Good reads #225- 12th August 2026

Dear Reader,
Welcome to the 225th edition of the Good reads newsletter by Malpani Ventures. Sharing your weekly dose of articles for this week’s reading!

• Capital Buys Courage

• You Are How You Operate

The most interesting thing Jaleh said may be that Mutiny only started moving at startup speed once there was no backup plan. As long as the old product still existed, every decision had two constituencies. Optionality at the corporate level became ambiguity at the operating level.

The results so far suggest the decision created real momentum that only clarity and complete commitment can create. Mutiny released the new product in private preview in February, launched generally in April, and is already being used by more than 3,500 organizations. In its first week alone, the product generated roughly 1,000 signups, including people from companies like Google and DHL. Existing customers, including Snowflake and Uber, also began adopting the new product.

• The physicality of the book –more than its content –is what makes it real.

• The arrival of the Kindle

I keep notes on the front page of my books, referring to the corresponding page. I often consult them while looking for references –like just now. I realized that all I have to do is find the book in my library, pull it out of the shelves, and the idea referenced in it would come to me in a flash. It is practically impossible for me to work entirely from electronic formats. As to more complicated subjects, say mathematical material, only the physical works –I could tell that complicated stuff required physical paper from seeing my students printing out the assigned reading and taking notes on them.

This inseparability of the content and its embodiment is the reason I’ve decided to keep every book I’ve read in the original format in which I have read it. This is not for any functional or pragmatic reason. This is not for any reason other than existential: once you’ve read a book, you are effectively rereading it every time you take a glance at it.

• Competing Visions for the Market for Intelligence

• To Monopoly or Not To Monopoly?

Any general-purpose technology brings benefits that are so widespread across sectors that it is impossible for any single firm to appropriate them. In theory, this could lead to underinvestment. The more general the AI models of Anthropic and OpenAI, the greater the gap between value creation and capture, which may explain the more recent focus on specialized cyber and life-sciences models. One may worry that without the labs, a number of areas of machine intelligence that are less monetizable would be neglected, as everyone has an incentive to free-ride on base capabilities and build where there’s high willingness to pay.

But this view misses a key consequence of open weights commoditizing yesterday’s frontier capabilities: as costs collapse, a number of applications that would otherwise not be economical, suddenly become viable. This accelerates adoption, and with adoption the number of companies that have a reason to support shared technology inputs also increases. We’ve seen this play out before with open source software like Linux, where companies with complementary business models contribute back to the commons, and it likely explains why NVIDIA was able to bring together a large and diverse coalition in support of open-weights.

Until next time!