Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: How Poppi hopes to win the battle of the bubbles 

• Space Inc.: What India’s space odyssey could look like 

• Plus, our Recommendations: An explanation for our problematic shopping; a master novelist’s slim oeuvre; and a movie podcast for the nerdiest film nerds

The most powerful and well-connected people in crypto seem to think they’ve entered a period of enormous prosperity, if the industry’s inaugural balls are any measure.

That prosperity may continue for some time into the future. But I think a little sober-mindedness now might prevent a helluva hangover later on. 

Whenever I’ve spoken to someone in crypto lately, they do their best to keep the conversation focused on the market’s boring bits—stablecoins and so forth—in an effort to highlight parts of crypto that are practical, not flashy. (Our Yueqi Yang heard much the same when she wrote a Weekend Big Read last month on the current state of crypto.) They also really like to talk up Donald Trump, and they think his presidency will be great for them. I’m not so convinced. 

Trump has signaled to crypto that his administration will take a very light touch to regulation, and he himself, of course, launched a Trump-branded memecoin shortly before taking office that has ballooned his net worth. He’s gotten richer by embracing the lack of rules, which could encourage others in crypto to do the same. 

Crypto has gone to some substantial effort to rebrand itself as a safe asset class, but by encouraging an everything-goes attitude, Trump could drive people out of the market who don’t have the stomach for topsy-turviness—or at least it could make them far less likely to hop in. And isn’t that what crypto is hoping to do—encourage more investors to enter?

Since Trump is unlikely to get tough, crypto may need to do what no industry ever wants to do: practice some unpleasant self-policing. If the stablecoin set really does want to win over more investors, it may need to do things like actively—and frequently—speak out against investing in junk such as memecoins, and keep such speculative stuff off trading platforms and exchanges. It could mean losing some business among crypto die-hards in a bid to appeal to a broader market.

I think there’s a political imperative, too. Let’s say crypto parties hard for the next four years, and anything and everything goes. What will happen if a Democrat takes back the White House? That president’s desire to press down hard on a Trump plaything could make the Biden administration’s ham-fisted approach to crypto look enlightened by comparison.—Abram Brown

The Big Read 

How Poppi Hopes to Win the Battle of the Bubbles

When Allison and Stephen Ellsworth initially gave up their oil-and-gas jobs and threw themselves into a weird-sounding beverage startup, they embraced the fact that they didn’t know anything about what they were doing. 

“Because we didn’t know anything coming into it, there was no playbook that we felt obligated to follow,” Stephen, 37, recalled when our Ann Gehan traveled to Austin to see him and Allison, 38. “We figured it out ’cause we had to.”

It’s worked out pretty well for them, as Ann explains in this week’s Big Read. Poppi did more than $500 million in sales last year and hit profitability—pretty good for a five-year-old startup, especially in the slim-margin beverage business. The Ellsworths are master marketers—a necessity in the consumer goods game—and they have smartly positioned their low-sugar soda to tap into the craze among younger shoppers for healthier alternatives to venerable drink brands. Indeed, Poppi is to soda what Athletic Brewing is to beer. 

The Ellsworths could find what’s ahead even harder than what they’ve already done. They face a swarm of competition—from established giants like Coca-Cola, which reportedly offered to buy Poppi last year, and from a slew of startup rivals, like Olipop. (Yes, the competition is so close that the names are that similar.)

Ann asked Allison what other startup she most admires and would most like to emulate. Allison’s answer: Kim Kardashian’s Skims. “I see Poppi on that same trajectory of disrupting a huge category while doing dope shit along the way,” she said. 

Space Inc.

A Satellite Startup Envisions a Top Spot in India’s Space Odyssey 

Few places in the world offer the eye-widening stories of entrepreneurial verve that India does. And those stories are only getting bigger and bigger—especially as India works to secure a place for itself in the commercial space industry. , a former Wall Street Journal veteran, has just such a tale for us about Awais Ahmed, a 27-year-old founder with Google and Lightspeed money who has one of his country’s most promising space startups: Pixxel, a maker of ultrasophisticated satellite-imaging tech. 

Ahmed has modeled everything he can in Bangalore-based Pixxel after what he knows about Silicon Valley—from the bunk beds in the office for when staff need to crash, to his own all-black dress code, an ode to Silicon Valley’s sartorial preference for Jobsian minimalism. “One thing with black is: You don’t have to iron it,” he said. 

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, hasn’t attracted any Elon hate on Twitter and frankly feels left out. Reach him at [email protected].

Listening: Lights, Camera—Critique! 

I watch a lot of weird old movies, and typically, I find myself in the same old routine once the credits roll: I open up my podcast app, search for the film’s title and select a show at random in the hopes of finding something, anything, to help me process what I just saw. 

Often I’m disappointed. Turns out there are a lot of dud podcasts out there! Then, while looking for a discussion of David Lynch’s masterwork “Wild at Heart” (1990) last weekend, I discovered “GenreVision.” It’s a fantastically thoughtful and well-researched movie podcast hosted by entertainment writers Drew Dietsch and Travis Newton. For nearly a decade, they’re been putting out weekly episodes that review and recommend practically every type of film you could imagine: from Hammer Studio’s “The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires” (1974) to the gender-bender comedy “Willy/Milly” (1986) to the Coen brothers’ “The Hudsucker Proxy” (1994). They’re good at assembling thematic series: “Willy/Milly,” for instance, was part of a lengthy discussion of movies about mix-ups and mashups. 

I especially appreciate how careful they are about dividing episodes into spoiler-free and spoiler-filled sections, as well as their recommendations of other pop culture—TV shows, other movies, sometimes even Broadway musicals—that has some connection to the movie they discuss.—Paris Martineau

Reading: A Creatively Frugal Master

For a literary escape from our chaotic present day, I’ve lately ditched my usual reading diet of contemporary novels and have instead been diving into historical fiction. One author in particular has helped get me through this winter: Argentine-American novelist Hernan Diaz.

Diaz has only published two books. His most recent, “Trust,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023, and it is indeed brilliant, a “Rashomon”-style telling of a family saga at the core of the early-20th-century banking system.

His first work, “In the Distance,” was a Pulitzer finalist, and I like it even more than “Trust.” The frontier epic follows Håkan, a young Swedish emigrant who gets lost and must embark on an accidental odyssey across the cruel and wondrous landscape of mid-19th-century America. Håkan’s journey is a reminder of how far our nation has come and how much we owe it to the past to keep building a kinder future.—Julia Black

Watching: How Amazon Suckers You In

Anyone with an internet connection today can probably relate to a certain feeling of consumption malaise between the deluge of social media ads and the ubiquity of frictionless shopping apps. As it happens, there’s a Netflix documentary about this feeling, “Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy.” 

It’s a concise yet clever tour through modern marketing infrastructure: from how consumer brands really do conspire to sell us more stuff—one Amazon executive interviewed brought up the word “magic”—to unsettling footage of how overconsumption harms the environment. I generally consider myself a conscious consumer, and when I turned the documentary on, I wondered exactly how much I might learn. Well, the film did its job, and I now know about several discomforting lies that get told about U.S. recycling efforts, including the fact that many products misrepresent themselves as recyclable despite boldly and prominently labeling themselves as such. 

It’s an illuminating if sometimes upsetting watch. The cheeky, robot-voiced narrator helped get me through.—Sara Germano

Final Thought

With great profit comes vested responsibility.