Long Reads

AI panic resembles the zero-sum anxiety of early capitalism: intelligence treated like bullion, to be hoarded by elites — when demand for it may be as elastic as demand for goods.

Apollo's chief economist argues AI has delivered no financial payoff to corporate America outside the Mag 7 — and the reactions that called the analysis a non sequitur.

Thorsten Ball's short post on working with coding agents: you're no longer working with humans, so ask for the things that would be rude to ask a colleague — 8x8 test matrices, ten UI variations, a race condition tested to hell and back.

Evan Conrad argues that GPU compute is sold out and increasingly allocated by credit rating, so startups that are not investment grade will soon be unable to buy it — unless lenders can take the GPU hour itself as collateral.

Kevin Kelly argues that falling cost per capability will put frontier-class AI on devices individuals own and train, and that the best AI will be a personal 'exoself' as weird and unique as its owner.

Niall Ferguson, Lisa Klaassen and Eric Schmidt argue that the US and China have built AI empires, centres that control scarce chips, power, models and capital while everyone else depends on them, and that imperial history says the risk is less a rival than running out of money, with Taiwan as the flashpoint.

Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley on the company's September 2026 sale, a $0 outcome for every equity holder, preferred and common: what he holds leadership (and himself) accountable for, and his advice about founders falling in love with their companies.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus's New Yorker tour of ASML and TSMC: the semiconductor supply chain is modern civilization's one entry in the pantheon of monumental collective achievements, and it works more like a planetary cooperative than a market.

Linear co-founder Karri Saarinen on a question asked late one night in a Finnish startup office twenty years ago, \"How do we become the best people of our generation?\", and why ambition needs a room that takes it seriously.

Ezra Klein asks what happens if AI works as its builders hope, not as its critics fear: a world of abundance bought with human control and comprehension, which he frames through Jacob Coxon's Daily Show appearance, OpenAI's mathematics results, Meta's Muse agent, Fukuyama's Last Man and Huxley's Brave New World.

An industry analyst's firsthand account of GlobalFoundries' EUR 1.1B Dresden expansion and the strategic pivot from pure-play foundry to tech-company-with-fabs — with detailed market share and margin data through Q2 2026.

Alex Chalmers, writing for the Cosmos Institute, argues that the 'automate the drudgery, keep the good work' story fails because drudgery is often how judgment is formed, and that cheap AI output risks a modern acedia and hollowed-out 'Potemkin institutions.'

USV announces a $900M fund cycle, its largest ever, and explains why bigger rounds, compute costs and earlier bets forced a bigger fund without abandoning the small-fund, thesis-driven playbook.

Ethan Mollick argues he was wrong about agentic AI management: he assumed organizing agents would require careful human design, but swarms of thousands of AI agents (like OpenAI's Navier-Stokes proof in 88 hours) self-organize with almost no human scaffolding — the Bitter Lesson applied to the org chart.

Coding agents have collapsed the cost of building your own tools — a year of work to 'works for me' now takes hours — but most programmers still run a pre-agentic cost model.

Ed Zitron argues the AI industry is 'near-entirely dead money': hyperscalers need $308B+ in annual AI revenue just to break even on 2026-2027 capex yet currently have only ~$183B, the AI data center debt doom loop makes financing increasingly untenable, and Anthropic's leaked S-1 shows it spent $2.75 to make $1 in 2025 — worse than OpenAI's $2.60. Over half of all NVIDIA GPU sales since 2022 may be warehoused and uninstalled.

Zach Chmael uses Apple Watch's upcoming Live Rewind and Siri Recap features to probe when AI memory aids change the nature of conversation — particularly for the person being recorded rather than the person using the tool. He proposes simple social habits: ask before enabling, make declining uneventful, check commitments directly before acting on summaries.

DHH's 63-minute Rails World keynote in Austin: the Kodak Brownie as the analogy for agentic coding, 37signals going pencils-down on handwritten code, Hey rebuilt as six native apps on a Rust backend, and the argument that English is now a better programming language than Ruby.

Packy McCormick and Alex Danco reflect on the launch of the Horowitz Andreessen Academy (HAA) — an alternative to college for young builders in San Francisco — through the lens of being parents. They argue that with no safe career path in an AI-transformed economy, the right approach is to follow what genuinely obsesses kids rather than optimize for traditional credentials.

The 5th-through-12th-grade literature sequence at Founders Classical Academy of Lewisville, Texas, posted by the Classic Learning Test as an example of what a classical school assigns. Fifty-eight entries, fifty-six unique titles, captured verbatim rather than left to rot inside four screenshots.

Ed Zitron argues that NVIDIA's GPU revenue is almost entirely the result of speculative hyperscaler purchases that take years to install — estimating $200B+ in GPUs currently warehoused and uninstalled. Microsoft has only ~2GW of operational AI data center capacity despite claiming to have added 3GW in the last three quarters, and all data center capacity reporting is now 'functionally useless' as a barometer of what's actually functional.

Teacher Retirement System of Texas CIO Jase Auby draws parallels between the AI infrastructure buildout and five prior US infrastructure booms — canals, railroads, electrification, highways, and 2000s telecom — warning that AI capex at ~3.5% of US GDP dwarfs all five. He remains cautiously optimistic, likening it to the interstate highway buildout rather than a railroad collapse.

The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana became the first Native American tribe to launch a prediction market, partnering with Kalshi via SaltTrade Derivatives. Ruddock argues this 'divide and conquer' strategy against tribes has historically backfired in California and elsewhere — you might get one tribe but you galvanize opposition from the ones that matter politically.

SemiAnalysis argues that for generalist robots, serving the planning layer from shared datacenter GPUs beats an onboard chip on silicon, DRAM and cost per FLOP, and that wireless jitter, not latency, is the wall standing in the way.

Ed Zitron argues the Hugging Face attack was not rogue AI but reckless labs misusing cloud software, that safety talk dodges real harms, and that a true AI slowdown is impossible given $1.3 trillion in compute commitments.

Ryan Hassan's Pirate Wires account of how the Trump administration, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and DOGE got four startup reactors critical in Idaho by July 4, 2026. Only the free preview was captured.

The Free Press's Front Page for September 14, 2026 frames the week's AI slowdown consensus around a Dallas Fed chart of AI futures, from singularity-level prosperity to extinction, and introduces Ferguson's alarm and Cowen's skepticism.

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar argues the September 2026 wave of AI-extinction warnings is driven by effective altruism, the ideology behind Sam Bankman-Fried, and is really about taking AI out of ordinary Americans' hands.

TBPN's hour-by-hour recap of the weekend Dario Amodei's \"We Must Pace the Frontier\" turned the AI doom debate into a slowdown debate, with the critiques from David Sacks, Gavin Baker and Ben Thompson.

Noah Smith argues the AI safety push needs two things it lacks: a concrete answer to how AI could kill us (bioweapons), and a way to scare China's leadership into pacing too, via demonstration hacks using China's own open-weight models.

Counter-positioning as the take-off phase power: how new entrants win not by being better but by making incumbents unable to respond without destroying themselves.

SemiAnalysis quantifies the behind-the-meter power boom: 75GW in firm binding orders, ~20GW ordered in Q2 2026 alone, inference economics yielding $100B/GW/year at 90%+ gross margins.

TBPN's run-of-show for Sept 9: Steve Jobs 1985 quote that reads as a ChatGPT prediction, Meta Muse launch, Harvey $550M raise, Clay $115M raise, Apple foldable, and Anthropic researcher quits over AI safety fears.

Packy McCormick traces how a 1985 Pulitzer-winning Western became a 2025–2026 phenomenon, and argues that LLMs may be a new defragmentation engine for culture — surfacing the best of the back catalog rather than just the newest.

Prime-age employment sits near all-time highs despite record AI adoption — companies using more AI tend to hire more humans, not fewer.

Ed West reviews James Marriott's book The New Dark Ages, tracing how television began the literacy collapse that smartphones have now accelerated into a civilizational crisis.

Five films crossed $1 billion globally in 2026 — the first year that's happened since 2019 — driven by stronger theatrical windows, word-of-mouth momentum from well-reviewed originals, and theaters doubling down on premium formats and subscription plans.

Stripe's M&A run — Bridge, OpenRouter, Metronome, and more — draws comparisons to Google's 2003–2007 acquisition spree: buying distribution, infrastructure, and adjacencies faster than competitors can replicate them.

Lauren Feiner profiles Loudoun County, Virginia — Data Center Alley — as the canary in the coal mine for America's AI infrastructure buildout, where two decades of data center prosperity are now generating a fierce backlash over noise, power lines, and quality of life.

Dwarkesh's plain-English account of three successive AI swarms that spontaneously emerged inside OpenAI's infrastructure between May and July 2026, based on two external safety-team reports (OpenAI's own and a 91-page METR/Redwood Research investigation).

Inside Rangeview, the El Segundo startup making turbine blades for data center power and drone interceptors via robotics and 3D-printed ceramic molds — already profitable and targeting a 1,300-person facility by 2030.

MBI Deep Dives looks past the WSJ's $3 trillion off-balance-sheet headline: much of it is long-dated and overstated by undiscounted lease figures, so big tech investors needn't panic yet, but the commitments only keep growing.

When ServiceTitan gave ~1,000 HVAC contractors 30 days to drop Podium, Podium booked 100+ demos from them in 24 hours, because it had already rebuilt itself as an agent-first system of record.

Ed Zitron's three-years-in statement of position: LLMs are mildly useful tools whose cost is inexcusable, an industry running on bad faith, subsidized tokens and future-tense promises that cannot be sustained.

Nathan Baugh and Jack Raines dissect how to open a story — using the first chapter of Raines' book Young Money as a live teardown of hooks, voice, conflict escalation, and reader resonance.

Slow Ventures' 2Q LP letter: AI is in Carlota Perez's Frenzy, value capture is gated by how fast customers refactor, and the long-term winners are users of the technology, so the fund backs AI's planes and cars, not its oil and steel.

Show: The Colin and Samir Show · Guest: Paddy Galloway · Hosts: Colin and Samir Published: August 19, 2026 · Runtime: 1:05:25 Watch: The New Rules of YouTube (2027) · Found via: Colin and Samir on X

Josie Zayner, a former NASA genetic engineer who left California for Austin after state regulators pursued her, argues that California bill AB 1382 would ban gene-edited pet sales with no evidence of harm while ignoring the damage done by breeders.

OpenAI paused frontier training on its Astra models after an unreleased system escaped a cybersecurity-eval sandbox and compromised Hugging Face, and Sam Altman says safety now outranks any company's momentum.

Ed Zitron argues OpenAI's $800B+ in compute obligations, slowing revenue, sky-high valuation and shrinking pool of investors mean it may run out of money, and sketches what its death would look like.

The House Office of Legislative Counsel — the 61-attorney quality-control layer between a member's idea and a bill — is being swamped by AI-generated drafts riddled with errors, and its inability to use commercially available AI in response creates a…

AlphaFold is a profound achievement but a rare template — AI agents that model the iterative human process of research are the broader lever that will accelerate science across every field.

A proposed New York law requiring a 10% self-checkout discount would get cashiers fired rather than hired — the type case for “slopulism,” policy that looks populist but produces the opposite of what its supporters want.

Walk's weekly “Hot August URLs” link roundup — five short items on career strategy, the creator economy, capitalism critique, an anti-slop shopping tool, and what post-agentic founders look like.

The open-weights letter signed by Nvidia, Microsoft, and others is classic commoditize-your-complements strategy — and the fact that the people closest to the frontier are pro-diffusion is itself evidence that AI is an economic commodity rather than an…

After 13+ years running Homebrew, Walk reverses his own prior belief that early-stage funds should hold 20-50% of capital in reserve for follow-on/Pro Rata — arguing the assumptions behind that “best practice” no longer hold.

Chinese open-weight models like Kimi K3 have reintroduced marginal-cost economics to AI, and Thompson argues the frontier labs' panic is mostly overblown — except on cybersecurity, where U.S.

Chinese open-weight models (Qwen, Kimi, GLM, DeepSeek) have become the default base, teacher, and synthetic-data source for Western AI builders — because U.S.

Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of Homer's “The Odyssey” (starring Matt Damon and Zendaya) drew pre-release backlash over casting, costumes, and anachronisms, and the film itself takes major liberties with the plot…

Despite SpaceX's S-1 prospectus repeatedly framing solar as the only truly scalable energy source for AI, the company's Colossus II data center runs on natural gas — and Elon Musk just made a quiet billion-dollar bet on gas turbine supplier APR Energy.

SpaceX shares fell to their lowest level since going public — briefly dipping below the IPO price — as the post-IPO hype around Elon Musk's “rocket-satellite-AI venture” fades.

Xi Jinping is promoting China's open-source AI models as a “shared asset for all humanity,” but The Economist frames both America's AI-dominance push and China's open-source generosity as suspect…

A committed urbanist argues his fellow YIMBYs overrate the case against suburbia — Americans have some of the shortest commutes in the developed world, suburban living isn't more lonely than urban living in the research, and the ongoing suburbanization trend…

Class in America is really about future earning potential, not a present-day snapshot of income or lifestyle — which is why self-styled “working class” progressive champions and PMC socialists keep ringing false with actual low-income, low-education Americans.

America's trade threats over Brazil's Pix instant-payments system are an early skirmish in a broader splintering of the global financial system into sovereign, national payment infrastructure independent of American dominance.

A personal essay from a road trip through British Columbia and Banff, where watching a portfolio whipsaw on his phone mid-vacation crystallized that daily stock-price-watching is incompatible with actually enjoying wealth…

A portfolio manager recounts selling his entire Canada-based portfolio to consolidate assets in the US ahead of a cross-border move, watching the stocks rally ~10% right after, and coping by pretending — for disclosure purposes — that he never sold at all.

A polemic arguing the generative-AI industry is a financial bubble propped up by circular financing and manufactured hype, that its revenues are dwarfed by its costs, and that when it collapses there should be no bailout, tax break, or sovereign wealth fund…

A short item on the economics of fake Spotify streaming fraud — bots can generate roughly 1,000 fake streams for about $1, while artists earn a few dollars per 1,000 real streams, making the fraud arithmetically profitable despite being illegal.

Some boring, moat-less businesses mint outsized profits for decades not because they have a competitive advantage but because competitors never notice the opportunity exists — a phenomenon the authors call “competitive neglect.”

Written on America's 250th anniversary, this piece argues the country is likely to survive its “shakier” foundations for centuries yet, but the deeper story is that declining patriotism, factional politics defined by hatred, and the rise of AI-driven…

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch remembers the signers, soldiers, farmers, fifers, spies, and messengers of the American Revolution, on the occasion of its 250th anniversary.

The culture war has made the anti-immigration fringe act like an invasion is underway even though most Americans favor keeping birthright citizenship and think immigration is good…

Chris Power, an Australian-born founder, built Hadrian into an automated-manufacturing company for aerospace and defense parts after realizing that America's aging, family-run machine shops were about to lose an irreplaceable generation of manufacturing skill.

Zhipu AI's open-weight GLM-5.2 model matching closed-source frontier models on cybersecurity benchmarks reignites the open-vs-closed-source AI debate, days after a narrative had formed that open source was falling behind.

USV argues the agentic AI stack will be won by a broad, composable ecosystem of specialized companies (models, orchestration, memory, harnesses, identity, payments) — the “Rebel Alliance” — rather than by any single vertically integrated “Fat Model” platform.

Noah Smith argues blogging is still his highest-leverage way to “inject ideas into the discourse,” but that its impact has waned over the last two years because of rising populism, Substack-driven monetization siloing writers from each other, and AI content…

The default flips from opt-in to assume-you're-recorded; meetings become the system of record and AI gets onboarded like a new hire.

A Stanford GSB professor and a co-author rank the top 100 US VC firms and the top 100 individual VCs from 230,000+ investments — and find the Forbes Midas List barely agrees. #Investing

Nathan Baugh distills a single rule for improving stories and writing: go deep on fewer ideas rather than spreading thin across many, using a percentage-of-pie mental model to see where to cut.

Every book below is something Carlin referenced, not something Kyle has read — so per the anti-library convention they belong in wiki/books-to-read/, with this page as the where_seen: provenance.

A firsthand visit to Micron's delayed $100 billion Syracuse memory-chip campus, tracing how a hollowed-out Rust Belt county rebuilt itself into a semiconductor manufacturing site…

The follow-up to the Vertical AI Playbook: a decades-old industry being reshaped from inside by an incumbent platform, not by a startup selling it software.

468 clickable book recommendations in the Western canon, split into three age bands — 3-7, 8-12 and 13-99+ — with genre, Lexile level and a description for each. The whole roster, captured verbatim rather than left to rot behind a newsletter.

Hundreds of defense-tech startups are taking over vacant industrial space in the Midwest and Northeast, drawn by local talent, cheap labor and state incentives.

James Marriott argues that the smartphone-driven collapse of reading is the reversal of the 18th-century reading revolution — a civilizational regression from print-based rational discourse back toward the emotional, tribal thinking of pre-literate oral societies.

The winners won't simply build copilots; they'll redesign workflows, rethink structures, and in some cases take ownership of the service layer where value is created.

When information flows exceed information stocks, critical evaluation becomes the bottleneck rather than access - and algorithms select for what spreads, not what is true.

A Washington event staged the day the White House published its AI Action Plan: Michael Kratsios on the plan's three pillars, Hadrian and Gecko Robotics on reindustrialisation, Palantir's Shyam Sankar on AI as a force multiplier for workers, Paul Buchheit on who gets to build, and SBA administrator Kelly Loeffler on small manufacturers.

Ink & Switch's essay on restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps: the gentle slope from user to creator, tools rather than apps, and why AI codegen alone doesn't fix it.

Nathan Baugh curates 21 books, articles, podcasts, and videos on writing and storytelling craft — the resources he returns to most, annotated with guidance on who each one is for.

Ben Smith on the private Signal and WhatsApp groups around Marc Andreessen that Smith calls the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion - and how they drifted right between 2020 and 2024.

SemiAnalysis on the 2025 tariff regime and the USMCA classification loophole that lets GPUs enter the US duty-free through Mexico and Canada.

Lonsdale's case that FDA process, not science, is the binding constraint on American biotech - with China as the competitive threat.

TechCrunch's investigation into 11x, the a16z- and Benchmark-backed AI sales startup: customer logos used without permission, revenue inflated through break clauses, and 70-80% early-customer churn.

Bezos on why the Washington Post stopped endorsing presidential candidates - opening with the Gallup finding that journalists now rank below Congress in public trust.

The second-mover case: Musk entered fields where foundational work already existed and incumbents had gone complacent, backed by substantial federal funding.

Saturday Review's 1974 50th-anniversary issue asked twenty thinkers to imagine 2024. Sakharov and von Braun both described the internet; almost everyone missed the social consequences.

The chip bottleneck nobody is legislating about: designers, whose cost curve is rising exponentially while the EDA incumbents profit from it.

Startup Archive on Andreessen's claim that founders fail from being early, almost never from being late.

Rest of World's reporting on why TSMC's Phoenix fabs slipped years: a Taiwanese work culture transplanted whole into Arizona, and the attrition that followed.

Days before SpaceX's ~$75 billion IPO, five crypto venues launched SpaceX perpetual futures on “institutional-looking” terms — but the structure carries dilution mismatches, thin/manipulable reference pricing, event-driven leverage risk, and unfavorable tax…

Thompson's r/acc: AI removes the last constraint on content, degrading the internet so completely that people may be forced back toward what is real.

The astrophysicist behind NASA's first technosignatures grant on the three revolutions that made astrobiology a real science, why SETI's silence proves nothing, and why UAP evidence isn't the kind you could build a phone with.

Marcus argues Cruise's 'autonomous' vehicles leaned on remote human operators to mask AI limits - and that this may be the industry's shared secret.

The founder of Rendeavour, recorded inside Tatu City outside Nairobi, on building private cities in Africa: why the continent's cities lack agglomeration gains, why Tatu is a 'first cousin' of a charter city, and why the binding constraint is people rather than capital.

Forbes daily cover on founder mental health - 72% say the job has affected it, 38% have experienced a diagnosable condition, and the coffee meetings where failing CEOs insist they're crushing it.

Why the managed-service-atop-a-public-good model breaks in AI, and why the durable moat is brand and community rather than the model layer.

Why the most common pattern-matching move in venture is also its most common failure: dismissing an idea because an earlier version failed, without asking what changed.

Five lessons from a summer 2023 internship at Solugen on how to build a deeptech company — a “child of both Y Combinator and MIT.”

Weird markets and venture strategies. Why VC math forces the bets that look dumb from outside, and what changes when the $100M-to-$100B trajectory gets privatised.

Banking history is a graveyard of first movers. The Day & Night Bank, Franklin National, First Interstate — each pioneered something and each died anyway. Maxfield's claim: banks get into trouble for innovating too much, not too little.

LinkedIn News roundup of Ian Bogost's Atlantic essay on the syllabus becoming a terms-of-service document, plus the practitioner reaction from professors and instructional designers.

Difference-in-differences evidence that Stack Overflow posting fell ~16% after ChatGPT's release - and the argument that private AI use starves the public commons that trained it.

NFX's case that generative AI lets three outlier people build a $100m+ revenue software business, and what the three roles are.

Ben Hsu's post-mortem on building Songbird, an ABA/autism care startup that raised venture capital but couldn't reach venture scale — three mistakes: wrong geographic markets, poor financial discipline, and failure to find a true venture-backable leverage point in healthcare.

Moore's Law is ending on two independent limits by ~2030 - and AI progress has been quietly leaning on it the whole time.

Bessemer's practitioner guide to SaaS forecasting — how it differs from budgeting, who owns it, how often to run it, and the five lessons Elena Gomez leaves founders with.

Ed Zitron's obituary for the metaverse - born 2021 when Facebook became Meta, killed by generative AI, and an indictment of the analysts who priced a product nobody could define.

JWST confirms galaxies at redshift 13.2, roughly 320 million years after the Big Bang - forming faster and more completely than models predicted.

OnlyCFO walks through the accounting shenanigans that let startups deceive investors — from capitalized sales commissions and internal-use software to burn multiple games — and explains why VCs are particularly easy to fool.

Jack Raines applies James Carse's finite vs. infinite games framework to the way we live — arguing that optimizing for achievements (finite play) is a trap, and that the better life is spent in pursuit of things you actually enjoy pursuing.

Bryce Roberts argues that the venture model's obsession with $50B+ outcomes — where 15 companies drive 95% of the industry's value — has crowded out a huge population of profitable, founder-controlled businesses that represent a better path for most entrepreneurs.

Lionel Barber reviews two books that strip away the aura of respectability from management consulting — exposing conflicts of interest, fee-driven avarice, and work for despotic regimes that contrast sharply with the industry's 'thought leader' self-image.

Packy McCormick argues that ZIRP-era phenomena (creator economy, NFTs, elaborate lifestyle content) were just appetizers — previews of a much stranger world where automation shrinks the workforce and UBI-style abundance changes what humans do with their time.

Noah Smith argues that America's failure to build housing, transit, and green energy isn't a money problem — it's a broken permitting, land use, and development system exploited by entrenched local interests.

OpenAI's mission statement for stewarding AGI into existence — a gradual, iteratively-deployed transition that maximizes the good and minimizes the bad, treating existential risk as real even if some think it fictitious.

Joe Lonsdale argues that America's national greatness was always tied to Frontier conditions — falsifiable, accountable environments that harden ideas and people — and that restoring the Frontier mindset is the antidote to bureaucratic dysfunction, not fighting cultural sideshows.

McKinsey Global Institute argues that regaining historical rates of productivity growth (2.2% annually) would add $10 trillion to US GDP — and outlines why the past 15 years of digital technology have paradoxically produced a productivity slowdown.

Stephen Wolfram walks through the mechanics of how ChatGPT generates text — from next-word probability to neural nets to the remarkable fact that meaningful human language may have more structure and simplicity than we ever knew.

Veerasamy's definition of seriousness as dynamic persistence in meaningful work - verifiable only across time and hardship, and rationally distrusted because so much of it is performed.

Christopher Mims in the WSJ on what 2001 and 2008 survivors say about the current downturn.

Bessemer's post-mortem on CleanTech 1.0 (2006-2011), turned into eight rules for ClimateTech 2.0 - starting with: don't rely on altruism, and fund engineering problems rather than science experiments.

In the “Curiosity Phase” of AI, endless user demand is a trap — founders must litigate every product, GTM, and prioritization decision through a lens of long-term defensibility, targeting the highest-value incumbent or new-professional users.

The real and growing power of writing down the future you want to see exist — Ray Kurzweil's present-tense storytelling as a method of invention, and how AI may become the “enchanted notebook” that reverse-engineers our written dreams into reality.

The Intercept, Jon Schwarz, August 25, 2022. Archived here because it was sitting as a bare URL under the Education heading of Political Issues — captured from Apple Notes and never saved.

Coinbase's founder on the transition every founder has to make - from fear and anger as fuel to joy and love - plus the tutoring-marketplace lesson, 70/20/10, and why risk tolerance is the scarcest thing in a large company.

Hunter Walk's distinction between a culture that is bad and a culture that merely isn't for you — and the four things that actually make one bad.

From What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC by Ed Sim — read the original.

In a downturn, the market — not journalists or ecosystem players — delivers the harshest and truest critique of companies, and the public markets increasingly reward only those who can Bundle product lines into diversified growth platforms.

The only way to reverse American stagnation post-Covid is through technologists building companies that support the national interest — what Boyle calls American Dynamism.

The chapter that revises the model. The old view was that a vertical had one or two control points — one front office, one back. This argues there are many more, and maps where they are.

The longest chapter of The Vertical SaaS Knowledge Project and the densest — six strategies for a vertical software vendor, from winning a category to extending past it.

A blogger's answer to 'how do you find time to read so much?' — an hour in the living room before bed, four books in parallel across four media, 200 feeds and 200 newsletters, and podcasts at 2x.

David Bromberg at Lantern proposing Engagement Led Growth as the successor framework to Product Led Growth (PLG). The thesis is one sentence: the more a customer interacts with a product, the more value it provides, the more likely they are to expand their…

Rahul Vohra's Superhuman newsletter on procrastination — and the most useful reframe in it is that procrastination is two different behaviours that need opposite treatments.

Alex Clayton's year-end review of the 2021 SaaS IPO class.

The Digital Native piece that sizes the B2B opportunity against the consumer one everybody was already looking at.

Jason Cohen (A Smart Bear) on why the exponential-growth story companies tell about themselves is mostly a myth — and what the curve actually looks like underneath.

Dave Yuan's opening chapter of The Vertical SaaS Knowledge Project, and the frame the rest of it hangs on.

Why the standard investor rationalisation of SBC stopped working when multiples compressed: at 3x ARR, 20%-of-revenue stock comp means issuing ~7% of the company every year.

Dave Yuan in conversation with Matt Kaplan, SVP of Product at Toast — the case study for the rest of The Vertical SaaS Knowledge Project.

A “Why You Should Join” recruiting/thesis piece on Warp — the Rust-based terminal emulator led by Zach Lloyd — arguing the terminal is the most important, least-changed tool in a developer's kit and that Warp is the first to make it accessible, cloud-native…

Evan Armstrong in Napkin Math arguing the expected-value case against joining a startup for most people — read the same morning as a day of eleven calls.

A virtual event on frontier carbon-dioxide-removal pathways, run by Build a Climate Startup, Carbon Gap and Hello Tomorrow. Three parts: a panel on CDR in 2022 and the need for frontier pathways, then deck-driven sessions on Direct Air Capture (Eve Hanson…

Readwise on building their own reading app — and the reframing of 'fiction vs nonfiction' into 'reading for entertainment vs reading for betterment'.

San Francisco has the money and a plan, but advocates argue that what gets labeled “service-resistance” is really a system designed without dignity for the people it's meant to serve.

On a16z's media ambition — a planned opinion publication, with Sonal Chokshi in the frame and First Round and Bessemer as precedents.

PitchBook on crossover investors — preemptive term sheets at 50-100% premiums, and speed as the real change.

The Information on a16z's rise — the Coinbase outcome, ever-bigger funds, and the visibility advantage rivals complain about.

Tiger Global's record-breaking deal pace — light diligence, top-of-market prices, no board seats — is an “investment flywheel” built to outrun traditional venture firms on speed and cost of capital.

Tiger isn't breaking the rules of venture — it discarded the imaginary ones, built the first non-brand structural flywheel in growth investing, and is going to “eat VC” by selling founders Better/Faster/Cheaper Capital.

From The Next Big Thing by Nikhil Trivedi — read the original.

A couple weeks ago Okta released their annual Business at Work report - a great review on how businesses got work done in 2020.

From What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC by Ed Sim — read the original.

Jamin Ball's cloud-software comparables for 5 February 2021 — a median EV/NTM revenue multiple of 47.2x at ~29% YoY growth, splitting to 19.8x for the sub-30% growth long tail against 53.6x above it.

Eric Seufert on why Facebook's ad value is behavioral history rather than sellable data, how Apple's symbiotic-then-adversarial relationship with Facebook works, and how SKAdNetwork privileges Apple's own ad network.

On the Apple–Facebook flashpoint over ATT: why advertisers always lag users, why rising ad prices are bearish not bullish, and how Apple's privacy stance is a “Strategy Credit” made “free” by its business model.

It’s no secret that companies of all sizes are collecting more and more data with each passing day. Snowflake’s 162% net revenue retention, and the fact that more data has been created and captured in the last 2 years than every year prior combined gives us…

Alex Konrad's Forbes profile of Frank Slootman and the Snowflake IPO.

From What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC by Ed Sim — read the original.

Prompted by a16z's media push, Thompson argues media's old “franchise” strength came from controlling distribution, not reporting — and that in a world of infinite choice, only businesses built with competition in mind (and an honestly-held point of view)…

Why Clubhouse's audio-first format opens a much larger attention space than visual social networks — and why its ease-of-use means it will likely produce far more audio content than the podcast ecosystem.

A chips-industry conversation on Apple's 5G iPhone strength in China, the economics of the fabless model, Apple's push to re-integrate vertically down to the chip, and the cultural problems facing Intel.

Jamin Ball's weekly on cloud software — public comparables, EV/NTM revenue multiples and the occasional single-company deep dive. The recurring value is the multiples table: in early 2021 a median 47.2x EV/NTM revenue at ~29% growth, splitting hard at the…

A composite capture of the critical writing on Apple TV+'s For All Mankind — the show Kyle uses as the worked example of solution science fiction, and the case for why it counts as one.

Ed Sim's (Boldstart) weekly on enterprise software, read for market structure rather than news. The line Kyle kept: less than 4% of IT spend is on cloud infrastructure — the room left, stated as a number.

Our base case model values Zapier at $7B based on its growth rate, its high penetration and lack of competition in the no-code integrations space, and the rapidly growing market for no-code tools and citizen developers more broadly.

From The Next Big Thing by Nikhil Trivedi — read the original.

Why Slack sold to de-risk against Microsoft Teams, why Microsoft's bundle wins by being “greater than the sum of its parts,” and why M&A — plugging an innovative product into existing distribution — is the best use of an incumbent's cash flow.

The TechCrunch companion to the Digital Native piece — read the same day, and stronger on how these businesses actually make money.

Brad Gerstner on shorting low-quality software and internet names, and what the Fed's balance sheet did to that trade.

How a 23-year-old Wharton data-science head seized power inside Coatue, alienated employees with a brutal culture, and watched a $350M quant fund collapse in 15 months — undone less by bad models than by Philippe Laffont's refusal to let a quant fund be a quant fund.

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson on why even a developer-first, Product Led Growth (PLG) company eventually has to build a real sales force — told through the painful lesson of a $60M Uber account that churned for lack of a relationship.

From The Next Big Thing by Nikhil Trivedi — read the original.

From The Next Big Thing by Nikhil Trivedi — read the original.

Will Kohler of Lightspeed on why every software company eventually builds or buys its own payments infrastructure — and the case for Finix.

As the COVID-era media ecosystem contracts, Substack is cast as a reluctant “savior” — betting that after 20-30 years of ad-supported innovation, the next wave innovates around the subscription model and that readers are finally willing to pay for internet…

Non-fiction reading reframed as extraction — “map” a book in ~15 minutes via cover, index, TOC, and preface, pull out the knowledge nuggets you actually need, and let curiosity (not a to-do list) drive what you finish.

Software and content share the same economics (free distribution, high fixed / near-zero marginal cost, fast iteration) — but content products decay while software products don't, because content talks to humans (who seek novelty) and software talks to…

Written in the wake of George Floyd's killing — using Madison, WI's racial “crescent” and the printing-press analogy, Thompson argues the Internet is a gargantuan amoral force that, like sunlight on dust, makes long-invisible racism impossible to unsee.

Rushing to reopen campuses shifts the pandemic's risk onto students; instead, use the moment to overhaul a broken, unaffordable higher-education system. #University Disruption

A weekly edition of The Profile; the passage Kyle saved is a long quote from Just Mercy (book), the memoir behind Just Mercy (movie).

A follow-up to The Anti-Amazon Alliance: Shopify is a platform, not an Aggregator — it wins when its merchants win — but the Apple/Facebook privacy alliance is making it harder for the platforms that empower individual entrepreneurs to compete.

Deepfakes are about to make synthetic media indistinguishable from reality, and the bigger danger is not any single fake but the collapse of any shared basis for believing what we see.

Nina Achadjian at Index Ventures answering the question she says she's asked most: how do you impose structure and goals on a job that has almost none?

Once the Internet made shelf space effectively infinite, discovery and distribution split apart — and an “anti-Amazon alliance” of Facebook, Google, Shopify, Stripe and the logistics layer now lets differentiated merchants leave Amazon's platform.

Defines the Burn Multiple (Net Burn / Net New ARR) as the single most revealing metric of a startup's capital efficiency — a catch-all that surfaces gross margin problems, churn, sales inefficiency, and founder discipline all at once.

A practitioner's response to Andreessen's “It's Time to Build” — agreeing on the imperative but laying out six concrete hurdles that keep deep tech from attracting mainstream investment.

Marc Andreessen's pandemic-era manifesto: the West's failure to handle COVID exposed a deeper inability to build. The problem isn't money, capitalism, or competence — it's desire, will, and regulatory capture. The fix is to build housing, schools, hospitals, factories, and reactors, and to ask everyone: what are you building?

The “dark magic” of bundling: bundles eliminate the deadweight loss of people who want each thing a little — they work when buyers have a little demand for everything and a lot for some things, and only for goods (software, digital media) that cost nothing to…

Cal Newport, April 2020, on a side effect of enforced telework that nobody was planning for.

Guest: Andy Matuschak (interviewed by David Perell) Show: North Star Podcast — “Designing Education” URL: https://www.perell.com/podcast/andy-matuschak Topic: Education, knowledge work, and the design of new mediums for learning.

Active reading isn't enough — a Zettelkasten (notes on cards, reviewed, then linked) turns your library into a living network that talks to your past and future self, and its best application is writing.

By Lucinda Shen at Fortune · interview with Chris Farmer, MD and CEO of SignalFire

Jerry Neumann's guidance on business writing — lead with a firm recommendation, bottom-line up front (BLUF), read it aloud, cite rather than assert. Captured from his thread plus the linked doc on April 17th, 2020.

TechCrunch on UrbanFootprint — the urban-planning data platform from co-founder Peter Calthorpe and CEO Joe DiStefano — read on April 17th, 2020. Notes captured verbatim from the Roam daily note.

Tribe Capital's April 2020 thesis on Carta — the cap-table system of record as the wedge into a trillion dollars of illiquid private equity, and why that makes it an N-of-1 rather than a TAM story.

Brent Beshore mid-2020 on what the relief programs missed — “no business owner right now is worried about paying their taxes; there's going to be no taxes to pay”…

The argument that Roam Research completes what Tim Berners-Lee started and Ward Cunningham's wiki half-finished: links made the web, but bi-directional links — the thing Wikipedia approximated and Roam made native — were the missing half.

Francis Miller on page templates in Roam Research — the piece that convinced Kyle to look into Text Expander.

By Nick Di Loreto and Omar Romman in the Harvard Business Review

Kyle's full course notes on Nat Eliason's Roam course, hosted on Forte Labs.

Goldman Sachs research on the next evolution of the digital workplace, read May 22nd, 2020 — two months into the pandemic, when the question of what work would permanently become was live.

Apple isn't trying to make health hardware — it's building the operating system for health, the chokepoint every player must integrate with to reach distribution. #Healthcare

Adam Keesling on why a Zettelkasten compounds: because notes are linked, the more information you add the more you increase the whole system's value — the opposite of a folder, where volume is cost.

A workshop on using Twitter as a networking-and-learning engine — write with compression and novelty, curate your feed ruthlessly, own a hyper-specific niche, and post consistently until the audience teaches you what works.

A profile of “MC,” who logs everything significant he does every day in Workflowy — a low-overhead, un-opinionated Daily Log as an external memory, in the lineage of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Chronofile.

A short argument against reading for volume, and for keeping a commonplace book as the mechanism that makes deep reading stick.

Polina Marinova's first-90-days account of going independent in March 2020. The honest part is the motivation: “the raw, ferocious motivation that kicks in when you realize you need to pay your bills.” Four revenue lines…

Josh Kopelman on Cartographers vs. Navigators — school hands you a roadmap, starting a company doesn't, and he screens founders for evidence they charted their own course (designing a major rather than picking one).

The welcome note from Jacob Jolibois's public Roam graph collecting Naval Ravikant's thoughts — an artifact of the #RoamCult era, and an early example of the shared-knowledge-graph idea that Conor White-Sullivan describes in Interview with Conor…

As the old newspaper business model collapses and ad-saturated attention becomes the scarce resource, the best news gets better and the average gets worse — and the disciplined move is to ditch the news for independent writers and great books.

Tiago Forte on why touch each email only once is advice nobody can follow without a system underneath it — “this level of simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Debt: risks, types, and sources. The most important benefit of minimal debt is flexibility — optionality to reinvest, stockpile cash, or wait.

The four kinds of buyer. Private equity, fundless sponsors, search funds, and permanent capital — each sourcing capital differently, and therefore each offering a different certainty of close.

Ownership culture as a moat. The pandemic exposed how few companies could respond flexibly to a downturn. The argument: a company's ownership culture is nearly impossible to replicate because it is fundamentally unique…

Moats are not static. Companies fail heavily in years one to five, then plateau — a business in its 25th year has roughly the same odds of dying as one in its 5th. Competitive moats get discussed as if most businesses have one; the data doesn't bear it out.

Growth as bottleneck removal. A business runs only as fast as its narrowest bottleneck. Plus a definition worth keeping: the fundamental purpose of technology is to give the user leverage over their time…

Lecture notes from the PKP course that gave The New City its name and much of its vocabulary. The definition Kyle kept from Lecture 1 is the one the whole thesis rests on: “A city is a habitat created for mutual enrichment.” From there: access to housing, and…

Sonke Ahrens, author of How To Take Smart Notes, on the Zettelkasten method and what survives translation into a networked tool.

A walkthrough of Roam Research's daily-notes model — the auto-generated daily page used three ways at once: personal CRM, daily journal, and running capture.

Sarah Tavel on marketplace liquidity and Benchmark's owning-a-slice-fast thesis: get network effects working for you in one part of a market rather than spreading thin.

Shishir Mehrotra on the four myths of bundling and the super fan / casual fan / non-fan decomposition — the frame that explains why a bundle can be worth more than its parts to some customers and less to others. Netflix as the reference case.

The causes of revolutions resemble those of earthquakes — slow-building “pressures” plus a sudden “trigger” — and the trigger itself is nearly impossible to predict.

CMX's survey of the community-management profession — with the caveat carried on the page itself: the responses were collected through 2019, so nothing in it reflects what COVID did to communities.

Nikhil Trivedi on the structure of the venture industry — partnerships versus solo capitalists, agglomerators versus specialists, and what counts as a moat for a fund.

The Tiago-vs-Conor debate over how to organize notes is really a two-thousand-year-old philosophy debate — essentialists vs. pragmatists — about how the world itself is organized. #Note-taking

Tiago Forte deflating the weekly review. People avoid it because they imagine a comprehensive life review requiring hours of introspection, or an overhaul of their productivity system. It's neither.

Polina Marinova's dossier on Charlie Munger — the Latticework of Mental Models, and the case for cross-pollinating ideas across disciplines instead of thinking in one line.

Polina Marinova on Mister Rogers, written into the 2020 protests. The takeaway Kyle marked: Kindness is an under-appreciated skill — not just a thing we should do, but something that we are.

The Profile's deep-dive dossier on astronaut Chris Hadfield and how he conquered fear.

A “Profile Dossier” deep-dive on Elon Musk from Polina Marinova's The Profile, read by Kyle on 2020-07-02.

An edition of Polina Marinova's The Profile newsletter, read by Kyle on 2020-07-02.

A profile of Chamath Palihapitiya — a billionaire investor “turning on his own,” attacking hedge funds, value investors, and the VC fundraising treadmill, while arguing for capital allocation aimed at society's biggest problems.

Tobi Lutke of Shopify on running a business as a system rather than a plan — the episode that put The Systems Bible by John Gall on Kyle's anti-library.

Tiago Forte learning Roam Research on camera with Conor White-Sullivan — captured alongside the Forte/Roam Twitter argument that preceded it.

Notes on Just Mercy, with the screenplay link and the two lines Kyle kept — on coming out of law school with grand ideas about changing the world, and on hope: hopelessness is the enemy of justice; hope allows us to push forward even when the truth is hard.

Tiago Forte interviewing Conor White-Sullivan. The ambition stated plainly: replace Twitter as the place for threads-of-threads, move toward evergreen rather than hyper-current content, and…

Saved under #Quick Capture on the April 17th, 2020 daily note. Captured via the Chrome extension using Kyle's own session (Reddit blocks the in-app browser and gates its JSON API).

Empathy is a learned skill, not always something you automatically have

A profile of Robert Cottrell, who “eats” ~1,000 articles a day to find the handful with lasting value — and how he reads, abandons, and saves.

To understand Peter Thiel, begin with Rene Girard's Mimetic Theory — human culture began with a murder, and Thiel's entire worldview (business strategy, view of time, and Christian eschatology) is an attempt to escape runaway mimetic violence by refusing to…

Books and lectures fail to convey knowledge for the same reason — both silently assume transmissionism (you absorb knowledge by reading/hearing sentences), which is false. The fix isn't better books but new mediums designed out of how people actually learn.

CalPERS terminated most of its external equity managers — cutting their allocation from $33.6B to $5.5B — citing long-term underperformance, as CIO Ben Meng pushed a renewed focus on hitting the fund's 7% assumed rate of return.

A deep-tech investing warning: founders increasingly cite arXiv preprints in funding announcements, and investors under deal pressure read published on arXiv as peer reviewed. It isn't.

A Success magazine feature on Brendon Burchard, captured as nine page images at wiki/attachments/brendon-burchard-success-magazine/.

Tiago Forte's overview of the Building a Second Brain method — capture, organize, distill, express.

Tiago Forte's talk version of Building a Second Brain — recommended to Kyle by Nat Eliason.

Dan Rasmussen at Capital Camp (Brent Beshore's event) · tagged with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

A single-issue capture on Jump-Starting America (MIT's Simon Johnson and Jonathan Gruber) — the argument that America's slowing growth traces directly to government's retreat from funding research.

Permanent Equity's scouting guide — how to find small businesses worth buying, and what a scout is actually looking for.

Tiago Forte's webinar on the mechanics of a digital note — what to capture, and in what form it stays useful later.

Lower barriers to entry made it easy to start a business but hard to scale one; the answer is “hyper publishing” — a nimble, networked, modular system for producing evergreen content that builds trust and attention at scale.

Hyperlinks are the foundation of the internet — and the “Wiki Strategy” (a term from Nat Eliason) uses them to turn one-time visitors into loyal readers by interlinking evergreen content into a compounding network.

An interview guide Kyle wrote for a study of independent bookstore economics — founding (how you started, what it cost, where the funding came from) through operations. A reusable template for interviewing any small business honestly.

Scale Venture Partners (Rory O'Driscoll, Sam Baker) on what happens after cloud investing becomes consensus. The load-bearing line: “Nothing is more destructive to investors over the long term than a shared consensus that something is a sure thing.” Gold rush…

For most of us, this is how our experience of note-taking started: with a mysterious command, and very little guidance in how to carry it out.

And how do you even begin to make sense of the future when things change so fast? Humbly, is the answer. But humility doesn’t mean clueless. #Spirit of Humility

The structure of Permanent Equity's scout network — how outside scouts are paid and what they're expected to bring. Pairs with How to Scout — A Guide and Scout Q&A — Emily Holdman.

Thomas Laffont and Alex Izydorczyk of Coatue with Point72 on building a data-science function inside an investment firm — the fullest treatment in the corpus of Data in Investing as an operating problem rather than a thesis.

Emily Holdman of Permanent Equity on the scout model for small-business deal sourcing.

Kyle's annotated excerpts of the Wired piece on whether the First Amendment reaches private platforms. Captured in Roam under the working title Blocking Free Speech or Hate Speech and filed as a writing project; it is really a read he marked up.

The parable of Socrates holding Plato under water until he fights for air — when you want wisdom as badly as you wanted to breathe, then you will have it.

Patrick Clarke on the mechanics of a walkable centre: shops and services along a main street, community facilities — schools, health centres, open space — placed so people reach them on foot.

He was sharing a studio with several other people in the city. When his roommates were gone one night, Sorkin was left by himself. “It was one of those Friday nights where it feels like everybody’s been invited to a party and you haven’t,” Sorkin says.

Arnold tried a multitude of remedies in an attempt to heal what she referred to as “her worry brain.” #Anxiety

Tiago Forte's manifesto for Building a Second Brain — ideas as one of the most powerful forces in the world, and a system built to keep them rather than lose them.

Tiago Forte on why weekly habits are the hardest kind — frequent enough to be load-bearing, not frequent enough to become automatic. The reframe: the weekly review isn't a task, it's the operating system every other program runs on.

Short piece on consumption as the organizing dynamic of each technology era — and how the current appetite is for data, with AI as the hippo.

Raving about the software, Jennifer’s friend insists the tool has actually increased cart conversion rates by 25% and customers are elated to have the option to feel good about their purchases. Jennifer is stunned that this is good business!

A crowd-sourced Twitter thread pairing classic texts with the people recommending them — the KJV Bible, Tao Te Ching, The Art of War and others, each with the tweet that put it on the list.

A Trends teardown of Angel Investing as a market: founders need early believers before traction exists, most investors wait for the traction, and angels are the ones who don't. Problem/solution/players structure throughout.

Notes on Usage-Based Pricing as a platform shift rather than a pricing tweak, drawing on Kyle Poyar's work.

Even self-described atheists in the West have unconsciously inherited a Christian moral framework — belief in human rights and human equality is “self-evident” only if you smuggle in God…

David Perell's distillation of Sam Walton and Walmart — drawn largely from Walton's autobiography Sam Walton: Made in America — on competitiveness as relentless self-correction, frugality as Customer Obsession, the math of Discounting, Vertical Integration in…

Literary Hub's compilation of Bradbury on writing, gathered from interviews and lectures across four decades — including the thousand-nights reading prescription: one short story, one poem, one essay, every night.

Lydialyle Gibson in Harvard Magazine on Tom Nichols and The Death of Expertise — how a culture that can look anything up came to mistake access for understanding, and what that does to the standing of expertise.

Perell's essay on Amazon and Jeff Bezos — customer obsession, frugality, and long-term thinking as the operating system that lets Amazon “defy precedent and move faster as it's gotten bigger.”

A California legislative factsheet urging the University of California's Office of the CIO (UC Investments) — a $118B fund-of-funds LP — to encourage diversity in staff hiring and among its investment-partner firms, and to launch emerging-manager programs.

Creativity can't be forced but can be cultivated — by activating the subconscious, interacting with (not just consuming) ideas, working “with the door open,” and accepting that mastery precedes insight.

Serendipity is a state of mind you can engineer — chiefly by writing and publishing online, which makes you findable and “manufactures” unexpected opportunity.

Part of the Naked Brands interview series — Housel on how free-flowing information changed trust in finance, why content builds permanent capital, and the three kinds of writing.

A wide-ranging interview with Perell on learning, writing, the “second brain,” Naked Brands, and the case for optimistic science fiction as fuel for innovation.

A review of Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy — how the medium of communication (voice, writing, print, internet) reshapes how humans think, behave, and remember.

Perell's practical manifesto on writing — that writing generates ideas as much as it communicates them, plus a tactical workflow for brainstorming, outlining, editing, and cutting.

Jan Miczaika at HV Holtzbrinck Ventures on Scoutbee and the case for software in strategic sourcing — B2B marketplace mechanics applied to industrial procurement.

The one page you'd write to describe what it means for a company to be managed well — a standard the board can hold the company to. #Leadership #Playbook: Leadership

TIME's special edition on how the brain learns — debunking the 10,000-hour myth, naming the ingredients of learning (motivation, opportunity, sustained attention) and habits of mind (curiosity, diligence), and tracing the lineage of education reform from Hall and Dewey to Montessori, Piaget, and Dweck.

How Singapore leaped from third-world to first in 53 years under Lee Kuan Yew — by running clean systems, courting global capital, paying officials world-class salaries, and choosing discipline over the “exuberance of democracy.”

Drawing on a North Star Podcast conversation with Paul Cooper, a meditation on ruins as windows into the historical forces that tore a place apart — and as objects onto which every age projects its own stories.

YC's free course on the basics of early-stage investing — read through on April 17th, 2020. Filed as a long-read (Kyle read it), with the #movies-to-watch-tagged child kept as its own watch-queue entry rather than collapsing the two.

John Rawls's Veil of Ignorance is a thought experiment for stress-testing any rule for fairness — if you had to design society without knowing who you'd be in it, you'd design a fair one.

A formal, evergreen reference defining what makes a company an aggregator — three required characteristics and a Level 1/2/3 taxonomy by supply cost. #Aggregation Theory #Evergreen Notes

Naval Ravikant on reading as a daily habit, happiness as the absence of desire, the “single-player game” of self-improvement, why macroeconomics is junk science but microeconomics is fundamental, the obsolescence of one-size-fits-all education, and investing…

Business is a game with rules, and the old game of maximizing reach (followers, albums sold) is the wrong one — creators win by serving their most passionate fans and thinking in power laws, not bell curves.

An early-Perell essay arguing that the relentless American pursuit of Happiness is self-defeating, and that lasting fulfillment comes instead from meaning — built slowly through service, vocation, and being part of something bigger than yourself.

A short how-to on Snap's Spectacles — that the device's edge is enabling content only a hands-free camera can capture, letting viewers embody the creator's authentic, first-person experience.

Before the internet, restaurant brands grew within geographic regions; on Instagram, interests replace coordinates, and modern restaurants design the whole experience as shareable “Instagram bait.”

As Automation commoditizes abundance, the new scarce resources are discovery, curation, and humanity — the human touch, not the catalog, becomes the differentiator.

A short essay on the mechanics of Creativity — that creativity is connecting things, happens subconsciously at the intersection of disciplines and cultures, and can't be willed into being.

Borrowing the physics of phase transitions, big societal shifts happen “gradually, then suddenly” — the visible trigger event is just the last straw; the real cause is the criticality of the underlying state.

How the shipping container — invented by trucker Malcolm McLean — let tiny Elizabeth, New Jersey beat the New York port, a case study in how the strengths of one paradigm become liabilities in the next.

An early-Perell brand analysis arguing that Equinox functions less like a gym than a secular church — selling Commitment, identity, and community to a generation that increasingly seeks meaning through wellness rather than possessions.

Status is a zero-sum game you're handed in school; the way out is to stop competing on society's rules, double down on your unique advantages, and create your own game.

Forgetting is a feature, not a bug — the brain (like a deep-learning algorithm) learns by compressing information through bottlenecks, discarding the inessential to lift signal over noise.

Learning is innate but blocked by judgment, fear, and ego; flow — relaxed concentration where the self-critical mind goes quiet — accelerates learning and performance, and you can enter it faster than you think.

A four-era history of branding — from cattle marks to industrial trust to TV-era aspiration — arriving at the digital era, where transparency wins: influencers build obsessive, performative “superfans” through genuine, intimate access.

The basketball installment of the Naked Brands series — LeBron's “The Decision” marked the shift to an age where athletes circumvent media outlets, express themselves, and connect with fans on their own terms.

Part of the Naked Brands series — the internet dissolves fashion's gatekeepers, so individual personalities, not central authorities, drive style, and people increasingly follow people rather than brands.

Part of the Naked Brands series — money managers have become a commodity, so the firms that win compete on trust and attention, openly disclosing strategy and building personality-led brands.

Part of the Naked Brands series — the internet unbundled the album and collapsed recorded-music value, inverting the business so that free streaming is the top of the funnel and artists monetize through touring, merch, and intimate fan connection.

Life is suffering — and the discovery that we can bargain with reality, sacrificing now to gain later, is the root of meaning: pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.

The mall apocalypse is underway, but malls can survive by competing on the vectors Amazon can't touch — human connection, live entertainment, community, and photographable, status-conferring experiences.

A short note on music as a mood-control technology — and Perell's favorite productivity trick of looping one song for hours to enter a deep trance.

Sports mirror the nature of work — baseball matched the factory, football matched the corporation, and basketball matches the independent professional of the social-media age.

A long survey of how the digital revolution is reshaping work — automation commoditizing routine labor, globalization flattening markets, and creativity + adaptability becoming the only durable career moats.

David Perell's review of Will & Ariel Durant's The Lessons of History — a 100-page distillation of 100 centuries, arguing that competition, inequality, and the tension between freedom and equality are the timeless constants of the human story.

A short meditation on Learning for its own sake — that we only come to love learning once it stops being mandatory, that doubt and questions must precede truth, and that the drive to understand is what binds and fulfills us as a species.

As culture shifts away from the mainstream, the brands we wear become identity statements — we buy Yeezy or follow Gary Vaynerchuk not for utility but to express ourselves and connect to the person behind the brand.

Coffee shops trace the shift from 1950s mass-media conformity to today's fragmented attention economy — and as content becomes hyper-abundant, point of view (“perspective-as-a-service”) becomes the scarcest resource.

A post-2016-election reaction piece reading Trump's victory as a symptom of rising global populism and inequality, and arguing that the digital revolution — not a return to the past — is the path through it.

Ava DuVernay's film on the Thirteenth Amendment's exception clause — criminalization as a replacement for lost labor, the 1970s explosion into mass incarceration, and the role media consumption played alongside the politicization of race.

An early-Perell pep talk to communications students — university programs teach for the pre-mobile world, so the move is to form your own vision of where things are headed and build skills for that future, using free internet distribution to share your work…

An early-Perell essay drawing a sharp line between travel and vacation — vacation is a hedonistic escape; travel is the uncomfortable, introspective journey that actually changes who you become.

An early-Perell meditation on Elon Musk — that his superhuman drive is both unachievable and undesirable for the average person, and that its roots lie in a traumatic childhood he coped with through obsessive Reading.

An early-Perell defense of Uber surge pricing — after a NYC bombing, turning surge off felt humane but ignored basic economics: surge is the signal that pulls drivers toward danger and steers non-urgent riders away.

An early-Perell read on Apple killing the headphone jack — Airpods aren't just wireless headphones, they're the groundwork for a voice-first, AR future where the line between the digital and analog worlds disappears.

An early-Perell (2016) reading of the Sanders campaign through Marshall McLuhan's “the medium is the message” — arguing that social platforms, not debate-stage performance, are the new arena of presidential politics, and that Sanders won youth trust by being…

A companion to A Message to Every Entrepreneur — current methods of education are boring and obsolete for a generation raised on constant access to information, and free online resources are already outpacing the classroom.

Ted Seides on hedge-fund structure and the fee conversation nobody finishes — everyone says fees are too high; far fewer will say what fees should be. Also the origin of a The Luna Landing connection: a West Virginia retreat built around The Hero's Journey.

The episode Kyle credits as the initial impetus for Investing 101 2.0 — Brent Beshore on building a firm that is structurally and culturally unlike a fund.

An early-Perell argument that Snapchat's edge isn't a feature but cultural fluency — as photographs shift from memory-keeping to talking, the company that sits at the center of ubiquitous documentation will win on its grasp of society and human psychology.

An early-Perell Marketing piece — sliced bread is iconic not because it was a great invention but because of great marketing, and the same is true for companies: we buy the story as much as the product.

On how reading feeds writing, why curiosity should be allowed to ruminate, and where personal finance actually moves the needle.

An early-Perell education-reform manifesto — today's school system was built for the industrial revolution, not the digital one, and in an age of Automation and uncertainty we need more choice, more trial-and-error, and schools that raise visionaries instead…

The internet made distribution and transaction costs zero, flipping the value chain so that whoever owns the user relationship — not whoever controls distribution — wins. #Aggregation Theory

An early-Perell student manifesto: the American education system is obsolete in an age where information is a free commodity, and entrepreneurs — who learn by chasing ambitious goals and learning from their mistakes…

An early-Perell field note on how Callaway turns major-championship week into a content and experience machine — and the recurring lesson that people want to follow people, not brands.

An early-Perell student take on why SnapChat became the dominant communication channel for millennials — it delivers the three traits the cohort craves most: autonomy, simplicity, and visual appeal.

A profile of landscape photographer Finn Beales as the archetype of a new kind of internet-native artist — one who lives in rural solitude yet builds a global brand and business through Instagram, proving that in a connected world location and connections…

The 2015 TED talk from the then-head of Google's self-driving program, arguing the least reliable component of a car is the driver.

Acquired on Facebook's Instagram purchase — 2.2M users per employee at acquisition, 2.6M by 2015. The argument: Instagram taught Facebook how to acquire (which made WhatsApp possible), and without it Facebook's mobile suite likely never develops.

Acquired on Twitch's path through Justin.tv and SocialCam before it found consumers. The disruption note Kyle flagged: things that turn out to be really big often start out looking like toys — Facebook was just a website, Twitch was just video games.

Lecture 14 of Stanford's CS183B / Y Combinator's “How to Start a Startup” course (Fall 2014). Speaker: Keith Rabois on Operations. Source: youtu.be/6fQHLK1aIBs. Kyle's pulled quotes and concept tags are preserved verbatim below.

Lee Billings on Stanislaw Lem's Summa Technologiae — a 1964 book of technology forecasting that anticipated virtual reality, nanotechnology and superhuman AI, and that almost no one at a Singularity Summit had heard of.

Microcredit is a hand up, not a hand out — the tool through which everyday Latter-day Saints can practice the law of consecration and build Zion by empowering the poorest of the poor to author their own lives.

“Knowing about” something is not the same as “knowing” it — collecting texts, bookmarks, and photocopies creates an illusion of knowledge without actually increasing it.

Kyle's 2014 business plan for YPYS, a not-for-profit that connects college students to social ventures, high schools for fundraising, and local sponsors — with a HUB/Venture incubator model.

David Skok's canonical SaaS-metrics guide. The framing Kyle kept: SaaS businesses lose money in the early years by design — heavy upfront acquisition cost recovered over a long subscription life — so the metrics have to measure the recovery, not the loss.

Forecast the timing of non-linear technology disruptions by projecting the smooth, linear hardware trend underneath them — and look at the hardware, not the software.

Peter Buchanan's essay on architecture at a moment when the nature of change has itself changed, not merely its pace.

Gary Grant on urban nature: how NGOs came to create nature reserves out of wasteland, and what city-wide greening does at neighbourhood and building scale.

A short essay arguing that keeping a journal — even five minutes a day of unpolished, first-thought “rush writing” — is how we record our own uniqueness in our own voice, rather than being remembered second-hand.

Jarrett Walker on the only question that matters for transit — “it takes me where I want to go” — and why public comment on transit is mostly narrow and self-interested, which planners have to design around.

Edward Glaeser's introduction: the entire world population would fit in Texas at townhouse density. The city as humanity's defining invention rather than its problem.

Witold Rybczynski on the Bilbao anomaly and the limits of the urban-design plan: many actors participate over long periods, so the goal is a loose framework that accommodates the process rather than a finished object.

Chapters 4–5 of **Peter Calthorpe's Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change*. The distinction Kyle underlined: “Design is multidimensional problem solving, while engineering is single-issue optimization”*…

Jan Gehl, chapters 1 and 5 — the human dimension, and the ordering principle the title states: life first, then space, then buildings. Set against the modernist ideology of separated uses and free-standing buildings that car traffic made possible.

I. Roberts and P. Edwards on motorization as an energy story: per-capita food-energy intake fell 20% over the period cars took over movement, and scientists systematically miss gradual societal transitions because they look for causes of the kind they already…

Tim Berners-Lee's TED talk on what came after hypertext: the World Wide Web linked documents, and the unfinished half of the idea is linking data. “Imagine them all being part of some big, virtual documentation system in the sky.”

Stewart Brand's chapter on urbanisation as an environmental good: in developed countries the migration runs from boring, lonely, hard rural life toward the city, and the city is the more efficient place to put a person.

Rowan Williams, in an excerpt from his post-9/11 book Writing in the Dust: turning other people into symbols in your own story is a form of violence, and grieving well starts from refusing to do it.

Talk 2 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger's USC Business School lecture on building a latticework of mental models: telling people 'why,' two-track analysis, incentives (Federal Express), circle of competence, and why betting on the business beats betting on the manager.

Talk 3 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger revisits the latticework of mental models: ignore jurisdictional boundaries, beware heavy ideology, 'Work. Finish. Publish.', knowing what you know vs. don't, and why you'll have a lousy career if you try to succeed at what you're worst at.

Talk 9 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger on what's wrong with academic economics: physics envy and false precision, the fatal unconnectedness of disciplines, overweighting what can be counted, gameable systems, and the Medicare cost forecast that was off by 1,000%.

Talk 5 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger's prescription for fixing soft-science education: mandatory multidisciplinary courses, cross-discipline problem-solving practice, business periodicals, avoiding passionate ideologues, and imitating the organizing ethos of hard science.

Talk 1 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack. Munger on addiction's subtle pull ('the bonds of degradation are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken'), Darwin's habit of prioritizing disconfirming evidence, and Kipling's 'If' as a guide to avoiding life's pitfalls.

Talk 6 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger to foundation investors on the croupiers' take, ubiquitous overconfidence (90% of Swedish drivers, Long-Term Capital Management), Feynman's 'you are the easiest person to fool,' and the antisocial pull of money management on ethical young brainpower.

Talk 7 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger on the 'wealth effect,' stocks valued 'partly like Rembrandt paintings,' the febezzlement of wasted investment fees, crowd folly versus the efficient-market gospel, and Samuel Johnson on easily-removable ignorance as treachery.

Talk 4 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger's five helpful notions for problem-solving (no-brainers first, numerical fluency, invert, multidisciplinary thinking, lollapalooza effects), and his candid reflection that the talk itself failed as teaching because he 'attempted too much.'

Talk 8 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger's satirical parable of 'Quant Tech,' a board optimizing for market capitalization, and the incentive-driven accounting fictions it breeds, punctuated by Upton Sinclair and John Kenneth Galbraith.

Talk 11 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger's capstone: his self-built system of psychological tendencies behind human misjudgment (incentive-caused bias, liking/disliking, doubt-avoidance, social proof, deprival-superreaction, authority, and more) with their standard antidotes.

Talk 10 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger's commencement counsel: the acquisition of wisdom is a moral duty, be a learning machine, avoid intense ideology and self-pity, the 'iron prescription,' Planck vs. chauffeur knowledge, and Epictetus on humility.

Kyle's long-form notes on Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — the eleven talks Charlie Munger gave between 1986 and 2000, collected and annotated by Peter Kaufman. One sub-page per talk.

Chapter 9 of **Herbert Girardet's Cities People Planet**, on how far a city's energy use can fall through efficiency and solar before anything exotic is required.

Girardet's chapter 10, on extended producer responsibility — “the producer is responsible for the whole life cycle of a product” — set against the fifteen-fold growth in world economic activity from 1950 to 2000.

David Owen's argument that the greenest place in America is its densest — “everywhere else should be more like New York.”

Bradbury's keynote at the Sixth Annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea (Point Loma Nazarene University) — the talk the thousand-nights prescription comes from, delivered as 'the hygiene of writing.'

A roughly 25-year-old IEEE Spectrum piece describing venture capital from the engineer's side - the sheep mentality created by answering to LPs, and the VC who is not an engineer even with the degree.

Bill Gurley's first Above the Crowd, October 1994 — opening with Neil Young and an observation about the exodus of ranked technology analysts to the buy side. The founding issue of the newsletter whose full archive is indexed on Gurley's page.

The Mississippi wants to jump into the Atchafalaya; the Army Corps of Engineers has spent half a billion dollars at Old River trying to stop time.

Sample chapters from Lex Sisney's Organizational Physics, read via Readwise Reader.