Tony Xu ·DoorDash ·18 FEB 2026
Build the Hard Side First, Then the Obvious Side
The product your customer sees is rarely the product that decides whether you win.
Topic
Technology
The technical bets that shaped a company's direction.
12 letters · most recent first
Richard McCathron ·Hippo Holdings Inc. ·10 NOV 2022
Design Your Exposure Before the Disaster Hits
The best risk management happens months before the storm, not during it.
Richard McCathron ·Hippo Holdings Inc. ·8 AUG 2024
Fix the risk profile first, then grow
The best time to prove your risk controls work is when the whole industry is bleeding — and you're not.
Ted Sarandos & Greg Peters & Spence Neumann & Spencer Wang ·Netflix ·18 OCT 2023
How Netflix Turned Content Spending Into a Flywheel
If you want to justify a massive cost center, show how it drives margin expansion at the same time — then the spending becomes the strategy.
Andy Jassy ·Amazon ·11 APR 2024
How Margin Expansion and New S-Curves Compound Together
When your core business gets cheaper to run, every new bet you place gets cheaper to fund.
Andy Jassy ·Amazon ·10 APR 2025
Ask Why Until The Locked Doors Open
Most companies optimize inside the room they're standing in; the best ones keep asking why the door is locked.
Andy Jassy ·Amazon ·9 APR 2026
Progress Is a Squiggly Line, Not a Straight One
Durable companies don't bet on one straight line — they build the muscle to zig, zag, and start over without losing momentum.
Elon Musk ·OpenAI ·28 JUN 2017
How to Turn a Partner's Asset Into Your Competitive Weapon
The fastest way to build a moat is to make someone else's resources do the work — before your rivals think to ask.
Ilya Sutskever ·OpenAI ·12 JUL 2017
Compute Is the Constraint, Not Cleverness
If the bottleneck is hardware, the winner is whoever buys the most of it first.
Neal Mohan & Scott Spencer & Joerg Heilig ·Google LLC ·21 APR 2009
Take the Small Competitor With the Right Shape Seriously
Scale wins fights, but a competitor copying your structure can become a real threat long before they look like one on paper.
Drew Bradstock ·Google LLC ·22 JUL 2015
Don't Give Away Your Best Weapon For Free
When competitors find a cheap workaround to your premium product, the real question isn't whether to fight it — it's whether your pricing power survives if you don't.
Jonathan Bellack ·Google LLC ·6 SEP 2016
Defend the Choke Point, Not the Product
When rivals attack your business model, your real moat is the one workflow they cannot route around.