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• The investor letters of the Nomad Investment Partnership in full – Nick Sleep and Qais Zakaria.
• The Fundsmith Annual Letters – Terry Smith and Fundsmith Owner's Manual (and other analysis). These are some of my favourite investing texts of all time. Terry is awesome.
• More from Terry:
  • The Ten golden rules of Investment.
  • Where’s the beef?
  • What I have learnt at Fundsmith in the past five years.
  • Stay focused on the ‘known knowns’.
  • The unique advantage of equity investment.
  • Forecasters are like Michael Fish. and, on a related note, There are only two types of Investors.
  • Return Free Risk.
• As We May Think – Vannevar Bush.
• Science, the Endless Frontier – Vannevar Bush.
• Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck – Marc Andreessen.
• How To Be Successful – Sam Altman.
• Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity – Marc Andreessen. The whole pmarca blog is archived here. Worth checking out.
• Sam Hinkie‘s Letter of Resignation to the Philadelphia 76ers ownership.
• The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley – Tom Wolfe.
• The Use of Knowledge in Society – Friedrich A. Hayek.
• The Logic of Risk Taking – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
• Kelly Criterion (Wikipedia) and Never Go Full Kelly (LessWrong).
• The Structure of “Unstructured” Decision Processes – Henry Mintzberg, Duru Raisinghani, Andre Theoret.
• The Great Divide over Market Efficiency – Clifford Asness, John Liew.
• Buffett’s Alpha – Andrea Frazzini, David G. Kabiller, Lasse H. Pedersen.
• Transcript of Stanley Druckenmiller‘s Speech at The Lost Tree Club – January 18 2015.
• Los Alamos From Below: Reminiscences 1943-1945 – Richard Feynman.
• Ray Dalio‘s Holy Grail.
• Why is finance so complex? – Steve Randy Waldman.
• Finance as Magic – Nick Rowe.
• Berkson’s Paradox – Kris Abdelmessih.
• Structured Procrastination – John Perry.
• You And Your Research – Richard Hamming.
• The Hamming Question – Raemon on LessWrong.
• Can We Survive Technology? – John von Neumann.
• Patrick Collison has a Few Questions for Tyler: Conversations with Tyler (Cowen).
• Some Perspective On The Japan Earthquake – Patrick McKenzie.
• The housing theory of everything – John Myers, Ben Southwood, Sam Bowman.
• Don’t let that crybaby in here again – Steven Shapin.
• A New World Order: Explaining the Emergence of the Classical Gold Standard – Christopher M. Meissner.
• The Loser’s Game – Charles D. Ellis.
• Y Combinator’s Essential Startup Advice.
• What libertarianism has become and will become – Tyler Cowen.
• How to succeed or fail on a frontier – Nick Szabo.
• A multi-part series on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and work by Ash Jogalekar.:
  • Oppenheimer I: “An Unctuous, Repulsively Good Little Boy”
  • Oppenheimer II: “Work… Frantic, Bad and Graded A”
  • Oppenheimer III: “Oppenheimer Seemed To Me, Right From The Beginning, A Very Gifted Man.”
  • Oppenheimer IV: “Nim Nim Man”
  • Oppenheimer V: “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture”
  • Oppenheimer VI: “Batter my Heart, Three-Person’d God.”
  • Oppenheimer VII: “Scorpions In A Bottle”
  • Oppenheimer VIII: The House of Science
• Lessons on management styles from Edward Teller, Hans Bethe and Robert Oppenheimer: A question of temperament – Ash Jogalekar.
• Speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists – J. Robert Oppenheimer.
• Eric Gilliam’s FreakTakes is an exploration of the behavioral and organizational practices of extremely successful 20th century applied scientific institutions. It is the single best resource on this (and associated) topic(s) I have encountered anywhere on the Internet. Some personal favorites:
  • Thomas Edison, Tinkerer.
  • Managing Lockheed’s Skunk Works.
  • A Progress Studies History of Early MIT— Part 2: An Industrial Research Powerhouse.
  • Irving Langmuir, the General Electric Research Laboratory, and when applications lead to theory.
  • We won the war on infectious diseases, but now we need to learn from it.
  • Is America’s applied and basic research really “applied” or “basic”?
• How To Do Great Work – Paul Graham.
• Patrick McKenzie‘s Travel Recommendations for Japan.
• An intuitive approach for understanding electricity – Brian Haidet aka AlphaPhoenix.
• Stripe and Solid-State Economics – Byrne Hobart.
• Free isn’t Cheap Enough – Palmer Luckey.
• Definite optimism as human capital – Dan Wang.
• How Technology Grows (a Restatement of Definite Optimism) – Dan Wang.
• Intellectual Laziness – Philo. On the fall of General Electric.
• Overconfidence: An Autobiography – Jason Zweig.
• Status as a Service (StaaS) – Eugene Wei.
• The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics – Max Roser.
• Lizardman’s Constant is 4% – Scott Alexander.
• Why OCaml – Yaron Minsky.
• A nice primer on the Anthropic Principle by Sabine Hossenfelder.
• Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980s – Jerry Neumann.
• The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge – Abraham Flexner.
• Invisible Details of Interaction Design – Rauno Freiberg.
• The Idea Trap – Bryan Kaplan.
• Transcript of Surreptitiously Taped Conversations among German Nuclear Physicists at Farm Hall (August 6-7, 1945).
• A Vision of Metascience: An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science – Michael Nielsen, Kanjun Qiu.
• The Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are The Most Important – Shane Parrish.
• Lead Bullets – Ben Horowitz.
• Peter Thiel on what works at work – Lillian Cunningham. Thiel interview with the Washington Post. Contains some nice high-level heuristics on building great culture inside organisations.
• Hiroshima – John Hersey. Events from the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing.
• Everything You Might Want to Know about Whaling – Matt Lakeman.
• Violence and the Sacred: College as an incubator of Girardian Terror – Dan Wang.
• Do I Need to Go to University? – Christopher Olah.
• Understanding Jane Street – Byrne Hobart.
• The high-return activity of raising others’ aspirations – Tyler Cowen.
• The Greatest Investment Quotes [That Everyone Should Know] – Nick Maggiulli.
• Patrick McKenzie's ‘Bits about Money’ contains some of the best essays on payments infrastructures and their economic underpinnings. A few of my favourites:
  • How credit cards make money.
  • Credit card debt collection.
  • Debit cards are hidden financial infrastructure.
  • Bank transfers as a payment method.
  • The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero.
  • Improving how credit cards work under the covers.
  • KYC and AML: beyond the acronyms.
  • Financial innovation is actually happening.
• The Drexel Diaspora – Jenny Anderson.
• Umeshisms – Scott Aaronson.
• It’s Time to Build – Marc Andreessen.
• I really enjoy listening to Richard Rhodes‘ talks and interviews. He’s a wonderful narrator and sometimes (often?) throws in information and anecdotes not present in his (stellar) books.
  • Interview by the Atomic Heritage Foundation (2018).
  • Appearance on The Lunar Society podcast.
  • Talk at Stanford on his book “Energy – A Human History”.
  • 2007 Talk at Google.
  • Appearance on ‘Plain English with Derek Thompson’.
  • Appearance on ‘The Joe Walker Podcast’.
• I, Pencil – Leonard E. Read.
• How Tom Wolfe Became… Tom Wolfe – Michael Lewis.
• What is Science? – Richard Feynman.
• Classical liberalism vs The New Right – Tyler Cowen.
• Why Shakespeare Could Never Have Been French – Tom Scott.
• A Pickpocket’s Tale – Adam Green.
• What Colour are your bits? – Matthew Skala.
• Strategy Letter V – Joel Spolsky. Commoditize your complements.
• The St. Petersburg Paradox on Stanford Plato.
• Scaling Organisations Means Choosing What’s a Rounding Error – Byrne Hobart.
• Aggregation Theory – Ben Thompson.
• The Techno-Optimist Manifesto – Marc Andreessen.
• Meditations on Moloch – Scott Alexander.
• America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy – Noah Smith.
• The Kolmogorov option – Scott Aaronson.
• The Problem of Excess Genius – David Banks.
• Choose Good Quests – Markie Wagner, Trae Stephens.
• Scenius, or Communal Genius – Kevin Kelly.
• Stamina Succeeds – Robin Hanson.
• Be suspicious of stories – Tyler Cowen.
• The Mirai Confessions: Three Young Hackers Who Built a Web-Killing Monster Finally Tell Their Story – Andy Greenberg.
• The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics – Jai.
• The Bitter Lesson – Richard Sutton.
• The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code – Kit Chellel.
• Writing to Think – Shane Parrish.
• The Need to Read – Paul Graham.
• Putting Ideas into Words – Paul Graham. [Admittedly, there should be a lot more Paul Graham on this list. The reason there isn’t – and this might sound like heresy to some people – is that I haven’t gotten around to reading all the essays yet. I’m quite sure a lot of them will tack on when I do.]
• Fishponds and Fighters – Joe Lonsdale.
• From checklist to service: scaling Stripe’s incident response – Jess Lin and Andreas Fuchs.
• The Nature of the Firm – Ronald Coase.
• Man in the News; Humanistic Scientist Isidor Isaac Rabi. (Isidor Rabi profile in the New York Times)
• Feynman Problem-Solving Algorithm – Professor Tom Crick.
• Intro to Large Language Models – Andrej Karpathy.
• A Study in Emerald – Neil Gaiman.
• Prediction Markets and Worse is Better – Byrne Hobart.
• What the Prisoner’s Dilemma Reveals About Life, The Universe, and Everything – Veritasium.
• Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman – J J O’Connor and E F Robertson.
• Rippling’s Series A Investor Memo – Parker Conrad.
• Rippling’s Series F Investor Memo – Parker Conrad.
• Palmer Luckey: American Vulcan – Jeremy Stern.
• Valve‘s Handbook for New Employees.
• How To Succeed at MrBeast Production – MrBeast.
• Facebook’s Little Red Book Remastered – Daniele Spaccapeli.
• Context is that which is scarce – Tyler Cowen.
• Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation – Richard Ngo, Jeremy Nixon. (Backup)
• Ruxandra Teslo has a fantastic Substack. Some favorites:
  • The flight of the Weird Nerd from Academia.
  • The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs.
  • Why haven’t biologists cured cancer?
• Perspectives on What's Ahead: A Conversation with Kenneth C. Griffin Founder, CEO Citadel. (Yale SOM)
• Matt Brown writes very good notes on the fundamentals of modern financial infrastructure:
  • Cross-border payments in ~1,000 words.
  • Payfac in 1,000 words.
  • Interchange in 1,000 words.
• Crony Beliefs - Kevin Simler.
• The Straussian Moment - Peter Thiel.
• Write Like A Programmer - qntm. And related: Writing, Briefly - Paul Graham.