Learning in public
Happy New Year folks! Here s what I read in 2025. Hope you find a gem or two for your lists. (Previous issues: 2024, 2023) Non-fiction The Ascent of Money Niall Ferguson A convincing case that finance shaped the modern world pretty much at every turn, starting with the financialisation of wars, colonisation, industrialisation, and [ ]
Belatedly posting a few notes on the first history of Nvidia; amazingly none had been written before this one coming which came out in December 2024. We d all heard the stories of Huang s intensity, 50+ direct reports, etc. but stories of the relentless execution and risk-taking is really the stuff of legends, and this was [ ]
I ve been following Dan Wang for years, and read a couple of his annual letters about China. When I saw his first book was coming out, I jumped on it as I have always found his approach really interesting. He mixes policy, societal and political analysis with very on the ground first-hand observations about life [ ]
The mental model when talking to ChatGPT is you are talking to a simulation of what a human labeller would say As expected, this was a fantastic intro course (3h30) into how LLMs work, with the stated goal of giving you an intution and demistifying for what really happens when you get that stream of [ ]
Here is what I read in 2024. Did much more sampling and dropping books halfway (I still love you, Moby Dick) so it’s a shorter list than last year. Hope you find a gem or two in there for your reading lists. Happy new year! 🤓 Non-Fiction (English) Fiction (French) Non-Fiction (French)
Intro Think slow, act fast The commitment fallacy Think from right to left Pixar planning Are you experienced? So you think your project is unique? Can ignorance be your friend? A single, determined organism What s your lego Eleven heuristics for better project leadership Misc
I like this definition of product management from Lenny s newsletter: Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems. I think it clearly encapsulates one of the hardest things about the job which is that it entails both [ ]
With the growth of self-service SaaS applications and open-source tools, we ve all become used to introducing new vendors dependencies into our stack without talking to anyone. As anyone who has been on the receiving end of sales discovery calls will attest, there are advantages to this. It s faster to get started and try out [ ]
This was a great read. Attia is my kind of doctor, one that challenges the establishment and received wisdom (he was so disillusioned with the medical profession that he left after he graduated, then came back). He explains why how we must move from treatment-focused care to prevention-focused care. This was a good complement [ ]
Here s a concept which I think is implicitly used by a lot of teams but (to my knowledge) isn t named and doesn t really get talked about: conditional commitments. These are commitments you make to prospective customers, but you don t execute on unless the customer signs. You are taking the bet that if the customer signs, [ ]
Not to be outdone by Barack, here is what I read in 2023. Hope you find a gem or two in there for your reading lists. Happy new year! 🤓 Non-fiction English Francais Fiction English Francais – J aime mieux, avait dit Langlois, me déranger vingt fois pour rien plutôt que de rater la fois qui compte. [ ]
This book was so heavily promoted across the internet I had to read it. Just like how I succumbed to an Athletic Greens subscription after the deluge of podcast ads. Mustafa Moose Suleyman is particularly clued-in on AI and the regulation landscape. He s a co-founder of Deepmind and someone who is very plugged in to [ ]
It just occurred to me that I ve been working professionally for 10 years 👴 Here are a few aphorisms and tidbits I ve picked up along the way, shared in the form of Kevin Kelly s. Your mileage may vary! Also sadly I ve found that the best way to internalise advice is to actually forget it when [ ]
I was excited to read this book for two reasons: This book explains why we are in a new space renaissance and profiles four companies which illustrate this new wave: Planet Labs, Rocket Lab, Astra, Firefly Aerospace. I learned that it is especially tough to make it as a private space company as: This makes [ ]
Don't try this at home!
When David Marcus jumped into the crypto space I was pretty interested to find out what he was going to build, given his illustrious career (sold company to Paypal, was Paypal CEO, led Libra and Messaging at Facebook) This interview goes into what he s building now with Lightspark, a company building on top of the [ ]
You know the drill. Every X weeks every project in the company has to fill out a status update, sometimes with a sprinkle of RAG status, target completion date, or similar. This gets rolled up into a summary email that gets sent around. Management now have an overview of who is working on what, and [ ]
This book is the thrilling account of the Ukranian power grid cyber attacks of 2015, and the search for who was behind them. This search takes us through many other attacks also attributed to the same source (Russian intelligence services) and Andy Greenberg skillfully weaves in key context: how the hacks worked, key players involved [ ]
They didn t know it was impossible, so they did it Paul Bourget If you follow certain agile methodologies to the letter namely points estimating all the work, and only assigning a certain amount of points to each engineer in the sprint you give your team members an upper bound on what is [ ]
I was really impressed and inspired by this pitch. In short, Propel are the creators of the Providers app, which is used by over 5 million Americans to manage their SNAP benefits and banking. It s a great example of a public interest technology : non-government entities that help governments to solve problems in the public interest. [ ]