Founder and Author of The Aisle (@ReadTheAisle). Author @WinnerSellsAll. Former @fortunemagazine/@recode. Email: [email protected]. Signal: jasondelrey.10
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🚨Well, I'm taking the leap...
I’m launching an independent media company, The Aisle (@ReadTheAisle), dedicated to in-depth reporting on the AI era of commerce.
Whether you call it agentic, conversational, or AI-powered commerce, what's clear to me is that we’re on the cusp of the biggest shift in how the world buys and sells in decades.
The Aisle will publish weekly, in-depth stories + exclusive interviews, and jump on scoops and breaking analysis when news demands it. The newsletter is powered by @beehiiv's Media Collective.
The Aisle is backed by my 12 years covering tech + commerce and the deep network I’ve built across retail and Silicon Valley.
It’s for:
• Leaders at brands + retailers navigating what AI means for their customers...and their business
• Builders inside AI labs, tech giants, and startups reinventing online shopping
• Investors backing this next wave
The first issue hits paid subscribers this Thursday.
👉 Subscribe: readtheaisle.com/join
I can't wait to show you what I've been working on.
I'm thrilled I'll continue hosting events with Fortune—more to come on my gratitude for that amazing crew—including Brainstorm AI in San Francisco this December. But I'm ready now to also build a company and community of my own.
If you or your org wants to collaborate, sponsor, or bring me in to speak about this transformation, my DMs are open.
It's here: readtheaisle.com/p/marissa-m…
Tomorrow in @ReadTheAisle: an interview with @marissamayer
Subscribe here to get it in your inbox first: readtheaisle.com/join
I was scheduled to interview @marissamayer
about her new AI assistant, Dazzle, this past Monday.
Then, over the weekend, that anecdote in a New York Times profile of Mayer went viral, sparking a wave of criticism that eventually reached even TMZ.
If you somehow didn't see it, the anecdote involved Mayer using Dazzle to help describe one of her 10-year-old twin daughters for a school birthday celebration. By Wednesday, a post on this very app calling the use case “so bleak” had racked up more than 3 million views. I understood the immediate reaction. A quick reading could suggest that Mayer needed help from AI to identify three unique traits of her own daughter. The prevailing judgment online: How sad was that?
Still, I suspected there was more context. I've written enough profiles to know how much nuance can get lost when a single anecdote takes off like that. And while Silicon Valley's wealth bubble has surprised me plenty over the years, I had a hard time believing Mayer had simply asked an AI assistant to tell her what made her daughter special.
Plus, I'd wanted to interview Mayer well before the controversy. When she first announced Dazzle a few weeks earlier, we were smack in the middle of the Muse-Instinct craze. Mayer and Dazzle were taking a different approach, betting that screenshots and other photos in our phone camera rolls could provide an AI assistant with more useful context than connections to email or calendars.
I'd already spent some time testing Dazzle myself and had plenty of questions. How useful could an assistant built around our camera rolls really be? And how comfortable would people be giving it that kind of access?
So I was glad Mayer didn't cancel our interview Monday. We talked about the birthday slide controversy, of course, and the context she believes was missing.
Then we got into the questions about Dazzle that had made me want to interview her in the first place.
My full interview with Mayer, along with my own impressions from testing Dazzle, is in this week's edition of @ReadTheAisle: readtheaisle.com/p/marissa-m…
I'd love to hear what you think...
Tomorrow in @ReadTheAisle: an interview with @marissamayer
Subscribe here to get it in your inbox first: readtheaisle.com/join
Interesting bit of history behind today's @Walmart- @GeneralMedicine partnership:
In 2018, Walmart nearly acquired PillPack, the previous startup from General Medicine's founders. Amazon ended up buying it instead.
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon even called PillPack CEO @tjparker afterward to try to reverse the outcome.
Here's how I reported it in my book Winner Sells All...
---
Doug McMillon sounded determined. It was Thursday, June 28, 2018, and the biggest business news story of the day was very bad news for Walmart and its CEO.
That same morning, Amazon had announced that it had signed an agreement to purchase a young company called PillPack, a five-year-old online pharmacy backed by venture capitalists.
PillPack sold prescription drugs specifically to Americans who take multiple medications every day, and had licenses in forty-nine states to ship those drugs—packaged in organized daily packs—to customers’ doors.
Not only would the acquisition give Amazon the pharmacy licenses and expertise to finally enter the highly regulated but ripe-for-disruption $350 billion prescription drug market, but it also landed another blow on Walmart, which had been extremely close to buying PillPack itself.
Just a few months earlier, PillPack and Walmart were so close to securing a deal that staff on both sides had already discussed the possibility of announcing the news to the American public through an appearance on a national morning show.
But in the final days of a nearly two-month period of due diligence, Walmart suddenly hit the brakes on the deal, stunning just about everyone involved on the PillPack side.
Walmart offered little explanation, other than that they needed to pause the talks and would be back in touch in about a month or so.
Either way, when news broke that PillPack was selling to Amazon instead, McMillon, one of the most powerful businessmen in the world, phoned PillPack’s 32-year-old CEO, TJ Parker, and pleaded with him to reconsider the Amazon deal.
“I think you made the wrong decision,” McMillon told him, according to someone familiar with the conversation. “We were the right buyer.”
McMillon was apologetic about his company’s mismanagement of the acquisition process and vowed to work one-on-one with Parker to push a sale to Walmart across the finish line if the entrepreneur backed out of the Amazon deal.
Of course, it was already far too late. Amazon had ripped a promising company right out of Walmart’s grasp, just like it had done nearly a decade earlier when it swooped in to purchase Diapers.com and its parent company after Walmart dragged its feet.
But this time it happened in the $4 trillion health care industry, which each company had big hopes of disrupting, just as they had each first done with retail decades ago.
Today @Walmart is expanding Better Care Services into a healthcare store, powered by General Medicine. Now, customers can search and browse 900+ products and services across a dozen provider groups, compare cash prices and estimated costs with insurance, and get the care they need.
Thank you to the Walmart team for building this with us and bringing it to customers across the US .
Read Walmart's press release here: corporate.walmart.com/news/2…
I mean... only my Knicks
The Knicks' assistant coaches did not receive their championship rings during Tuesday's ceremony, despite being handed ring boxes, according to league sources.
Many longtime employees at Madison Square Garden will not receive rings at all, per team sources.
Those employees got their hopes up in late September, when they were sent a fake championship ring offer as part of a phishing test.
nyti.ms/4jB0yvR
I spent so much time last fall agonizing over the fact that I was being told I shouldn't name my new publication The Receipt or The Receipts
After finally landing on The Aisle as a substitute name, I literally haven't thought about the original name ideas again...until now
By the looks on the faces of my fellow panelists at this Beehiiv/Edelman event, I'm pretty sure this is the moment I momentarily blacked out and admitted that I had reached out to some early subscribers of The Aisle many months ago to find out why they unsubscribed.
One of them blamed it on their AI agent and is still a subscriber to this day.
The other....gave me some valuable feedback that I hope will make the publication stronger in the long run.
One thing I've learned in the first 11 months of building my own thing: you can't have any shame in your game.
Was indeed a good time chatting with @benthompson for @stratechery recently: stratechery.com/2026/an-inte…
And, yes, Beehiiv has been a great partner in my first 11 months building @ReadTheAisle
every week @benthompson interviews some of the most notable people in tech (previous guests include Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, etc.)
2 of his recent guests?
journalists who have recently gone independent and are absolutely crushing it on @beehiiv 🙌
> @JoannaStern (New Things)
> @DelRey (The Aisle)
I did not expect one of the more intriguing AI shopping experiences I've seen lately to come from HP.
Yes, the computer and printer company.
I got a demo of HP's new AI-powered shopping site, which completely redesigns itself in real time based on a customer's voice or text prompts.
I've seen startups building toward this future, but few retailers doing it in-house.
What worked, what didn't, and what it could mean for e-commerce in the latest @ReadTheAisle:
readtheaisle.com/p/exclusive…
Not me awkwardly staring directly into the camera
At Edelman NYC for the @beehiiv panel on creator journalism w/ @BrianSozzi @amyodell @DelRey @LachCartwright
Longtime @stratechery reader, first-time talker. It was a real treat to nerd out on all things Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce--and of course, Muse and the personal agent craze--with @benthompson this week.
stratechery.com/2026/an-inte…
We also discussed the life and death of Recode, and my conviction that my new publication @ReadTheAisle will be the last job of my career.
Hope you take a read, and then consider subscribing here: readtheaisle.com/join
Will give a shot to anything that can try to make sense of all the screenshots in my camera roll
If a picture is worth a thousand words, your camera roll is worth millions.
That’s why we built Dazzle, an AI assistant that turns your camera button into a "get it done" button. No blank prompts, just instant context and action. 🚀
Read the full launch post: dazzle.ai/blog/ 🎉
Jason Del Rey retweeted
A list of surprising and mind-boggling stats from this conversation:
- $1B+ a year in transaction volume (still invite only)
- Growing 10%+ A DAY and has spent zero dollars on marketing
- 40% of users shared a personal credit card with Instinct within 3 weeks
- Compute demand is doubling roughly every week
- At 5 to 8% daily growth over the months it takes to bring new compute online, Instinct would reach about 100 million users
- On Instinct's own A/B tests, it matches Opus 5 performance at a fraction of the cost
- Noah spends about 40% of his time on compute
- Buying compute at the last minute costs 3 to 4x more
- Background work runs on setups that are 3x, 5x and 8x more efficient on the same compute
- 50% of Instinct's transaction volume is travel
- Instinct plans to take a cut of what users buy (take rates, Shopify is~2.5-3%, Amazon ~15%, Apple 30%)
- Noah's personal goal is to keep Instinct free for everyone for life
- Some small businesses run their entire back office on Instinct
- Users who connect at least one piece of sensitive information retain at about 80%
- Some users send more than 90% of their messages to Instinct by voice
- Say an app makes 70% of its money from ads and 30% from actually selling you things. Agents could wipe out the 70%, but Noah thinks the 30% gets much bigger, because people buy more when buying takes zero effort
- Instinct launched to about 200 friends and family
- Invites have sold on eBay for around $300
- More than 50% of Instinct's traffic doesn't run on iMessage
- Instinct has proactively called Noah three times
- The company is less than a year old
- Raised $1B at a $10B valuation, less than a month after raising at $2.5B
- Noah is 23
My conversation with Noah Shinn (@noahrshinn), founder of Instinct.
Noah is building a personal AI assistant. It's still invite only, has spent nothing on marketing, and is growing roughly 10% A DAY.
This is his first long conversation about the company.
We discuss:
- Why Instinct doesn't have an app
- Buying compute months ahead of exponential demand
- How users learn to trust it with a credit card
- Safety and security
- Agents coordinating with other people's agents
- Instinct's business model
- Apps built on consumer inertia
- and more
Enjoy!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
4:11 What people are using AI agents for
15:07 Rethinking travel, reservations, and the internet
22:43 Trust, privacy, and personal data
27:50 The business model behind Instinct
38:04 How existing businesses will adapt
47:55 Designing a personal assistant people love
53:15 Growth, compute, and competing with Big Tech
1:11:44 What’s next for Instinct and personal AI
Meta announcing a bunch of major retailers integrating with Muse like Walmart and Best Buy reminds me a bit of Google's anti-Amazon alliance built around Google Home and voice commerce a decade ago.
Amazon didn't need Google then. And it doesn't need Meta's Muse now.
I explain in my latest @ReadTheAisle newsletter: readtheaisle.com/p/amazon-me…
Some helpful context on the new Amazon v Meta/Muse battle that you'd already know if you subscribed to @ReadTheAisle 😎
1. Amazon already has its own AI shopping agent called Buy for Me. The company hasn't marketed it heavily yet (maybe because it does some of the things that Amazon is trying to stop other AI agents from doing?)
2. Amazon last year sued Perplexity over the AI startup's Comet AI agent that some Amazon customers were using to shop on their behalf. An appeals court recently sided with Perplexity (after a lower court had previously ruled in favor of Amazon to temporarily ban Comet from accessing Amazon for shoppers).
3. On Monday, Amazon amended its complaint against Perplexity accusing Perplexity of misleading the appeals court. Perplexity had told the court its own servers never directly touched Amazon's and that everything happened in the customer's browser. But Amazon says that's false and that on iOS, Perplexity's servers logged into Amazon themselves using customers' sign-in cookies. We'll see if this case makes it to trial.
Would be shocked if Amazon sues Meta but this is the era of crazy first times.
More in The Aisle this week...
