Marc Andreessen

Standalone edition of the 2023 a16z essay; Andreessen has written no conventional book

A novel of wartime codebreakers and their descendants building a data haven.

A novel of a feudal space empire fighting over a desert planet and its spice.

A novel: a mathematician foresees an empire's fall and plans to shorten the dark age.

Retirees join Earth's colonial army in an interstellar war against advanced species.

In 2380, a wormhole-linked commonwealth of 600 worlds sees a distant star vanish.

Travellers from 800 years ahead come through a gate to take an alien home.

A poet cured of Alzheimer's wakes in 2025 San Diego to a world of smart lenses.

Ancient machines built to suppress intelligent life awaken after a fatal discovery.

A novel of a hacker in a corporate-run America and its virtual world, the Metaverse.

Why liberal democracy may be the end state of political change, and how people react.

An inquiry into the nature of freedom and the uses of power.

Elite theory: who actually rules, and why stated aims mislead

The case for anarcho-capitalism, a society run on markets without a state.

Why managers and technocrats would replace capitalists as society's ruling class.

Voters hold systematic biases about economics, so democracies choose bad policies.

Argument that online communities can become sovereign; crypto-native politics

1997 forecast of digital money weakening the nation state

How the NeXT and Pixar years changed Steve Jobs into the leader who rebuilt Apple.

A comedian's eighteen years building a stand-up act, and why he quit it.

A British volunteer's account of fighting for Franco's Nationalists in Spain.

Dell's founder on the buyout, the Icahn fight and VMware

Joseph Kennedy's contested years as US ambassador to Britain on the eve of war.

How an unelected official amassed power and used it to rebuild New York.

Walt Disney's life from Missouri to Mickey Mouse, the 1941 strike and Disneyland.

Building Creative Artists Agency into Hollywood's top agency, then failing at Disney.

Economic freedom as a condition of political freedom, applied to policy questions.

Hazlitt's 1946 distillation of Bastiat's 'broken window' insight: good economic reasoning requires seeing both what is visible and what is made invisible by a policy. A short book that teaches a single analytical habit, and that habit is genuinely useful regardless of your politics.

The case for free markets and limited government, policy area by policy area.

Supply-side case for entrepreneurs as the actual source of growth

The poor hold assets but lack the property records that turn them into capital.

Sector-level explanation of why productivity differs so much between countries

Prosperity grows as trade and specialisation let ideas meet and combine.

How the division of labour and free markets make a nation rich.

How dense cities make people more productive, inventive and green.

Diamond's central question — why did some civilizations come to dominate others over 10,000 years? — is precisely the kind of question that requires long-term thinking to even ask. The answer, rooted in geography and biology rather than culture or intelligence, is a model for how to reason about slow causes and fast effects.

How shared fictions such as money, nations and gods let humans cooperate at scale.

Twelve rules for living, each drawn from clinical practice, biology and myth.

Modern Stoicism; desire management and negative visualisation

Incerto volume 4

How present certainties will look to the future; outside view applied

Montaigne's life and essays, read as answers to the question of how to live.

Incerto volume 5

Freud, Marx and Lévi-Strauss as cases of the Jewish struggle with Gentile civility.

Preference falsification: why people hide their views and how that hides change.

Two satirical essays on class, status and race in America around 1970.

Innovation as a game played by the state, capital markets and competition.

Customer development: how startups find customers before building the full product.

Subtitled 'Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers'

Build, measure, learn: test what customers want with small experiments.

Why startups should build something new and own a small market before growing.

How the Yale endowment invests, and how institutions can build portfolios like it.

Speeches making the case for a latticework of mental models from many fields.

Subtitled A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment.

Ackman against Icahn over Herbalife; the MLM model argued in public.

Thomas Edison's life, told in reverse chronological order.

J.C.R. Licklider's vision of computers that serve individuals, and how it came true.

Edison as the first manufactured celebrity.

The secretly funded litigation that destroyed Gawker.

Management as production: a manager's output is the output of the team they lead.

How to spot a strategic inflection point, when a tenfold force changes a business.

Why well-run firms lose to cheaper, worse products that enter at the market's bottom.

A 20-year test of 28,000 expert forecasts: foxes with many models beat hedgehogs.

Rare, unforeseen, high-impact events drive history, explained only after the fact.

Judge decisions by their reasoning, not their outcomes, and think in odds.

Meadows wrote this before systems thinking became a popular phrase, and it remains the clearest account of why short-term interventions in complex systems so often backfire. The chapter on leverage points is the conceptual core of what long-term thinking actually requires from decision-makers.

The case that disorder is often more efficient than imposed order

Alfred Adler's psychology taught through five nights of dialogue.

Why mass movements of every kind draw the same frustrated people and use one method.

Kahneman's synthesis of behavioral economics is the cognitive science underpinning every negotiation tactic. Anchoring, loss aversion, framing effects, and the planning fallacy — understanding why these biases operate, not just that they exist, makes you harder to exploit and more honest about your own irrationality.

How people learned to measure risk, from early probability to portfolio theory.

The Libor rigging scandal told through the traders who ran it

Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould and Morgan and the economy they built

Explains an action by tracing its causes back from neurons to hormones to evolution.

A neurologist on the varieties of luck in scientific discovery

How ancient DNA has rewritten the story of human prehistory and migration.

Computing as a run of collaborations, from Ada Lovelace and Babbage to Google.

Hayek's 1944 warning that central economic planning corrodes political freedom alongside economic efficiency. Written for a British Left audience, it argued that the path to socialism and the path to fascism share structural features. Its critics say it proves too much; its admirers say history vindicated it.

Evidence that rich economies now grow while using fewer physical resources.

Environmentalist case for nuclear power, dense cities and genetic engineering

From abused child and 300-pound exterminator to Navy SEAL, and how to get tough.

Navy SEAL leadership doctrine adapted to running teams and firms

Culture is how people behave when the leader is absent, and must be designed.

Marvel and DC's fifty-year rivalry: stolen ideas, poached staff, spies, price wars.

How Lyndon Johnson mastered the Senate's rules and became its majority leader.

Three generations of hackers, from MIT's AI Lab to the Homebrew club and game makers.

How extreme-sports athletes use flow states to push performance further.

How Rockefeller built Standard Oil, faced its breakup and gave his fortune away.