Long-Forms

OnlyCFO walks through the accounting shenanigans that let startups deceive investors — from capitalized sales commissions and internal-use software to burn multiple games — and explains why VCs are particularly easy to fool.

Jack Raines applies James Carse's finite vs. infinite games framework to the way we live — arguing that optimizing for achievements (finite play) is a trap, and that the better life is spent in pursuit of things you actually enjoy pursuing.

Bryce Roberts argues that the venture model's obsession with $50B+ outcomes — where 15 companies drive 95% of the industry's value — has crowded out a huge population of profitable, founder-controlled businesses that represent a better path for most entrepreneurs.

Lionel Barber reviews two books that strip away the aura of respectability from management consulting — exposing conflicts of interest, fee-driven avarice, and work for despotic regimes that contrast sharply with the industry's 'thought leader' self-image.

Packy McCormick argues that ZIRP-era phenomena (creator economy, NFTs, elaborate lifestyle content) were just appetizers — previews of a much stranger world where automation shrinks the workforce and UBI-style abundance changes what humans do with their time.

Noah Smith argues that America's failure to build housing, transit, and green energy isn't a money problem — it's a broken permitting, land use, and development system exploited by entrenched local interests.

Joe Lonsdale argues that America's national greatness was always tied to Frontier conditions — falsifiable, accountable environments that harden ideas and people — and that restoring the Frontier mindset is the antidote to bureaucratic dysfunction, not fighting cultural sideshows.

McKinsey Global Institute argues that regaining historical rates of productivity growth (2.2% annually) would add $10 trillion to US GDP — and outlines why the past 15 years of digital technology have paradoxically produced a productivity slowdown.

Stephen Wolfram walks through the mechanics of how ChatGPT generates text — from next-word probability to neural nets to the remarkable fact that meaningful human language may have more structure and simplicity than we ever knew.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy interviews Okta co-founder/CEO Todd McKinnon: leaving Salesforce to bet on the cloud, the painful early years, how you create and become the default name in a new market category, and the frameworks for innovating as a public company.

Yale case (2020) on why holding a business for decades beats flipping it: compounding, the friction of trade (taxes, fees, idle cash, redeployment risk), and why MOIC beats IRR.

Truman G. Madsen's second lecture in his Joseph Smith series: a close-up portrait of the man rather than the prophet — physical constitution, athletic streak, the four cast of his mind, temperament and humor, humility, emotional depth, home life with Emma, and the testimony of contemporaries who knew him.