Pointers
Here are some pointers to books, articles, podcasts and other resources that I found interesting. When they are in French, a (FR) is added before the title.
Books
Zero to One, Peter Thiel
Don’t chase competition by imitating others, establish monopolies by inventing new products.
Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson
Biography of Steve Jobs, written by Walter Isaacson.
Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson
Biography of Elon Musk, written by Walter Isaacson. Includes the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk.
Learnt that creating urgency is key to getting things done. Always question everything (First principles thinking).
Losing My Virginity, Richard Branson
Autobiography of Richard Branson, written by himself.
Podcasts
Lightcone Podcast: Anthropic Co-founder: Building Claude Code, Lessons From GPT-3 & LLM System Design
What: Tom Brown co-founded Anthropic after helping build GPT-3 at OpenAI. He previously started a YC backed startup.
Why: Understand the move from computer science to machine learning. Discover the early days of OpenAI and then Anthropic.
Talk on Autonomous Driving by Peter Gao, computer vision lead @ Cruise at Stanford
Technical and practical talk on what it is like to build autonomous driving cars and operate them in San Francisco.
(FR) Silicon Carne: Karim Bousta (ex VP Tesla)
What: Karim Bousta is an ex VP Tesla, where he worked closely with Elon Musk. He later became head of operations at Lyft and then worked with Masayoshi Son at Softbank.
Why: Understand the hardcore culture Elon Musk managed to create at Tesla through daily anecdotes. Understand why Lyft failed because of its culture.
Let’s build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out, Andrej Karpathy
Excellent exercise. To increase difficulty, you can pause the video and write the code of the next step.