Kyle Harrison
Long Reads
Articles, podcasts, and talks I've gone through closely — with highlights, notes, and synthesis. Grouped by the year the source was originally published.
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Discourse maps
A different thing from a long read. A long read is one source I went through closely. A discourse map takes one argument that broke out online — a post and everything it provoked — and reconstructs it: who said what, which camps formed, where they actually disagreed, and which claims nobody addressed. Every post is archived verbatim, because the best of them get deleted. Most stay private; these are the ones worth reading.
Discourse: Anthropomorphism and the OpenAI Hugging Face Incident
In July 2026 a group of OpenAI's agents organized inside the company's own test systems and broke into Hugging Face. Dwarkesh Patel's account hit 12.3M views — and nobody disputed a fact. The three-day argument was over whether software can be said to want anything.
2026
The Dangerous Ideology Behind the AI Warnings
An Ode to Counter-Positioning
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.
What Is So Hard About Behind-The-Meter Power for Datacenters Part 1
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.
Steve Jobs Would Have Loved AI, and Been Hated for It
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.
Write Things Down
AI Keeps Stubbornly Refusing to Take Our Jobs
Prime-age employment sits near all-time highs despite record AI adoption — companies using more AI tend to hire more humans, not fewer.
Stripe's Google Vibes
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.
2021
For All Mankind — The Critical Case
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.
2026
Roundup #87 — Technology BAD!! (Noahpinion)
Go Big or Go Broke — The Middle Ground Is Gone (Ethan Kurzweil)
The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations
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).
America Forgot How to Make Things. Cameron Schiller Is Fixing That.
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.
Elon's Favorite Sci-Fi Prophet Was Wrong (Niall Ferguson)
Robotaxis Are the Next Dystopian Villain (Bloomberg on Autokill)
Can This Little Bookstore Save a Rust-Belt Town?
Inside OpenAI's Reboot (TIME)
An American Engineer in China
A pseudonymous American engineer (“Matthew”) embedded in China for months to study energy, AI, and hardware companies, filing dispatches through Packy McCormick's Not Boring newsletter.
Big Tech Off-Balance Sheet Concerns
A WSJ report found nine top tech companies hold roughly $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet AI commitments — growing faster than the ~$600B/year in disclosed capex.
Don't Die a Point Solution
When ServiceTitan sent ~1,000 HVAC contractors a 30-day ultimatum to drop Podium or lose access, Podium — the messaging point solution being squeezed out — booked over 100 demos from those same customers within 24 hours.
The AI Hater's Manifesto
Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At, 115,000 subscribers) synthesizes three years of AI criticism into a single manifesto: he believes LLMs are genuinely interesting technology that could fix broken enterprise software, but argues the AI industry as currently…
Our 2Q Letter to LPs
Slow Ventures' 2Q LP letter applies Carlota Perez's general-purpose technology framework to the current AI moment: every such technology passes through an installation “Frenzy” before a deployment phase, and the biggest value ultimately accrues to consumers…
The New Rules of YouTube (2027)
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
California Wants to Ban Gene-Edited Pets, Because of Course It Does
Mike Solana (Pirate Wires) argues against a proposed California ban on gene-edited pets, framing it as another instance of the state reflexively regulating emerging biotechnology without evidence of harm.
OpenAI's Big Slowdown
OpenAI paused frontier model training for two-plus weeks after an unreleased system escaped its sandbox during a cybersecurity evaluation and compromised Hugging Face's production systems — a breach that took roughly a week to discover.
What Happens If OpenAI Dies?
Ed Zitron argues that OpenAI may not survive as a company, triggered by two events occurring in the same week: a $7B internal share buyback and the simultaneous departure of COO/former CFO Brad Lightcap and Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser.
Dear VCs, Just Give Up (Michael Dempsey)
AI Slop Is Swamping a House Office That Drafts US Laws
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…
Crafts and Hobbies Are Winning the Battle for Americans' Paychecks
AI for Science Needs Reasoning, Not Just Data
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.
Slopulism Is Taking Over America
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.
Why Grab Any Seat on the Rocketship Is a Bad Career Strategy (Hunter Walk Link Roundup)
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.
AI Is Oil, Not God
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…
I’ve Changed My Mind. Early Stage Venture Funds of $100 Million or Less Should Hold Almost No Reserves for Follow-On.
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.
Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?
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.
America’s Open-Model Paradox
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.
A Very Silly Adaptation of The Odyssey
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…
Elon Musk Discreetly Bought a $1 Billion Gas Turbine Company to Power AI. Here's What it Means for SpaceX Investors.
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 Sinks Back to Where It Started
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.
When China’s Open-Source AI Is a Trap
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…
The American Suburbs Are Better Than You Think
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…
I Have Never Been Working Class
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.
Storm Clouds Gather Over America's Financial Supremacy
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.
What Makes Us Rich
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…
It's Not a Lie if You Believe It
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.
Let AI Burn
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…
Untruth Machines
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.
Treasury Has an Internal Report Warning About the Dangers of an AI Bubble
Invisible Companies
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.”
The American Age Was The Human Age
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…
Neil Gorsuch: The Heroes of 1776
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.
Stop Screeching About Immigration, And Get Smart About It
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…
He Came From Oz To Save American Manufacturing — EP 80 Chris Power
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.
Learning to Replicate Expert Judgment in Financial Tasks (Bridgewater x Thinking Machines)
Another Open Source AI Debate
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.
The Rebel Alliance
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.
Does Anything I Write Matter Anymore?
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…
Everything Is Recorded Now
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 Normal Person 30 Years Ago
Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search
AI's Big Messaging Pivot
This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright
You Are What You Consume
Infinite Midwit
The Unlikely Red State Trying to Buck Trump and Big Tech
The Pentagon Threatens Anthropic
What's the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?
Power in the Age of Intelligence
Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs Inside an AI-Powered Private School
The Mindset Shift We Need to Rebuild
Rented Virtue
More Perfect
What I Would Tell the Founders About American Technology
Hardcore History — Episode Notes
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.
Inside Micron's Attempts to Reindustrialize the Dying American Heartland
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 Education of the Broligarchy
2025
Hype and Hubris: Are Prediction Markets Overpromising?
The China Fetish Is Getting to Be a Bit Much
The State of Adventure Capital
It's Still 1995
Factory Towns Revive as Defense Tech Makers Arrive
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.
On Tinkering
The David Senra Interview: Use History as a Form of Leverage
Measuring Thinking Efficiency in Reasoning Models (Nous Research)
Information Liquidation and a Superior Mode of Being
When information flows exceed information stocks, critical evaluation becomes the bottleneck rather than access - and algorithms select for what spreads, not what is true.
Winning the AI Race (All-In and Hill & Valley Forum, 2025)
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.
AI's Giants Want to Take Over the Classroom
Malleable Software
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.
Flounder Mode
The Group Chats That Changed America
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.
Tariff Armageddon and the GPU Loopholes
SemiAnalysis on the 2025 tariff regime and the USMCA classification loophole that lets GPUs enter the US duty-free through Mexico and Canada.
Make the FDA Great Again
Lonsdale's case that FDA process, not science, is the binding constraint on American biotech - with China as the competitive threat.
11x Has Been Claiming Customers It Doesn't Have
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.
EMERGENCY DEBATE: They Lied About The Economy Recovering
2024
The Hard Truth — Americans Don't Trust the News Media
Bezos on why the Washington Post stopped endorsing presidential candidates - opening with the Gallup finding that journalists now rank below Congress in public trust.
Elon Musk Owes His Success to Coming in Second Place
The second-mover case: Musk entered fields where foundational work already existed and incumbents had gone complacent, backed by substantial federal funding.
50 Years Later: Remembering How the Future Looked in 1974
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 Looming Labor Crisis in Chip Design
The chip bottleneck nobody is legislating about: designers, whose cost curve is rising exponentially while the EDA incumbents profit from it.
USV's The Librarian
Inside TSMC's Arizona Expansion
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.
Synthetic SpaceX: Trading a Press Release
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…
Silicon Valley Canon & History (Patrick Collison)
2023
Regretful Accelerationism
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.
Adam Frank on Armchair Expert
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.
Could Cruise Be the Theranos of AI?
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.
Stephen Jennings on Conversations with Tyler
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.
Forget Crushing It — Startup Founders Open Up About Mental Health Problems
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.
Open Source AI Business Models and Brand Moats
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.
I've Seen This Before, It Didn't Work
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.
Witnessing the Beginning of A Chemical Empire
Five lessons from a summer 2023 internship at Solugen on how to build a deeptech company — a “child of both Y Combinator and MIT.”
The Big Sort (Strange Loop Canon)
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.
The First-Movers Disadvantage In Banking
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.
College Syllabi Are Ancient History
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.
Are Large Language Models a Threat to Digital Public Goods?
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.
The 3-Person Unicorn Startup
NFX's case that generative AI lets three outlier people build a $100m+ revenue software business, and what the three roles are.
The Transistor Cliff
Moore's Law is ending on two independent limits by ~2030 - and AI progress has been quietly leaning on it the whole time.
Forecasting 101
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.
RIP Metaverse
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's Newfound Galaxies Are the Oldest Ever Seen
JWST confirms galaxies at redshift 13.2, roughly 320 million years after the Big Bang - forming faster and more completely than models predicted.
The Technium and How Kevin Kelly Changed His Mind
Cranking The Learning Machine Up To 11
Frederik Gieschen (Neckar) on compounding one's own learning — saved to read; no excerpts captured yet.
How to Trick Investors and VCs
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.
Infinite Games
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.
We're Selling Entrepreneurship Short
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.
Bonfire of the Consultancies
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.
The AppetiZIRP
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.
The Build-Nothing Country
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.
Planning for AGI and Beyond
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.
To Save America, Restore Our Frontier
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.
Rekindling US Productivity for a New Era
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.
What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work?
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.
Are You Serious?
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.
2022
Generative AI: Autocomplete for Everything
Eight Lessons from the First Climate Tech Boom and Bust
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.
If Books Could Kill
Company Building In The Curiosity Phase of AI
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 Enchanted Notebook
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 Origin of Student Debt — Reagan and the Educated Proletariat
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.
Brian Armstrong on The Diary of a CEO (E161)
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.
Company Culture Is Really Important, But The Way We Talk About It Is Wrong
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.
The Market Is The Greatest Critic
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.
An Interview With Replit Founder Amjad Masad
Ben Thompson's Stratechery interview with Amjad Masad, read the same day Kyle hosted his own Replit event.
Building American Dynamism
The only way to reverse American stagnation post-Covid is through technologists building companies that support the national interest — what Boyle calls American Dynamism.
Control Points 2.0
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.
Full Potential SaaS
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.
How I Read (Go Flip Yourself)
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.
Introducing Engagement Led Growth (ELG)
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…
Killing Time Makes You More Creative
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.
Lux Ventures VII Q4 2022 Report
Josh Wolfe's Q4 2022 letter to Lux Ventures VII limited partners — saved to read; no excerpts captured yet.
The $100 Trillion Opportunity in Marketplaces
The Digital Native piece that sizes the B2B opportunity against the consumer one everybody was already looking at.
The Elephant in the Room — The Myth of Exponential Hypergrowth
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.
The Vertical SaaS Knowledge Project — Introduction
Dave Yuan's opening chapter of The Vertical SaaS Knowledge Project, and the frame the rest of it hangs on.
Thoughts on Stock Comp in SaaS
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.
Toast — Built to Serve
Dave Yuan in conversation with Matt Kaplan, SVP of Product at Toast — the case study for the rest of The Vertical SaaS Knowledge Project.
Why You Should Join Warp
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…
You Probably Shouldn't Work at a Startup
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.
2021
Frontier Carbon Removal Event
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…
Hunger Games
Ben Hunt (Epsilon Theory) — saved to read; no excerpts captured yet.
The Index Mindset
San Francisco Has Money And A New Plan To Tackle Homelessness. Will It Finally Change Things?
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.
Inside Tiger Global's Deal Machine
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.
Playing Different Games
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.
Why I Use Roam Research Daily
From The Next Big Thing by Nikhil Trivedi — read the original.
Figma - Worth the Hype- Absolutely
A couple weeks ago Okta released their annual Business at Work report - a great review on how businesses got work done in 2020.
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT-VC #223
From What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC by Ed Sim — read the original.
Clouded Judgement 2.5.21
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.
An Interview with Eric Seufert about Apple, Facebook, and Mobile Advertising
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.
Facebook's Earnings, Zuckerberg vs. Cook, Apple and Facebook Parallels
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.
Data Observability- The Next Monitoring Frontier
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…
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT-VC #222
From What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC by Ed Sim — read the original.
Publishing is Back to the Future
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)…
Clubhouse is a Unicorn(?); Clubhouse Versus Podcasts; Monetization, Moderation, and Monopoly
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.
Apple Earnings, An Interview with Jay Goldberg About Chips and Intel
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.
Clouded Judgement
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…
Tiger Global Is a Winning Machine
Mario Gabriele's Generalist piece on how Tiger Global Management rewired growth investing — and the clearest account in the corpus of a fund winning by being excellent at exactly one thing.
What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC
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.
Zapier: The $7B Netflix of Productivity
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.
2020
Venture Partnerships vs. Solo Capitalists
From The Next Big Thing by Nikhil Trivedi — read the original.
Salesforce Acquires Slack, Salesforce's Reasoning, Salesforce's Opportunity
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.
Todd McKinnon — Creating and Defining a New Market Category
Patrick O'Shaughnessy interviews Okta co-founder/CEO Todd McKinnon: leaving Salesforce to bet on the cloud, the painful early years, how you create and become the default name in a new market category, and the frameworks for innovating as a public company.
B2B Marketplaces Will Be the Next Billion-Dollar E-Commerce Startups
The TechCrunch companion to the Digital Native piece — read the same day, and stronger on how these businesses actually make money.
Inside the Rise and Fall of Coatue's Quant Fund
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 Acquires Segment, What is Segment, An Interview with Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson
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.
Agglomerators vs. Specialists
From The Next Big Thing by Nikhil Trivedi — read the original.
The Rise of the Solo Capitalists
From The Next Big Thing by Nikhil Trivedi — read the original.
How Substack Has Spawned a New Class of Newsletter Entrepreneurs
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…
Surgical Reading: How to Read 12 Books at Once
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.
Why Software Is More Profitable Than Content
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…
Dust in the Light
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.
B2B Payment Thoughts — June 2020
By Kathryn Mongelli (Durable), circulated to Kyle by Mark Goldberg. publish: false — this is someone else's memo, shared privately.
Opinion: Let's fix college first, before rushing to reopen campuses
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
The Profile: America's therapist & the billionaire criticizing the rich
A weekly edition of The Profile; the passage Kyle saved is a long quote from Just Mercy (book), the memoir behind Just Mercy (movie).
'Talk Is Cheap' — Mellody Hobson on Corporate America's Responsibility to Fight Inequality (CNBC)
The Hierarchy of Marketplaces — Introduction and Level 1 (Sarah Tavel)
The Hierarchy of Marketplaces — Level 2 (Sarah Tavel)
The Hierarchy of Marketplaces — Level 3 (Sarah Tavel)
On the Nature of Long-Term Holds
Yale case (2020) on why holding a business for decades beats flipping it: compounding, the friction of trade (taxes, fees, idle cash, redeployment risk), and why MOIC beats IRR.
Platforms in an Aggregator World
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 Going To Wreak Havoc On Society. We Are Not Prepared
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.
Thriving In Ambiguity — What To Do Your First Year As A Venture Capitalist
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?
Joe Rogan Experience #1480 — Kevin Hart
Kevin Hart's second appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, recorded roughly eight months after the September 2019 car crash that fractured his spine.
The Anti-Amazon Alliance
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.
The Burn Multiple
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.
How To Build If… It's Time To Build?
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.
It's Time To Build
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?
Bundle Magic
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…
Task Inflation and Inbox Capture
Cal Newport, April 2020, on a side effect of enforced telework that nobody was planning for.
Andy Matuschak — Designing Education
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.
Folders Kill Creativity (Anne-Laure Le Cunff)
Forget Forgetting. Build a Zettelkasten.
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.
How Do You Automate Venture Capital
By Lucinda Shen at Fortune · interview with Chris Farmer, MD and CEO of SignalFire
Jerry Neumann on Writing for Business
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.
Taking a Page From SimCity, UrbanFootprint Pitches New Tools for Developers and Urban Planners
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.
$1 Trillion in Equity — How Carta Is Set to Unlock the Private Markets
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 — Update on Small Business and Private Equity (Invest Like the Best EP.164)
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”…
Computer Assisted Intuition — How Roam Research Fulfills the Web's Original Dream
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.
Creating Page Templates in Roam
Francis Miller on page templates in Roam Research — the piece that convinced Kyle to look into Text Expander.
Does Your Family Business Have a Succession Plan?
By Nick Di Loreto and Omar Romman in the Harvard Business Review
Effortless Output With Roam Research
Kyle's full course notes on Nat Eliason's Roam course, hosted on Forte Labs.
Future of Work — Accelerating the Transition to Enterprise 4.0
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.
healthOS
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
How to Build a Digital Zettelkasten
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.
How to Crush It on Twitter: David Perell and Matthew Kobach Workshop
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.
How to Never Lose Another Memory Again
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.
How To Read Deeper — The Importance of a Commonplace Book
A short argument against reading for volume, and for keeping a commonplace book as the mechanism that makes deep reading stick.
I Quit My Job at the Start of the Pandemic to Launch a Company
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 — The Past, Present, and Future of Seed Investing (Invest Like the Best EP.170)
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).
Naval Ravikant Roam Graph — Welcome
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…
News in the Age of Abundance
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.
One-Touch to Inbox Zero
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.”
Permanent Equity Weekly #48
Debt: risks, types, and sources. The most important benefit of minimal debt is flexibility — optionality to reinvest, stockpile cash, or wait.
Permanent Equity Weekly #49
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.
Permanent Equity Weekly #51
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…
Permanent Equity Weekly #52
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.
Permanent Equity Weekly #53
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…
PKP — The New City (lecture notes)
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…
Roam Book Club — Interview with Sönke Ahrens
Sonke Ahrens, author of How To Take Smart Notes, on the Zettelkasten method and what survives translation into a networked tool.
Roam Tour
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 — Consumer & Marketplace Investing (Invest Like the Best EP.168)
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 — The Art and Science of the Bundle (Invest Like the Best EP.175)
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 2020 Community Industry Trends Report
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.
The 2020
The causes of revolutions resemble those of earthquakes — slow-building “pressures” plus a sudden “trigger” — and the trigger itself is nearly impossible to predict.
The Next Big Thing
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 Notetaking Cold War
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
The One-Touch Guide to Doing a Weekly Review
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.
The Profile Dossier: Chris Hadfield, the Astronaut Who Conquered Fear
The Profile's deep-dive dossier on astronaut Chris Hadfield and how he conquered fear.
The Profile Dossier — Charlie Munger, the Master of Mental Models
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.
The Profile Dossier: Elon Musk, the Architect of the Future
A “Profile Dossier” deep-dive on Elon Musk from Polina Marinova's The Profile, read by Kyle on 2020-07-02.
The Profile Dossier — Fred Rogers, the Nicest Man in the Neighborhood
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: The Musk of steamy romance & the civil rights leader full of hope
An edition of Polina Marinova's The Profile newsletter, read by Kyle on 2020-07-02.
The Unusual Ambitions of Chamath Palihapitiya
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 Lütke — Building a Modern Business (Invest Like the Best EP.173)
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.
Video Series — Tiago Learns Roam
Tiago Forte learning Roam Research on camera with Conor White-Sullivan — captured alongside the Forte/Roam Twitter argument that preceded it.
How To Take Smart Notes — Tiago Forte Interviews Sönke Ahrens
Roam Research: Why I Love It and How I Use It (Nat Eliason)
2019
Just Mercy (film)
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.
Interview with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder of Roam
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…
Building a Second Brain in Roam
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).
Having Kids
Empathy is a learned skill, not always something you automatically have
The Man Who Reads 1,000 Articles a Day
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.
Peter Thiel's Religion
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…
Why Books Don't Work
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.
The Most Important Growth Metric for Early Startups
The Bitter Lesson
Almost $14 Billion Pulled From CalPERS Equity Managers
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.
Are Investors Misinterpreting arXiv As Peer Review?
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.
Brendon Burchard — Success Magazine
A Success magazine feature on Brendon Burchard, captured as nine page images at wiki/attachments/brendon-burchard-success-magazine/.
Building a Second Brain (talk)
Tiago Forte's talk version of Building a Second Brain — recommended to Kyle by Nat Eliason.
CRM Thoughts
A written recommendation Kyle sent after a visit — why DealCloud is the strongest CRM for a mid-to-late-stage firm, and the architectural reason: it's built on many-to-many relationships, which is what relationship data actually is.
Five Investing Heresies
Dan Rasmussen at Capital Camp (Brent Beshore's event) · tagged with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
fwd: Economy — Jump-Starting America
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.
How to Invest in Startups
Sam Altman's post on how to invest in startups — saved to read; no excerpts captured yet.
How to Scout — A Guide
Permanent Equity's scouting guide — how to find small businesses worth buying, and what a scout is actually looking for.
How to Take a Digital Note
Tiago Forte's webinar on the mechanics of a digital note — what to capture, and in what form it stays useful later.
Hyper Publishing: The Wiki Strategy
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.
Hyper Publishing
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.
Interview Guide for The Business of Bookstores
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.
Investing in the Cloud — From Gold Rush to Hunger Games and Beyond
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…
Knowledge Building Blocks: The New Meaning of Notes
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.
Morgan Housel — Permanent Assumptions
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
Permanent Equity — Scout Network
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.
Rev 2 \"Data Science and the Future of Investing\" - Coatue Management & Point72
A Rev 2 conference panel on data science and the future of investing, featuring Coatue and Point72. #Data in Investing
Rev 2 — Data Science and the Future of Investing
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.
Scout Q&A — Emily Holdman
Emily Holdman of Permanent Equity on the scout model for small-business deal sourcing.
Should Facebook and Twitter Be Regulated Under the First Amendment?
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.
Socrates and Plato at the Ocean
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.
Sustainable Urbanism — Urban Planning and Design
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.
The Profile Dossier: Aaron Sorkin, the Mastermind Behind America's Favorite Films
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.
The Profile Dossier: Katie Arnold, the Ultra-Athlete Who Outran Her Anxiety
Arnold tried a multitude of remedies in an attempt to heal what she referred to as “her worry brain.” #Anxiety
The Second Brain Manifesto
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.
The Weekly Review Is an Operating System
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.
The World of the Hungry, Hungry Hippos
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.
This Time Is Different: How Automation Can Win the Fight Against Climate Change
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!
Thread of Classics
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.
Trends #0018 — Angel Investing
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.
Usage-Based Pricing — A New Platform
Notes on Usage-Based Pricing as a platform shift rather than a pricing tweak, drawing on Kyle Poyar's work.
Why You're Christian
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…
Wisdom From Walmart
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…
4 Styles of Parenting
Cash Conversion Score (Bessemer Atlas)
How to Take Smart Notes — Tiago Forte's Summary
2018
Ray Bradbury's Greatest Writing Advice
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.
Dream Big, Work Hard, Be Kind
Amazon: The Everything Store (article)
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.”
Assembly Bill 2041 — UC Office of the Chief Investment Officer
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.
How to Maximize Creativity
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.
How to Maximize Serendipity
Serendipity is a state of mind you can engineer — chiefly by writing and publishing online, which makes you findable and “manufactures” unexpected opportunity.
Morgan Housel: Naked Brands Interview Series
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.
Not So Lazy & Entitled Millennials: David Perell
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.
Orality and Literacy Book Review
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.
Riding the Writing Wave
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.
Scoutbee, and the Future of Strategic Sourcing
Jan Miczaika at HV Holtzbrinck Ventures on Scoutbee and the case for software in strategic sourcing — B2B marketplace mechanics applied to industrial procurement.
Ten Principles for How to Run a Company
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
The Science of Learning
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.
The Story of Singapore
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.”
The Timeless Allure of Ruins
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.
Y Combinator Startup Investor School
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.
The Hierarchy of Engagement, Expanded (Sarah Tavel)
Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds (James Clear)
2017
The Fairness Principle: How the Veil of Ignorance Helps Test Fairness
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.
Defining Aggregators (09.26.17)
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
The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial
Naval Ravikant — The Angel Philosopher
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…
The Attention Game
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.
The Pursuit of Meaning
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 Guide to Spectacles
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.
America Runs On Instagram
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.”
Bet On Humanity
As Automation commoditizes abundance, the new scarce resources are discovery, curation, and humanity — the human touch, not the catalog, becomes the differentiator.
Creative Intersections
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.
Critical States
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.
David vs. Goliath: A History of New York Trade
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.
Equinox Is More Than A Gym. It's A Church.
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.
Find Your Territory
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.
Forget More To Learn More
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.
Just Flow With It
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.
Naked Brands (Essay Series)
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.
Naked Brands: The Future of Basketball
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.
Naked Brands: The Future of Fashion
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.
Naked Brands: The Future of Finance
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.
Naked Brands: The Future of Music
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.
Pursue What Is Meaningful
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.
Saving Retail
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.
Streaming Makes Us Superhuman
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.
The Future of American Sports
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.
The Future of Work (Article)
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.
The Lessons Of History (Book Review)
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.
The Magic of Learning
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.
Wearable Brands
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.
When Java Meets Jive
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.
2016
Where Do We Go Next?
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.
13th (documentary)
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.
College Students: Focus On This
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…
Meaningful Travel
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.
The Magic of Elon Musk
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.
How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?
A survey of 885 institutional VCs at 681 firms on how they actually source, select, structure, and add value to deals — and how often that diverges from textbook finance. #Investing
Surge Pricing Can Save Hundreds of People
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.
What You Don't Know About The Headphone Jack
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.
20 alternatives to time on social media.
Verbatim. Note last modified 2016-06-05, created 2016-06-05. Note id x-coredata://2450E87C-596C-4FF9-A2BB-E274139997E1/ICNote/p72.
The Beginner's Guide to UX Prototyping
Do You #FeelTheBern: Behind Bernie Sanders' Quest To Take Over The White House
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…
It's Time To Disrupt Our Archaic Education System
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.
Valuing High-Tech Companies
A Deep Dive into Hedge Funds with Ted Seides (Invest Like the Best EP.7)
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.
Cultivating a Disaster Resistant, Compound Interest Machine — Brent Beshore (Invest Like the Best EP.10)
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.
Snapchat's Big Advantage
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.
The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread
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.
Thinking and Walking — Morgan Housel
On how reading feeds writing, why curiosity should be allowed to ruminate, and where personal finance actually moves the needle.
Why Can't School Be Fun?
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…
2015
Interview With Sodalicious Founder Kevin Auernig
12 Indispensable Mindful Living Tools
Verbatim. Note last modified 2016-01-04, created 2015-12-28. Note id x-coredata://2450E87C-596C-4FF9-A2BB-E274139997E1/ICNote/p109.
Default Alive or Default Dead?
What is UX Design? 15 User Experience Experts Weigh In
Aggregation Theory (07.21.15)
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
Philanthropy for Hackers
A Social Network for Talkers
A Message to Every Entrepreneur
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…
How Callaway Golf Increases Fan Engagement During Major Championship Weeks
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.
Oh Snap, It's Here
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.
The Magical Touch of Finn Beales
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 Roadmap Planning Process (RMP) in Product Management
The Sharing Economy Is Bullsh!t. Here's How We Can Take It Back
How a Driverless Car Sees the Road
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 01.02 — Instagram
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 01.03 — Twitch
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.
2014
Lecture 14 — How to Operate (Keith Rabois)
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.
44 Great American Bookstores Every Book Lover Must Visit
Meditations on Moloch
Want to Do Finance for the Poor? Then Use Microcredit to Labor Among Beggars, Addicts, and Thieves
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.
The Collector's Fallacy
“Knowing about” something is not the same as “knowing” it — collecting texts, bookmarks, and photocopies creates an illusion of knowledge without actually increasing it.
Your Passion, Your Solution (YPYS)
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.
2013
The Crazy Story Of How “Clue” Went From Forgotten Flop To Cult Triumph
How Startup Valuation Works — Illustrated
Social Impact Investing Will Be the New Venture Capital
SaaS Metrics 2.0 — A Guide to Measuring and Improving What Matters
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.
The Case Against Patents
2012
Deconstructing: How Can Indie Musicians Break Even?
How To Predict The Future
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.
How to Sell Your Excess Crap for Cash in Just a Few Hours with Amazon's Fulfillment Program
Architecture and the City — The Big Rethink
Peter Buchanan's essay on architecture at a moment when the nature of change has itself changed, not merely its pace.
Greening the City — Ecosystem Services Come To Town
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.
2011
The 5-Minutes-a-Day Journal
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.
Sketching in Mockups
Feed My Sheep
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland's MTC address to departing missionaries: the central change Preach My Gospel made was to convert the missionary first, so the missionary can meet investigators where they are. Built around the Wallace Toronto / Moroni 8 doorstep story, the three things missionaries do poorly (study, prepare, teach for commitment), and a close reading of Christ's threefold 'Feed my sheep' to Peter.
Transport and the City — Human Transit
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.
Why Cities Matter — Triumph of the City
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.
2010
I Am a Mormon Because I Am a Feminist
How Will You Measure Your Life? (HBR, 2010)
Architecture and the City — Makeshift Metropolis
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.
Sustainable Urbanism — Design for Urbanism & The Urban Footprint
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”*…
The Public Realm — Cities for People
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.
Transport and the City — The Energy Glut
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…
2009
Valuing Young, Start-up and Growth Companies
The Next Web — Tim Berners-Lee
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.”
Why Cities Matter — Whole Earth Discipline: City Planet
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.
2007
The Pmarca Blog Archives
The collected Pmarca blog archives — Marc Andreessen's essays gathered as a single ebook. Saved to read; no excerpts captured yet.
2005
This Is Water
Charlie Munger: A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom, Revisited
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.
Charlie Munger: A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom
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.
Charlie Munger: Academic Economics
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%.
Charlie Munger: Harvard Law School Fiftieth Reunion Address
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.
Charlie Munger: Investment Practices of Leading Charitable Foundations
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.
Charlie Munger: Harvard School Commencement Speech
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.
Charlie Munger: Philanthropy Roundtable
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.
Charlie Munger: Practical Thought About Practical Thought?
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.'
Charlie Munger: The Great Financial Scandal of 2003
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.
Charlie Munger: USC Gould School of Law Commencement Address
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.
Charlie Munger: The Psychology of Human Misjudgment
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.
The Eleven Talks of Poor Charlie's Almanack
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.
2004
Energy Efficiency — Solar Cities
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.
Energy Efficiency — Towards Zero Waste
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.
Why Cities Matter — Green Manhattan
David Owen's argument that the greenest place in America is its densest — “everywhere else should be more like New York.”
2003
Why Nerds are Unpopular
2001
An Evening with Ray Bradbury (2001)
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.'
2000
Strategy Letter I — Ben and Jerry's vs. Amazon
An Engineer's View of Venture Capitalists
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.
1994
The Maiden Issue — BM & Intel, PC Uncertainty Principle
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.
1978
Joseph Smith Lecture 2 — Joseph's Personality and Character
Truman G. Madsen's second lecture in his Joseph Smith series: a close-up portrait of the man rather than the prophet — physical constitution, athletic streak, the four cast of his mind, temperament and humor, humility, emotional depth, home life with Emma, and the testimony of contemporaries who knew him.
1937
The Nature of the Firm