Reading List
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Maintenance
Assembling 19 volumes
Full reading list
Nineteen books, one operating question: what should a builder understand before asking institutions, teams, and technology to carry more weight?
Systems
Maintenance as strategy, not housekeeping.
Useful for healthcare operations, protocol discipline, and any organization that has to keep promises after the launch moment passes.
How production systems learn to waste less.
The operating lens transfers cleanly from factories to clinics, education, housing, and any service that needs quality at scale.
Open source as invisible maintenance labor.
A clean lens for public digital infrastructure: who carries the work, who captures the value, and what breaks when attention moves on.
Companies
Mental models, incentives, temperament.
A compact operating manual for judgment when decisions are ambiguous, irreversible, or socially pressured.
Company rituals that make people systems legible.
Founder motion has to become operating cadence: hiring, feedback, decision rights, documents, and repeatable management practice.
Engineering organizations as systems to tune.
Covers the practical questions that decide whether software teams get leverage: migrations, debt, sizing, succession, and pace.
The late-stage operator manual.
Useful for executive hiring, boards, capital, M&A, and the moments when company design becomes more consequential than product taste alone.
Technology
The current AI phase told by the builders inside it.
A live map for product judgment, policy risk, and the operational gap between impressive demos and dependable systems.
A challenge to low ambition in the world of atoms.
Keeps the question of abundance concrete: energy, transportation, manufacturing, and the parts of progress that cannot be shipped as software alone.
Silicon Valley before it became software mythology.
A reminder that ecosystems are made from hardware constraints, capital, talent density, and people taking technical risk early.
Choosing important problems and staying honest.
A discipline for builders who need taste, rigor, and the courage to work on problems that might matter for decades.
Creative production under constraint.
A useful diary of craft, doubt, persistence, and shipping when the work is still fragile.
The vision behind personal computing.
A reminder that technology revolutions need patrons, labs, taste, and a narrative strong enough to organize decades of work.
Institutions
When conviction, capital, and urgency compress time.
A useful provocation for deciding which temporary excesses create real capacity and which only create noise.
R&D coordination under national urgency.
A bridge between science, policy, military urgency, and execution; especially relevant to healthcare and public-private operating models.
Frontier science before it can justify itself.
Useful when designing funding, review, and accountability systems that should not accidentally delete the non-obvious work.
Authority after information abundance.
Important for anyone communicating through distrust, platform dynamics, and public institutions that no longer control the information surface.
Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
See it on the shelfThe moral case for long-term growth.
A counterweight to short-horizon decision making: compounding, responsibility, freedom, and welfare over long timeframes.
Community
Community as shared ownership, not audience management.
Useful for founder-led communities, patient communities, alumni groups, and any movement that cannot be managed by broadcast alone.