Topic
Strategy
Every resource in the archive tagged with strategy.
46 resources
Letter2014 Letter to Shareholders
Jeff Bezos
Apr 2015 · 22 min read
The four traits of a dreamy business, and how Marketplace, Prime, and AWS each earned the label.
Letter2011 Letter to Shareholders
Jeff Bezos
Apr 2012 · 16 min read
Why self-service platforms beat gatekeepers: AWS, FBA, and KDP let improbable ideas get tried.
Letter2003 Letter to Shareholders
Jeff Bezos
Apr 2004 · 11 min read
Why long-term thinking is the mark of true ownership — owners are different from tenants.
Letter2002 Letter to Shareholders
Jeff Bezos
Apr 2003 · 12 min read
How Amazon turned customer experience into a fixed cost to deliver both great service and low prices.
Letter1997 Letter to Shareholders
Jeff Bezos
Mar 1998 · 7 min read
Jeff Bezos' original letter to shareholders is reprinted from Amazon's 1997 Annual Report.
EssayDon't Fuck Up the Culture
Brian Chesky
Apr 2014 · 3 min read
Why culture matters more than anything else — the letter Chesky sent the entire Airbnb team in 2013.
EssayLabor and Capital Are Old Leverage
Naval Ravikant
Apr 2019 · 4 min read
Labor and capital are old leverage: both must be granted by others and are hard to scale.
EssayGuide to Career Planning, Part 3: Where to go and why
Marc Andreessen
Oct 2007 · 9 min read
How to pick the industry, company, and role where your opportunities will compound.
EssayGuide to Big Companies: Retaining great people
Marc Andreessen
Jul 2007 · 12 min read
How big companies lose their best people, and what it takes to keep them.
VideoSteve Jobs on Focus
Various Founders
Sep 1997 · 3 min
Steve Jobs's philosophy on the power of saying no and eliminating distractions to achieve excellence.
EssayStartup Advice, Briefly
Sam Altman
4 min read
Start with a project, not a company, so you can find something great to work on without premature commitment.
EssayThe Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
Paul Graham
Apr 2006 · 21 min read
The counterintuitive lessons startups repeatedly fail to learn: release early, keep improving, make users happy, and fear the right threats.
EssayOrganic Startup Ideas
Paul Graham
Apr 2010 · 4 min read
The best startup ideas come from problems you encounter in your own life, not from trying to guess what others want.
VideoEric Schmidt on why most companies get strategy wrong
Eric Schmidt
Mar 2026 · 1 min read
Why strategy should start from what the world will look like in five years, not from your products.
VideoMark Zuckerberg: “You can’t 80/20 everything”
Mark Zuckerberg
Mar 2026 · 1 min read
Why some problems demand 100% of the work — you can't 80/20 everything.
VideoTobi Lutke explains what the VCs who passed on Shopify got wrong
Tobi Lütke
Mar 2026 · 1 min read
“What a lot of free-market thinkers don’t understand is that between the demand and eventual supply lies friction."
VideoSteve Jobs explains the importance of both thinking and doing
Steve Jobs
Mar 2026 · 1 min read
Why the people who change industries are thinkers and doers in one person.
VideoJeff Bezos’s two pieces of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs
Jeff Bezos
Mar 2026 · 1 min read
Why entrepreneurs shouldn't chase the hot thing — position for the wave, then wait.
EssayWhy We Prefer Founding CEOs
Ben Horowitz
9 min read
Founding CEOs outperform professional CEOs because they're more committed to the company's mission and better able to navigate uncertainty.
EssayThe Case for the Fat Startup
Ben Horowitz
9 min read
Lean startups can thrive by spending more strategically instead of cutting costs everywhere.
EssayLead Bullets
Ben Horowitz
9 min read
Leaders should deliver hard truths to their teams even when doing so risks unpopularity.
Letter2020 Letter to Shareholders — Farewell
Jeff Bezos
Apr 2021 · 25 min read
Bezos's parting message in his final shareholder letter as CEO, framed via a Richard Dawkins passage on biological homeostasis.
Letter2018 Letter to Shareholders
Jeff Bezos
Apr 2019 · 18 min read
Bezos arguing that risk-taking, not just revenue, must scale with company size.
Letter2016 Letter to Shareholders — Day 1
Jeff Bezos
Apr 2017 · 8 min read
Four practices to prevent organizational stagnation: customer obsession, rejecting proxies, embracing trends, and fast decision-making.
EssayQuestions
Patrick Collison
16 min read
A collection of open-ended questions about economics, progress, institutions, and society from a founder's perspective.
EssayWhat I Wish Someone Had Told Me
Sam Altman
1 min read
How to start and scale ambitious things: recruiting, focus, speed, conviction, and fighting bureaucracy.
EssayHard Startups
Sam Altman
2 min read
Altman's core thesis: ambition is a recruiting and gravitational advantage, not a liability.
EssayIdea Generation
Sam Altman
3 min read
How to get good at generating startup ideas through environment, tectonic shifts, and founder-company fit.
EssayGuide to Startups, Part 7: Why a startup's initial business plan matters
Marc Andreessen
Jul 2007 · 6 min read
Andreessen's punchline: the inventor of the phonograph initially filed it under 'speaking telegraph' and missed its true market for months.
EssayGuide to Startups, Part 6: How much funding is too little? Too much?
Marc Andreessen
Jul 2007 · 9 min read
How much funding a startup should raise: enough to reach product/market fit or full exploitation, with a buffer for setbacks.
EssayGuide to Startups, Part 5: The Moby Dick theory of big companies
Marc Andreessen
Jun 2007 · 10 min read
How to navigate unpredictable dealings with large companies as a startup founder.
EssayGuide to Startups, Part 4: The only thing that matters
Marc Andreessen
Jun 2007 · 10 min read
Rachleff's Corollary of Startup Success, as formulated by Andreessen.
EssaySuperlinear Returns
Paul Graham
Oct 2023 · 19 min read
In most fields, small differences in performance create outsized differences in results because of exponential growth and thresholds.
EssayHow You Know
Paul Graham
May 2003 · 25 min read
Why startups beat incumbents in design wars: design-by-committee deliberately trades away upside to avoid downside.
EssayWhy It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice
Paul Graham
Apr 2004 · 9 min read
Hackers' disobedience and rule-breaking are essential to their brilliance, not flaws to suppress.
EssayLife Is Short
Paul Graham
Apr 2001 · 1 min read
Time is finite, so choose work and people that matter most to you.
EssayBlack Swan Farming
Paul Graham
Sep 2012 · 9 min read
Startup investing concentrates returns in a few massive winners, which look like bad ideas until they succeed.
EssayMean People Fail
Paul Graham
Nov 2014 · 5 min read
Meanness correlates with startup failure because it costs you talent and prevents the transcendent thinking startups require.
EssayHow to Make Wealth
Paul Graham
May 2004 · 39 min read
Starting a startup is the most reliable way to compress your earning potential by working intensely for a few years instead of a lifetime.
EssayRelentlessly Resourceful
Paul Graham
Mar 2009 · 4 min read
The defining quality of a successful startup founder is relentless resourcefulness.
EssayCities and Ambition
Paul Graham
May 2008 · 16 min read
Graham's argument for why where you live matters far more than the 'couple percent' you'd expect.
EssayHow to Start a Startup
Paul Graham
Mar 2005 · 43 min read
Three things determine whether a startup succeeds: good people, a product customers want, and spending little money.
EssayFounder Mode
Paul Graham
Sep 2024 · 5 min read
Founder mode—how founders run companies—works better than manager mode, the standard advice they're given.
EssayHow to Get Startup Ideas
Paul Graham
Nov 2012 · 32 min read
The best startup ideas come from problems you have yourself, not from trying to think of startup ideas.
EssayDo Things That Don't Scale
Paul Graham
Jul 2013 · 19 min read
Why successful startups succeed by doing manually unscalable things first, like recruiting users one at a time.
EssayGuide to Startups, Part 2: When the VCs say no
Marc Andreessen
Jun 2007 · 11 min read
How to reduce layers of risk in your startup plan after VCs say no.