I am a big fan of good writing.
Easily, I am a big fan of companies with strong writing cultures. This writing can be either internal, where strategy is hashed out in long-form memos, or public engineering or strategy blogs. Think Uber, Cloudafare. You can find me diving deep on any given weekend. In most personal and professional environments, I try to create writing artifacts that can serve as a knowledge base, both for me and for the person who is going to succeed me. How else can one train an LLM on their notes, the way Andrej Karpathy suggested one do? (My personal approach to writing and editing is that of Henry James - keep editing and revamping material long after it’s published.)
Companies with a strong internal writing culture
- Stripe writing culture
- Amazon writing culture - Bezos shares his thoughts on writing memos
- Clipboard Health
- Cloudflare on writing for customers
Memos
I am a big sucker for a well-written memo, partially because they demand more from the writer. Here are some of my favourite memos
- Natural founder Kahlil’s memo on agentic payments
- Sample memos compiled by Sriram Krishnan, who also happens to love them
VCs I like to follow
- Eugene Wei
- Jaya Gupta is an excellent writer, especially in grasping developments in AI and the impact they would have
- Emergence Capital’s blog
- Bill Gurley - though he is not the most prolific of writers depsite his wealth of experience
- Zavain Dar @ Dimension, with Substack
Other people whose writing/thinking I personally admire
- Gaby Goldberg
- Taylor Lorenz - an internet archivist/cultural anthropologist of sorts
- Anson Yu
People writing about AI and agents
- New ontologies by Nix