Ideas that shape our work
What we believe about AI, how companies change, and what it takes to build capability that compounds. From the team at Substantial.
The Canon
The readings that shaped how we think.
Essential context for anyone building AI into how companies operate.
Leopold Aschenbrenner
Situational Awareness
The most comprehensive analysis of where AI capability is heading and why it matters. Essential context for anyone making long-term investment decisions.
Benedict Evans
AI Eats the World
Evans does this twice a year and it's always the single best macro snapshot of where tech actually is — not where Twitter thinks it is. Ninety slides, no hype, just clarity.
Rich Sutton
The Bitter Lesson
The foundational argument that general methods leveraging computation always win. Shapes how we think about building systems that compound.
Marc Andreessen
Why Software Is Eating the World
The essay that named the era. Replace 'software' with 'intelligence' and you have the thesis for the next decade.
Marc Andreessen
It's Time to Build
The problem isn't technology — it's will. A call to ambition that hits different every time you re-read it.
Carlota Perez
Technological Revolutions and Techno-Economic Paradigms
Every major technology wave follows the same pattern: installation, bubble, crash, then deployment. Understanding where you are in the cycle changes what you do next.
Ben Thompson
Aggregation Theory
The single most useful framework for understanding how the internet rewired who captures value. If you only read one thing about platform economics, this is it.
Ben Thompson
Best
When technology commoditises 'good enough,' the premium for being genuinely best goes up, not down. Short, sharp, and it reframes how you think about quality as strategy.
Peter Thiel
Competition Is for Losers
The goal isn't to compete better — it's to build something so different that competition becomes irrelevant. Provocative and worth arguing with.
Hamilton Helmer
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
The most rigorous answer to 'what actually makes a business durably valuable?' Seven sources of strategic power — and only seven. If your strategy doesn't map to at least one, you don't have a strategy.
Clayton Christensen & Joseph Bower
Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave
The original HBR article that introduced disruption theory — before the word got diluted by a thousand pitch decks. Still the clearest explanation of why good companies get blindsided.
Joel Spolsky
Strategy Letter V
The best explanation of commoditising your complement: make the thing next to you free so your thing becomes more valuable. Google did it. Amazon did it. Once you see it, you see it everywhere.
Chris Dixon
The Next Big Thing Will Start Out Looking Like a Toy
A short, punchy riff on Christensen that's easier to hand someone than the whole book. If serious people are laughing at something new, pay attention — that's often the signal, not the noise.
Paul Graham
Do Things That Don't Scale
The most counterintuitive and most important advice for anyone building something new. Your instinct is to automate and systematise. Graham says: not yet.
Jim Collins
The Flywheel Effect
Great companies don't transform through one dramatic leap. They push a heavy flywheel, turn by turn, until momentum becomes unstoppable. The concept that launched a thousand Amazon strategy memos.
Kevin Kelly
1,000 True Fans
You don't need millions of customers. You need a thousand people who genuinely care. More true now with AI-enabled small teams than when it was written.
Eugene Yan et al.
What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs
Practical, hard-won lessons from production LLM systems. The closest thing to a field manual for what we do every day.