through its own painful transition from growth-at-all-costs to profitability, is now in a position to buy the company that couldn't make that turn. The acquirer is the one that survived its own crisis first.
The regulatory path will be complex. Antitrust authorities in the EU, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia will scrutinise the deal for market concentration. Labour regulators will ask what consolidation means for rider pay and conditions. And Delivery Hero's shareholders will debate whether €10 billion is enough for a company that was once valued at nearly three times that.
But the strategic direction is clear. The age of competing delivery platforms in every city is ending. What replaces it — a duopoly of Uber and DoorDash, with regional holdouts in China and India — will determine not just how food gets delivered, but what the economics of last-mile logistics look like for a generation.
Source: Bloomberg · 24 May 2026
Now — Delivery consolidation reprices every regional food platform on the planet: The Uber-Delivery Hero proposal instantly revalues every mid-sized delivery company in markets where neither Uber nor DoorDash has a dominant position. Founders and boards in Latin America, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe are recalculating whether independence is viable or whether finding a buyer is the only rational exit. The bid also validates what the public markets have been signalling for two years: standalone delivery platforms without ride-hailing cross-subsidies cannot generate the margins investors require. The era of the pure-play delivery unicorn is effectively over.
Soon — Gig-worker regulation finds its test case in mega-mergers: When two global delivery platforms merge, the combined entity controls pricing for hundreds of thousands of riders. European regulators, already advancing gig-worker reclassification directives, will use the merger review as leverage to extract labour concessions — minimum pay guarantees, portable benefits, algorithmic transparency. The deal becomes a vehicle for policy that regulators could not impose through legislation alone. Expect the EU's merger approval, if it comes, to include binding labour conditions that set precedent far beyond food delivery.
Later — South Korea's retail traders become the canary for leveraged-product contagion: South Korea is about to introduce single-stock leveraged exchange-traded funds into the world's most volatile major equity market — a market already dominated by some of the planet's most fervent retail day traders. The combination is combustible. Leveraged products amplify gains on the way up and accelerate destruction on the way down; when they are placed in the hands of a retail base that trades on margin and momentum, the systemic risk multiplies. If the Korean experiment goes wrong — a flash crash, a leveraged ETF blowup, a cascade of margin calls — it will hand regulators globally a case study in why democratising complex financial instruments without guardrails is not financial inclusion but financial recklessness. The lesson will shape leveraged-product regulation from Tokyo to Toronto for the next decade. Source: Bloomberg · 24 May 2026 ---
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has revealed the referendum question that will go to voters this October, testing support for the oil-rich western province's independence from Canada. Smith says she personally supports remaining in confederation, but the decision to hold a vote at all — compared by observers to David Cameron's Brexit gamble — injects genuine constitutional risk into a country already strained by regional grievances over energy policy, equalization payments and federal climate regulation. A strong separatist showing, even without a majority, would hand Ottawa a crisis it has no institutional mechanism to resolve. Source: Sydney Morning Herald · 24 May 2026
Israel allowed displaced Gazans to begin crossing the military zone that bisects the enclave, after a deadlock over hostage releases was broken. Thousands of Palestinians walked north on foot, many returning to neighbourhoods they had not seen in months. The movement is fragile — dependent on continued progress in hostage negotiations — and the northern districts they are returning to have been extensively damaged. But the physical act of return, even into ruins, carries enormous symbolic and political weight for a population that feared permanent displacement. Source: Wall Street Journal · 24 May 2026
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced that far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben Gvir is banned from entering France and called for EU-wide sanctions against him. The move follows Ben Gvir's widely condemned taunting of activists aboard the Global Sumud flotilla. The ban is largely symbolic — Ben Gvir was not planning a Paris trip — but it signals that European patience with the most extreme members of Israel's governing coalition has a limit, and that individual sanctions, not just state-level diplomacy, are entering the European toolkit. Source: Politico Europe · 24 May 2026
A suspect approached a checkpoint near the White House and opened fire on Secret Service personnel, according to officials. The suspect was killed and a bystander was wounded. The incident is the most significant security breach near the White House in years and comes amid heightened political tensions. Details remain limited, but the shooting will intensify debate over security protocols around the executive compound and the broader climate of political violence in the United States. Source: BBC World · 24 May 2026
Scientists warn that the surge in global shipping traffic rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope — diverted from the Red Sea by Houthi attacks and from the Strait of Hormuz by the Iran conflict — is intensifying overlap with whale habitats off South Africa's west coast. Vessel strikes on whales are increasing, and researchers say the rerouting has turned what was already a busy shipping lane into one of the most ecologically hazardous corridors in the Southern Hemisphere. The environmental cost of geopolitical disruption is rarely measured; this is one of the rare cases where it can be. Source: Mail and Guardian (SA) · 24 May 2026
Finnish health-tech company Oura, maker of the eponymous smart ring that tracks sleep, heart rate and activity, has filed for an initial public offering in New York. The move tests whether the wearable-health market can sustain a standalone public company outside the Apple-Samsung duopoly. Oura has built a devoted following among biohackers and wellness enthusiasts, but an IPO will force it to prove that a single-product hardware company can deliver the recurring revenue growth that public markets demand. The filing comes as the broader consumer wearables market shows signs of saturation. Source: Sifted · 24 May 2026
An airstrike on the Russian-occupied city of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine killed eighteen people and injured forty-two others. Russia accused Ukraine of deliberately targeting civilians and vowed to retaliate. The strike is among the deadliest on occupied territory in recent months and comes as both sides probe for leverage ahead of any potential ceasefire framework. The escalation pattern — strikes deep behind lines followed by retaliatory volleys — continues to push the conflict toward a logic where civilian infrastructure on both sides becomes a target of first resort. Source: BBC World · 24 May 2026
Congo has suspended flights to the eastern city of Bunia as the Ebola outbreak — caused by the rare Bundibugyo strain — spreads across three provinces and overwhelms contact-tracing efforts. Regional health ministers warned of escalating cross-border risks, particularly to Uganda and Rwanda. Medical supplies are running short in affected areas, and the flight suspension complicates both evacuation and resupply. The WHO declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern last week, but the gap between declaration and effective containment is widening. This is now the most serious Ebola event since the 2018–2020 outbreak in the same region, and the logistical challenges of fighting a hemorrhagic fever in an active conflict zone remain as brutal as ever. Source: Bloomberg · 24 May 2026; Nature · 22 May 2026 ---
On São Miguel Island in the Azores, a Portuguese architecture studio called Atelier Backlar has done something that looks minor on paper and radical in practice. They took the ruins of a former whaler's tavern perched on a clifftop above the traditional whaling bay of Capelas, and rebuilt it using recycled ocean plastic and locally sourced timber. The result is called The Blue House.
This is not a showroom for sustainable architecture sponsored by a corporate foundation. There is no Patagonia logo, no EU grant plaque, no glossy coffee-table book deal. It is a small building on a remote Atlantic island, made from waste that washes up on its shores, designed by a studio most people have never heard of, in a place most architects will never visit.
What makes it interesting is the logic chain. The Azores sit in the middle of the North Atlantic, which means they catch an extraordinary volume of marine plastic debris. Most of that plastic is collected and shipped back to the European mainland for recycling — an expensive, carbon-intensive process. Atelier Backlar asked the obvious question that nobody had bothered to ask: what if you processed and used the plastic locally, as building material, in the place where it arrives?
The answer turns out to be architecturally viable. The recycled ocean plastic forms part of the building's envelope. The timber comes from the island. The ruins of the old tavern provide the structural bones. The result is a building that is simultaneously new and old, local and global, waste and resource.
There is a satisfying irony in the location. Capelas was a whaling bay — a place where the ocean was exploited for industrial profit. Now it is a place where the ocean's industrial waste is turned into shelter. The building does not moralise about this. It simply exists, on its cliff, looking out at the water.
The studio is small. The project is small. The island is small. But the idea — that waste geography and building geography can be the same geography — is not small at all.
Source: Dezeen · 23 May 2026
In New York, a new gallery called Studio 54 Fine Art — no relation to the nightclub beyond the address's aura — is testing what its founder calls an "unconventional" model: no permanent stable of artists, no massive overhead, no multi-year contracts. Instead, it operates as a curatorial platform, mounting focused exhibitions with artists it selects project by project. The model echoes what Kunsthallen do in Europe but applies it to a commercial gallery context, betting that agility and curatorial taste matter more than roster size in a market where mid-tier galleries are struggling to survive. Source: Artnet News · 24 May 2026
Atelier Backlar's Blue House on São Miguel Island, built within the ruins of a whaler's tavern using recycled ocean plastic and local timber, is drawing attention not for its scale but for its material logic. The Azores intercept vast quantities of Atlantic plastic debris; rather than shipping it to the mainland for processing, the studio used it as architectural cladding on site. The building sits above Capelas bay — once a centre of industrial whaling — making it a quiet meditation on extraction, waste and reuse. Source: Dezeen · 23 May 2026
Dutch studio Barde vanVoltt has completed Estero, a mixed-use building in San José del Cabo, Mexico. At street level, a community café lined in chukum — a traditional Maya plaster — opens onto the sidewalk. Above it, three floors of residences share a courtyard logic that prioritises shade and cross-ventilation over the glass-and-steel vocabulary that dominates resort architecture in Los Cabos. The building's ambition is modest: to match the slower rhythm of the town rather than import the tempo of Mexico City or Amsterdam. Source: Dezeen · 23 May 2026
Cristian Mungiu's *Fjord* won the Palme d'Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, making the Romanian director a two-time winner. The Grand Prix went to Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev for *Minotaure* — a notable choice given ongoing political sensitivities around Russian artists at the festival. The jury, led by Park Chan-wook, delivered a ceremony described as "darkened by the state of the world," reflecting the festival's uneasy mood amid multiple ongoing conflicts. Source: Le Monde · 23 May 2026; Vanity Fair · 24 May 2026
Richard Dawkins's *The Selfish Gene*, published in 1976, reaches its half-century. New Scientist argues that despite — or because of — the genomic revolution that followed, the book's gene-centred view of evolution remains remarkably robust. When Dawkins wrote it, almost no genes had been sequenced. Today, with millions mapped, the core argument that genes are the primary unit of natural selection has been refined but not refuted. A rare case of a popular science book ageing better than most scientific papers. Source: New Scientist · 24 May 2026
In Geneva, young Swiss practice Sapid Studio has transformed a raw industrial space into a photography atelier where light itself becomes the primary design element. Rather than renovating the space in the conventional sense, the architects worked almost exclusively with apertures, reflective surfaces and translucent partitions to control and redirect natural light through the building. The result is a workspace that changes character throughout the day — a studio where the photographer's raw material is also the architect's. Source: Wallpaper · 24 May 2026 ---
This past week marked a qualitative shift in public sentiment toward artificial intelligence. The concept was booed at multiple US commencement speeches. A literary prize was tarnished when a winning story was revealed as likely AI-generated. Meta justified mass layoffs in explicitly AI-driven terms. Taken individually, each incident is minor. Taken together, they suggest that AI's public image problem is migrating from the tech press into mainstream consumer consciousness — and that any brand deploying AI visibly now carries reputational risk. The implications for companies are practical, not philosophical. Consumer-facing brands that trumpet AI integration — in customer service, creative output, hiring — may find that the association hurts more than it helps. The smart corporate response is likely what the ad industry calls "ingredient branding": use AI internally, never mention it externally. The irony is that the companies doing the most sophisticated AI work may be the ones that talk about it least. For the AI industry itself, this is the moment when the technology's boosters need to reckon with a fundamental communication failure. They sold AI as magic. Consumers experienced it as job loss, creative theft and uncanny mediocrity. Rebuilding trust will require less evangelism and more demonstrated, specific, undeniable utility — and a willingness to admit what AI does badly. Source: Fast Company · 24 May 2026
Fast Company has published an analysis of Oracle's financial position that raises uncomfortable questions about the AI infrastructure boom's financing. The company has taken on significant debt to fund data centre expansion, betting that demand for AI compute will justify the leverage. The pattern is not unique to Oracle — Blackstone called AI infrastructure investment a "generational opportunity" as recently as January — but Oracle's balance sheet makes the risk particularly visible. The concern is structural. AI infrastructure requires enormous upfront capital. Returns depend on sustained demand for compute that may or may not materialise at current pricing levels. If the AI application layer disappoints — if enterprise customers find that AI tools don't deliver the productivity gains they were promised — the infrastructure players are left holding expensive, depreciating assets financed by debt that doesn't depreciate at all. This is the classic picks-and-shovels trap: the gold rush ends, but the shovel factory's loans don't. None of this means Oracle or its peers will fail. But it means the "safe bet" narrative around AI infrastructure deserves far more scrutiny than it has received. The safest-looking investments in a boom are often the most dangerous in a correction. Source: Fast Company · 24 May 2026 ---
69
69%
That is the share of clothing that contains microplastics — synthetic fibres that shed into waterways every time the garments are washed. A small device designed to filter microplastics from washing machine discharge is gaining attention as a practical, low-cost intervention against what has become one of the most pervasive and least visible forms of pollution. The number is striking because it reframes the microplastics problem: this is not primarily an industrial waste issue or a packaging issue. It is a laundry issue. Every household with a washing machine and a synthetic-fibre wardrobe is a point source of ocean pollution.
The filter technology is simple — a mesh or magnetic trap fitted to the machine's outflow — but the behavioural challenge is enormous. Persuading hundreds of millions of households to retrofit their washing machines requires either regulation (France has mandated microplastic filters on new machines from 2025) or consumer demand that does not yet exist at scale. The 69 percent figure may be what changes that: it makes the abstract personal. Your fleece jacket, your yoga pants, your children's school uniforms — all of them, every wash, releasing fragments into the water system.
Source: Reasons to be Cheerful · 24 May 2026
In perspective
That is the share of clothing that contains microplastics — synthetic fibres that shed into waterways every time the garments are washed. A small device designed to filter microplastics from washing machine discharge is gaining attention as a practical,...
8 — Today's Wisdom
Uber puts ten billion euros on the table for Delivery Hero, and it's not an acquisition. It's a funeral. Not of Delivery Hero specifically, but of the entire idea that you can build a global platform company on razor-thin margins and perpetual venture capital without ever having to prove that the business actually works.
I've seen this before. I've lived it. When the bubble bursts, it's not the weakest that die first — it's the ones that never found their way from growth to profitability. Uber made that journey, painfully and late, but they made it. Delivery Hero did not. And now they're being acquired by the one that survived its own crisis. That's always how it goes.
The interesting part isn't the deal itself. The interesting part is what it says about an entire generation of tech companies built on the premise that scale solves everything. It doesn't. Scale without unit economics is just a faster way to burn money. Every order that loses three kronor doesn't lose any less just because you do a million of them.
What remains after the consolidation will be stronger. Fewer players, better margins, more reasonable prices. It's not glamorous, but that's how real companies are built. Not by subsidizing every meal with venture capital, but by delivering value that someone is actually willing to pay for.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai