Billion Dollar PDFs<br>A directory · 2026<br>Billion Dollar PDFs<br>A Billion Dollar PDF is a document — a memo, a deck, a whitepaper, a thread — that crystallized a narrative at exactly the right moment and moved billions of dollars of capital around the field.<br>The term is Jeremy Giffon’s. This is an open index of the ones people keep citing — browse it below, expand any entry for the story, and follow the link to read the original.
All receiptsStrictCulturalAll erasPre-20002000–20092010–20192020–nowAll categoriesVC Doctrine (24)Worldview (19)Technical Paper (16)Short / Activist (13)Macro Memo (11)Sector Report (9)Pitch Deck (9)Crypto (8)AI Essay (6)Tweetstorm (2)All mediumsBookDeckEssayEssay SeriesLetterManifestoMemoOp-EdPaperPresentationReportResearchTweetstormWebpageWhitepaperFeaturedNewestOldestA–ZGrid viewList view
117 documents
Whitepaper<br>Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System<br>A decentralized, trustless electronic cash system using proof-of-work to solve double-spending without intermediaries.
Satoshi Nakamoto2008
Technical Paper0expand +
Paper<br>Attention Is All You Need<br>The Transformer architecture, based solely on attention, outperforms recurrence/convolution for sequence modeling.
Vaswani et al. (Google)2017
Technical Paper0expand +
Essay<br>Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead<br>AGI by ~2027 and superintelligence shortly after will trigger a trillion-dollar compute buildout and a US-China race.
Leopold Aschenbrenner2024
AI Essay0expand +
Paper<br>The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities<br>An option can be priced by constructing a continuously rebalanced hedge, yielding a closed-form value independent of the investor's risk preferences.
Fischer Black, Myron Scholes1973
Technical Paper0expand +
Essay<br>Why Software Is Eating the World<br>Every company is becoming a software company; software firms will disrupt incumbents across every industry.
Marc Andreessen2011
VC Doctrine0expand +
Essay<br>The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me)<br>Bootstrap an EV company from the top down: build an expensive low-volume sports car, use the proceeds to fund progressively cheaper, higher-volume models, and drive the transition to sustainable energy.
Elon Musk2006
Worldview0expand +
Whitepaper<br>Ethereum Whitepaper: A Next-Generation Smart Contract Platform<br>A Turing-complete blockchain enabling arbitrary smart contracts and decentralized applications.
Vitalik Buterin2013
Technical Paper0expand +
Memo<br>The Internet Tidal Wave<br>The Internet is the single most important development since the IBM PC; Microsoft must reorient every product around it or be swept aside.
Bill Gates1995
Worldview0expand +
Paper<br>The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine<br>Ranking web pages by the link structure of the web itself (PageRank) produces dramatically better search than keyword matching.
Sergey Brin, Lawrence Page1998
Technical Paper0expand +
Deck<br>RIP Good Times<br>The 2008 crash is structural, not cyclical; cut burn, extend runway, get to cash-flow positive.
Sequoia Capital2008
VC Doctrine0expand +
Essay<br>The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville<br>The concentrated success of value investors from a shared intellectual 'village' refutes efficient markets.
Warren Buffett1984
Macro Memo0expand +
Paper<br>ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (AlexNet)<br>Deep CNNs trained on GPUs shatter the ImageNet benchmark, igniting the modern deep-learning era.
Krizhevsky, Sutskever, Hinton2012
Technical Paper0expand +
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