Why a Pokémon business site
I have been a Pokémon fan for most of my life and a business nerd for the rest of it, and the two met a long time ago. Pokémon is the highest‑grossing franchise there is, yet almost nobody can say how the money moves: who prints the cards, who books a game’s sales, why the company that runs the franchise pays its owners next to nothing. The answers are public, scattered across Japanese filings, court dockets, customs tables and trademark registers, and nobody had put them in one place with receipts.
So over two weeks I built one. Every number on the site links to the document it came from and carries a grade for how much to trust it. The method page explains how that works.
How it was built
The research runs as a pipeline. A question goes in; scouts read the primary documents and transcribe facts with verbatim quotes; a reconciler checks the arithmetic; a red team tries to break the thesis before anything is written; a writer turns what survives into a page where every figure resolves to a record. The site is generated from that record, so if a figure is wrong the fix is to correct the record, not the prose.
It is a work in progress. Some questions are answered to a filing, some only to an estimate, and a few are still blocked on documents nobody has been able to read yet. The grades say which is which.
Send a note
If you spot a number that does not add up, or just want to say hello, leave a note here. It goes straight to my inbox.