Research & Writing
Eli Oates
I research businesses and industries — what makes them defensible, how they compound, and what the numbers say that the narrative doesn't.
Writing on strategy, markets, and the mechanics of durable businesses. Background in [X]. Based in [City].
Recent Work
What Makes a Business Defensible?
A working framework for thinking about competitive moats
Most discussions of moats treat them as binary — you either have one or you don't. The more useful question is: what is the mechanism, how durable is it, and what is it actually defending?
Stripe's Infrastructure Moat
Why payments infrastructure compounds differently than most software businesses
A deep look at how Stripe has built compounding technical and distribution advantages that make it structurally difficult to displace — and what the right frame for the business actually is.
AI's Picks-and-Shovels Moment
Who actually wins when everyone is building AI applications
An analysis of the infrastructure layer in AI — why the obvious beneficiaries may not be the durable ones, and where structural advantage is actually accumulating.
How I Read Annual Reports
A practical framework for extracting signal from 10-Ks
Annual reports are designed to be read by lawyers and regulators. Here's how to read them as an analyst — where the signal is, where the noise is, and what to look for that management doesn't highlight.
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