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:
Table of Contents
Case Studies
Strategy
Growth and Monetization
Marketplaces
AI
Other Topics
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
The Bitter Lesson by Rich Sutton
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