An Essential Reading List by TheFamily

TheFamily Papers #007

By Nicolas Colin (Co-Founder & Partner) | TheFamily

A while ago, we had to select 20 articles that everyone could read to better understand the digital economy. You’ll find the list below, as well as a bonus list and some longer articles on essential issues. Happy New Year!

#EssentialReading

1. W. Brian Arthur, “Increasing Returns And The New World of Business”, Harvard Business Review, 1996.
2. Paul Graham, “How To Make Wealth”, 2004.
3. Tim O'Reilly, “Open Source Paradigm Shift”, 2004.
4. Tim O'Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0?”, 2005.
5. Brad Templeton, “On The Invention of The Internet”, Brad Ideas, 2005.
6. Paul Graham, “How To Be Silicon Valley”, 2006.
7. Tim O'Reilly, “Government As A Platform”, Open Government, 2009.
8. steve blank, “What’s A Startup? First principles”, 2010.
9. Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating The World”, The Wall Street Journal, 2011.
10. Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee, “The Big Data Boom is the Innovation Story of Our Time”, The Atlantic, 2011.
11. Steve Yegge, “Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant”, 2011.
12. Clayton Christensen, “A Capitalist’s Dilemma, Whoever Wins on Tuesday”, The New York Times, 2012.
13. Paul Graham, “Startup = Growth”, 2012.
14. Kevin Kelly, “Better Than Humans: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs”, Wired, 2012.
15. Babak Nivi, “The Entrepreneurial Age”, Venture Hacks, 2013.
16. Adam Davidson, “Welcome To The Failure Age!”, The New York Times, 2014.
17. Eric Kutcher, Olivia Nottebohm, and Kara Sprague, “Grow Fast or Die Slow”, McKinsey Global Institute, 2014.
18. Philip Evans & Patrick Forth, “Borges’ Map: Navigating A World of Digital Disruption”, BCG Perspectives, 2015.
19. Nick Grossman, “Regulation, The Internet Way: A Data-First Model for Establishing Trust, Safety, and Security”, Regulatory Reform for the 21st Century City, 2015.
20. Tim O'Reilly, “Networks and the Nature of the Firm”, What’s the Future of Work?, 2015.

#Bonus

1. David Stutz, “The Natural History of Software Platforms”, 2004.
2. Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee, “Investing in the IT That Makes A Competitive Difference”, Harvard Business Review, 2008.
3. Jeff Bezos, “2010 Letter To Amazon Shareholders”, 2010.
4. The Economist, “Another Game of Thrones: Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are at each other’s throats in all sorts of ways”, 2012.
5. Sangeet Paul Choudary, “Why Business Models Fail: Pipes vs. Platforms”, Wired, 2013.
6. Daniel Eran Dilger, “The Apple Era begins as Microsoft, Google shift to a hardware centric model”, Apple Insider, 2013.
7. William H. Janeway, “Growth Out Of Time”, Project Syndicate, 2013.
8. Scott Kupor, “Unshackle the Middle Class”, 2013.
9. Farhad Manjoo, “R.I.P. Windows”, Slate, 2013.
10. Edmund S. Phelps, “Less Innovation, More Inequality”, The New York Times, 2013.
11. Balaji S. Srinivasan, “Software is Reorganizing the World”, Wired, 2013.
12. James Bessen, “How Technology Creates Jobs For Less Educated Workers”, Harvard Business Review, 2014.
13. Bill Gurley, “How to Miss By a Mile: An Alternative Look at Uber’s Potential Market Size”, 2014.
14. Sara Horowitz, “America, Say Goodbye to the Era of Big Work”, The Los Angeles Times, 2014.
15. Balaji S. Srinivasan, “@balajis On Full-Stack Startups”, 2014.
16. steve blank, “Fear of Failure and Lack of Speed in a Large Corporation”, 2015.
17. Dion Hinchcliffe, “Why the Underlying Laws of Cloud, Social, and Digital Business Matter”, 2015.
18. Dave McClure, “Bubble, My Ass: Some Unicorns Might Be Overvalued, But All Dinosaurs Gonna Die”, 2015.
19. Tim O'Reilly, “Workers In A World Of Continuous Partial Employment”, What’s the Future of Work?, 2015.
20. Doc Searls & David Weinberger, “New Clues, From Two Cluetrain Authors”, 2015.

#LongReads

1. steve blank, “The Secret History of Silicon Valley”, 2009.
2. Kim-Mai Cutler, “How Burrowling Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)”, Techcrunch, 2013.
3. Sander Duivestein & Patrick Savalle, “Everything You Need To Know About the Bitcoin Protocol”, The Next Web, 2014.
4. Paul Ford, “What is Code?”, Bloomberg Business, 2014.
5. Venkatesh Rao, Breaking Smart, Season 1, 2015.

Jorge Luis Borges’ “Library of Babel”

(This is an issue of TheFamily Papers series, which is published in English on a regular basis. It covers various areas such as entrepreneurship, strategy, finance, and policy, and is authored by TheFamily’s partners as well as occasional guest writers.)

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