Writing and research
Dossiers on institutions, ambitious founders, and frontier systems.
Curated from private vault notes and rewritten as public-facing research dossiers: business history, product strategy, AI systems, hard technology, and leadership under pressure.
6 entries
Business History & Institutions
Founder and finance studies about how companies, families, brands, and markets become durable operating systems.
Financial History
10 min
Long-form vault essay
Rothschild Part I: Money's Prophets
A study of how a family moved from constrained Frankfurt trade into one of Europe's most powerful financial networks by combining trust, speed, secrecy, logistics, and sovereign debt.
Financial History
11 min
Long-form vault essay
Rothschild Part II: The World's Banker
The second act: how a multinational family bank tries to preserve unity while telegraphs, nationalism, empire, public visibility, and New York finance erode its original edge.
Product Strategy
8 min
Founders Podcast notes
Spotify Co-CEO Gustav Söderström: The Company Apple Couldn't Kill
A product and organization study of Spotify's survival logic: synchronized leadership, distribution over elegance, user-aligned business models, AI product judgment, and why Apple could not simply crush the category.
Business History
6 min
Founders Podcast notes
Michelin Brothers: Engineering Demand
A business-history dossier on how the Michelin brothers paired product engineering with races, guides, road signs, and ecosystem design to make tires inevitable.
Business History
6 min
Founders Podcast notes
Rockefeller: Cost Structure and Control
A business dossier on Standard Oil's logic: secrecy, transport economics, debt-fueled scale, acquisition discipline, political awareness, and the machinery behind monopoly power.
Product Strategy
7 min
Founders Podcast notes
Sony & Akio Morita: Market Creation
A founder/product dossier on rebuilding from scarcity, refusing private-label comfort, creating markets before research can validate them, and turning Sony into a premium global signal.
5 entries
Ambition, Leadership & Biography
Biographical and symbolic studies on self-construction, morale, image-making, curiosity, and the costs of ambition.
Leadership History
10 min
Long-form vault essay
Napoleon Bonaparte: Ambition and Narrative Command
A multi-source Napoleon essay about self-construction, artillery logic, media control, administrative systems, overreach, and the tragic edge of unlimited ambition.
Scientific Biography
6 min
Biography podcast notes
Einstein: Curiosity and Misfit Thinking
A biography dossier on stubborn curiosity, individual judgment, self-directed learning, and how Einstein's patent-office years turned isolation into creative leverage.
Craft & Ambition
6 min
Founders Podcast notes
How To Run Down A Dream
A compact operating philosophy built from Sam Hinkie, Daniel Meyer, Bob Dylan, and other obsessive practitioners: passion is tested by whether you love the preparation.
Leadership History
5 min
Biography podcast notes
Winston Churchill: Morale as Infrastructure
A leadership dossier on Churchill in 1940: communication, morale, American alignment, symbolic courage, and why words can become strategic infrastructure in wartime.
Political Iconography
4 min
Short visual research note
Hand in Coat: Symbols of Authority
A short iconography dossier on Napoleon's hand-in-waistcoat pose, the migration of elite body language, and how visual conventions become interfaces for authority.
3 entries
Frontier Technology & AI Systems
Research notes on AI, robotics, propulsion, and the infrastructure logic behind new technical frontiers.
AI Systems
7 min
Lecture synthesis note
CS153 Frontier Systems: AI as a Utility
A synthesis of Sam Altman's CS153 themes: AI as infrastructure, the product journey from model to interface, scaling as systems engineering, and the societal stakes of cheap intelligence.
Frontier Engineering
7 min
S3 video research note
Astro Mechanica: Electric-Adaptive Supersonic Flight
A deep-tech startup study on turboelectric adaptive jet engines, founder-market fit in hard engineering, and the business logic of attacking a stagnant aerospace frontier.
Frontier Engineering
5 min
Video research note
The SpaceX of the Ocean: Ulysses
A maritime robotics note on autonomous underwater vehicles, modular fleets, ecological restoration, infrastructure inspection, and the ocean as an under-instrumented platform.