Long Form Reads

I believe that one of the richest ways to learn is long form essays written by people who deeply understand their subject matter. Below is a (growing) list of my favorite essays from other authors. Subscribe to never miss an essay from me:

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Table of Contents

• Case Studies

  • Big Tech

  • Startups

• Strategy

  • Competition and Differentiation

  • Defensibility

  • Disruption

  • Tech Cycles

• Growth and Monetization

  • Flywheels, Systems, Loops

  • Growth Theory

  • Growth Tactics

  • Monetization and Pricing

• Marketplaces

  • Industry and Evolution

  • Liquidity and Scaling

• AI

  • Impact on Business

  • Impact on Society and Policy

  • The Technology

• Other Topics

  • Media and Advertising

  • Creator Economy

  • Metrics and Forecasting

  • Founding and Careers

  • Organization and Operating Models

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Case Studies: Big Tech

• Alibaba and the Future of Business by Ming Zeng

• Don't Forget Microsoft by John Luttig

• Nintendo, Disney, and Cultural Determinism by Matthew Ball

• The Google Squeeze by Ben Thompson

• The FANG Playbook by Ben Thompson

• The Resilience of Costco (presentation)

• What is Amazon? By Zack Kanter

• Top articles on Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft by Ben Thompson

Case Studies: Startups

• Brex: The Future of Business Banking and Cash Management by Anu Hariharan, Nic Dardenne, Karan Shah

• Food Delivery Wars by Sarah Tavel

• How Duolingo Reignited User Growth by Jorge Mazal

• Lessons from Spotify by Ben Thompson

• Pinduoduo and The Rise of Social E-Commerce by Anu Hariharan and Nic Dardenne

• Stripe: Platform of Platforms by Ben Thompson

• Shein: The TikTok of Ecommerce by Packy McCormick

• Tencent: The Ultimate Outsider by Packy McCormick

• The Epic Games Primer by Matthew Ball

• Understanding how Uber & Lyft Grow in Markets by Kevin Kwok

• Why Figma Wins by Kevin Kwok

• Why Uber Fights by Ben Thompson

Competition and Differentiation

• Aligning Business Models to Markets by Kevin Kwok

• A Quickstart Guide to Positioning by April Dunford

• Consoles and Competition by Ben Thompson

• How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time by Kevin Kwok

• Market Share: Understanding Competitive Advantage Through Market Power by Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan

• Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy by Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker, and Sangeet Paul Choudary

• Positioning and Competition by April Dunford

• Should You Pay Attention To Competitors? by Casey Winters

• Tech’s Two Philosophies by Ben Thompson

• The Audacity of Copying Well by Ben Thompson

• Understanding Abundance by Alex Danco

• Why Product Market Fit Isn't Enough by Brian Balfour

Defensibility

• Apple, Its Control Over the iPhone, and The Internet by Matthew Ball

• How to Lose a Monopoly by Benedict Evans

• Measuring the Moat by Michael Mauboussin, Dan Callahan

• Schumpeter on Strategy, A Taxonomy of Moats, and Productive Uncertainty by Jerry Neumann

• The Power of Defaults by Julian Lehr

• The New New Moats by Jerry Chen

• The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Positioned - Packy McCormick

• When to Dig a Moat and In Defense of Strategy by Packy McCormick

Disruption

• Aggregation Theory by Ben Thompson

• Beyond Disruption by Ben Thompson

• Big Tech’s Biggest Bets by Matthew Ball

• Creating in The Era of Creative Confidence by Scott Belsky

• Disruption, disintegration and the dissipation of differentiability by Clayton Christensen, Matt Verlinden, George Westerman ‍

• Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave by Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen

• Google Redefines Disruption: The “Less Than Free” Business Model by Bill Gurley

• How to Miss By a Mile: An Alternative Look at Uber’s Potential Market Size by Bill Gurley

• Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done” by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan

• Playing on Hard Mode by Ben Thompson

• Strong and Weak Technologies by Chris Dixon

• The Best is the Last by Benedict Evans

• What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong by Ben Thompson

• What Is a Tech Company? by Ben Thompson

Tech Cycles

• Great Surges of Development by Carlota Perez

• On Inflection Points by Michael Dempsey

• The End of the Beginning by Ben Thompson

• When Tailwinds Vanish by John Luttig

• Why Software Is Eating The World - Marc Andreesen

Flywheels, Systems, Loops

• Growth Loops are the New Funnels by Brian Balfour, Casey Winters, Kevin Kwok, Andrew Chen

• How Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook

• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System by Donella Meadows

• Uber’s virtuous cycle by Andrew Chen

Growth Theory

• Ads Don't Work That Way by Kevin Simler

• Building your Growth Model and Ladder of Engagement by Josh Elman

• Do Things That Don't Scale by Paul Graham

• Hierarchy of Engagement by Sarah Tavel

Growth Tactics

• Building an Efficient Marketing Machine by Emily Kramer

• Conservation of Intent by Andrew Chen

• Crafting The First Mile Of Product by Scott Belsky

• Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane by Lenny Rachitsky and Dan Hockenmaier

• Growth Inflections by Lenny Rachitsky

• How to Win with Product-led Sales by Elena Verna and Naomi Ionita

• How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users - Lenny Rachitsky‍

• Making Uncommon Knowledge Common by Kevin Kwok‍

• Product Channel Fit Will Make or Break Your Growth Strategy by Brian Balfour

• The Five Types of Virality by Josh Elman‍

• The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs by Andrew Chen‍

• Why Onboarding is the Most Crucial Part of Your Growth Strategy by Casey Winters

Marketplaces: Industry and Evolution

• A Guide To Marketplaces by Angela Tran, Max Webster, Boris Wertz

• All Markets Are Not Created Equal: 10 Factors To Consider When Evaluating Digital Marketplaces by Bill Gurley

• Building and Investing in Marketplaces by Erik Torenberg

• Platforms vs Verticals and the Next Great Unbundling by Jeff Jordan and D'Arcy Coolican

• Sequencing Business Models: Can That SAAS Business Turn Into a Marketplace? by Casey Winters

• Sequencing Business Models: The Types of Marketplaces by Casey Winters and Gilad Horev

• Sequencing Business Models: So You Want To Be A Platform? by Casey Winters and Gilad Horev

• The Rebundling of Craigslist by Josh Breinlinger

• The Concept That Explains Everything About Marketplaces by Dan Hockenmaier

• What's Next For Marketplace Startups by Li Jin and Andrew Chen

• Why Marketplaces Fail: The Role of Engagement by Sameer Singh

Marketplaces: Liquidity and Scaling

• Four Strategies to Win Big with Low Frequency Marketplaces by Casey Winters

• How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business by Lenny Rachitsky

• How to Structure a Marketplace by Simon Rothman

• Marketplace Liquidity by Borja Moreno de los Rios

• Online Marketplaces by Jeff Jordan

• Pen, Pricetag, Flashlight by Michael Dearing

• Solving the “Marketplace” Business Model by Jason Cohen

• The Hierarchy of Marketplaces by Sarah Tavel

• Underutilized Fixed Assets by Kevin Kwok

• “White Space” For Building A Marketplace by Sarah Tavel

• WTF is Marketplace Liquidity? by Julia Morrongiello

AI: Impact on Business

• AI and the Big Five by Ben Thompson

• AI Platforms, Markets, & Open Source by Elad Gil

• AI: Startup Vs Incumbent Value by Elad Gil

• Developer Tools 2.0 by Charlie Curnin, Josephine Chen, Stephanie Zhan

• Every Company Needs and AI Strategy (Presentation) by Sarah Guo

• Hallucinations in AI by John Luttig

• Startup Opportunities in Machine Learning Infrastructure by Leigh Marie Braswell

• The AI Unbundling by Ben Thompson

• The Bull Case for OpenAI’s threat to Google’s dominance by Sarah Tavel

• The Business of Artificial Intelligence by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

• The Economic Case for Generative AI and Foundation Models by Martin Casado and Sarah Wang

• Winning the AI Products Arms Race by Aniket Deosthali

AI: Impact on Society and Policy

• Alien Minds by Susan Schneider

• Artificial Intelligence Made Me Write This by Tom Morgan

• Creating Friendly AI by Eliezer Yudkowsky

• How to Learn and Teach Economics with Large Language Models, Including GPT by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok

• How to make AI that’s good for people by Fei-Fei Li

• Moore’s Law for Everything by Sam Altman

• Superintelligence FAQ Scott Alexander

• The Age of AI has Begun by Bill Gates

• The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence and Our Immortality or Extinction by Tim Urban

• When will AGI arrive and how it will impact society? Responses from Anton Troynikov, James Poulos, roon, Max Anton Brewer, Robin Hanson, Niklas Blanchard

AI: The Technology

• Attention Is All You Need by Ashish Vaswani et al.

• Emergent Deception and Emergent Optimization by Jacob Steinhardt

• Software 2.0 by Andrej Karpathy

• Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence by Sébastien Bubeck et al.

• State of AI Report 2022 by Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth

• Text Is the Universal Interface by Roon

• The Illustrated Transformer by Jay Alammar

• The Road to ChatGPT (Presentation) by Rama Ramakrishnan

• The Scaling Hypothesis Gwern Branwen

• What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? by Stephen Wolfram

• Collections: Aman.ai; Deepmind Research Index; LessWrong AI Index; OpenAI Research Index‍

Media and Advertising

• Apple Robbed the Mob’s Bank Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 by Eric Seufert

• Data Factories by Ben Thompson

• Everything is an Ad Network by Eric Seufert

• How Technology Shapes Content and Business Models (Or Audio’s Opportunity and Who Will Capture It) by Matthew Ball

• How to Blow Up a Timeline by Eugene Wei

• Netflix is Not a Tech Company by Benedict Evans

• Seeing Like an Algorithm by Eugene Wei

• Status as a Service by Eugene Wei

• Signaling as a Service by Julian Lehr

• Forget Peak TV, Here Comes Infinite TV by Doug Shapiro

• The Great Unbundling by Ben Thompson

• TikTok and the Sorting Hat by Eugene Wei‍

Creator Economy

• 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly

• Creator Economy 2.0 by Andrew Chen

• The Creativity Supply Chain by Michael Mignano

• The Only Thing Which Has Failed About The ‘Creator Economy’ Thus Far Is Venture Capital’s Attempts to Get Their Piece by Hunter Walk

Metrics and Forecasting

• Benchmarks collection by Lenny Rachitsky

• BlitzFail: How Not to Go Off the Rails by David Sacks

• Conversion: The Most Important Internet Metric of All by Bill Gurley

• Choosing Your North Star Metric by Lenny Rachitsky

• How to Calculate Market Share of a Product by Janna Bastow

• Invisible Asymptotes by Eugene Wei

• Metrics Versus Experience by Julie Zhuo

• Operating Leverage by Alex Taussig

• The Burn Multiple by David Sacks

• The Nag Metric by Julie Zhuo

• The Dangerous Seduction of the Lifetime Value (LTV) Formula by Bill Gurley

• The Elephant in the room: The myth of exponential hypergrowth by Jason Cohen

• The Lightspeed SaaS Operating Model by Natalie Luu and Alex Taussig

• What is Good Retention by Lenny Rachitsky and Casey Winters

• Why Most Analytical Efforts Fail by Crystal Widjaja

• Your Organization Needs a Data Hierarchy Map by Elena Verna

Monetization and Pricing

• A Rake Too Far by Bill Gurley

• Conducting Pricing Research & Experimentation by Naomi Ionita

• Freemium vs. Trial by Lenny Ratchitsky

• Is There a No Man's Land in SaaS ACVs? by Tomasz Tunguz

• Matching Price to Value—3 Lessons in Monetization by Naomi Ionita

• Pricing primer by Michael Dearing

• Pricing your SaaS product by Patrick Campbell

• The Car Bundle by Alex Danco

• The Hidden World of Pricing: Uber, Trulia, Etsy, Superhuman & More by Pete Flint

• The Obscure Economic Idea Behind SaaS Pricing Challenges by Tomasz Tunguz

Founding and Careers

• CS183 Notes Essays - Peter Thiel

• How to do Great Work by Paul Graham

• How to do What You Love by Paul Graham

• How to Work Hard by Paul Graham

• Market Research, Wireframing, and Design (including “The Idea Maze”) by Balaji Srinivasan

• Silicon Valley Career Guide by Andy Rachleff

• The Pmarca Guide to Startups - Marc Andreesen

Organization and operating models

• Apple’s Organizational Crossroads by Ben Thompson

• Functional versus Unit Organizations by Steven Sinofsky

• How Apple Is Organized for Innovation by Joel M. Podolny and Morten T. Hansen

• Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule by Paul Graham

• Starting an Analytics Org from Scratch by Jessica Lachs

• The Cadence: How to Operate a SaaS Startup by David Sacks

• The Planning Issue: Decide What to Work on and How You'll Get There by Brie Wolfson

• The Types of Product Team Organizational Structures by Casey Winters

• Why Microsoft’s Reorganization Is a Bad Idea by Ben Thompson

• Uncommon Sense: How to Turn Distinctive Beliefs Into Action by Jules Goddard, Julian Birkinshaw and Tony Eccle

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