The Devil’s Haircut
The Ostrich Report is back — six panels, two continents, one new entry in the lexicon.
Sponsored by All Things Market Places and Rithum
[Read the comic strip version on the site → theostrichreport.netlify.app/show/special-edition]
Right. Let’s do the news.
Hendrik and I got the start time wrong this morning — live five minutes late and fifty-five early, which is more or less the posture of the whole industry: running fast, arriving confused, doing it anyway. So we aired the conversation we usually keep in the group chat.
1 / AGAIN?! — Platforms Shopify and Cloudflare fell over again — the fourth wobble of the year — and the merchant class shrugged. Status pages green by morning; the outrage never showed. That’s the tell. There’s nowhere left to storm off to: competition’s thin, switching costs brutal, and “is it headless, is it composable, what does MACH even mean” has quietly replaced any real choice.
“When there’s nowhere else to go, an outage stops being a crisis and becomes a Tuesday.”
2 / PLATEAU! — Retail media The post-Covid gold rush has flattened into one buyer: CPG brands moving shopper-marketing money. Mirakl planted its flag as the infrastructure and, since 2025, leaned into monetisation — Amazon’s death-by-a-thousand-cuts, run with better manners. Everyone’s waiting on a Mirakl IPO for a real signal. Until then it’s Criteo hoovering and agencies narrating.
“Retail media went hunting for a problem to solve and came back with someone else’s budget.”
3 / KA-CHING?! — AI Who IPOs first, Anthropic or OpenAI — almost certainly north of a trillion. Hendrik’s frame is the one I keep circling: there’s only so much money in the room. Whoever reaches the public markets first holds a structural edge and gives us the first honest look inside these businesses. This is the Karen Hao question wearing a finance hat — not “is the tech good,” but who funds it, on what terms, and who pays when the bill lands.
[GIF — suggested: “community-adjusted EBITDA” / WeWork energy]
“There’s only so much money in the room. The first one to the exit gets to call it an entrance.”
✂ SPLASH — THE DEVIL'S HAIRCUT Salesforce bought Contentful on 1 June. No price disclosed, no SEC filing — corporate body language for don’t read this number. The Information later put it at $1–1.5bn against a $3bn-plus valuation in 2021. A four-to-six-times round trip, going the wrong way. So we named it, after the Beck track.
THE DEVIL’S HAIRCUT (n.): when a once-hot company sells at a brutal markdown and the buyer leaves the price in the drawer — because the number is the story. Spot one in the wild? Make the meme. Tag us.
5 / HOOVER! — Cross-border Global-e bagged Passport for $350m up front, plus up to $75m in earnout — a non-merchant-of-record capability and ~$100m of 2026 revenue, into the bag. Cross-border is consolidating into a handful of giants while the category goes mute on conference agendas. The part to clip: the way out isn’t scale, it’s re-localisation. Product ubiquity flattened price differentiation — same item, anywhere, separated only by delivery cost. If you’re an Irish or EU operator watching UK demand soften (IMRG has fashion conversion and demand generation sliding), that’s your opening, not your obituary.
“Cross-border didn’t die. It got bought, twice, and taken off the agenda.”
6 / SOLD! — Events Hyve — owner of Shoptalk, HLTH, Bett, Manifest — swapped PE owners at a reported $1.8bn, roughly triple its 2023 price, on $100m-plus EBITDA. The buyer’s line is that in an AI world the in-person room gets more valuable. Maybe. But PE-to-PE at the top of a cycle is less a vote of confidence than a clock running out.
“The conference where you learn the industry is consolidating just got consolidated. Buy the t-shirt.”
THE SIGNAL — Same map, different scissors Here’s the turn, because the off-the-cuff version blurs it. It’s tempting to wrap all six into one doom-loop — but the numbers won’t let you. Contentful is the genuine haircut. Hyve and Passport are up deals, capital flowing toward control rather than creation. Not a market dying. A market being bought.
So where does that leave the operator on the ground? Watching who files first, who gets the quiet no-price deal next, and whether the back half of the year bites as hard as the signals suggest. The winners won’t be chasing scale. They’ll be building something specific enough that nobody can buy their way around it.
If Wednesday’s Daily said Europe is the prize, this is the sound of the buyers loading up.
That’s your two continents. The Ostrich Report is back properly from next week. Week 1 brought to you by Rithum (powering the future of commerce) and All Things Marketplace — over £370M in revenues handled through Amazon. And in January 2027 we’ll all be in Tralee, at the one event nobody can acquire.
Heads up. The rest of them have theirs in the sand.