Billion Dollar PDFs
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.
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.
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
A decentralized, trustless electronic cash system using proof-of-work to solve double-spending without intermediaries.
Attention Is All You Need
The Transformer architecture, based solely on attention, outperforms recurrence/convolution for sequence modeling.
Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead
AGI by ~2027 and superintelligence shortly after will trigger a trillion-dollar compute buildout and a US-China race.
The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities
An option can be priced by constructing a continuously rebalanced hedge, yielding a closed-form value independent of the investor's risk preferences.
Why Software Is Eating the World
Every company is becoming a software company; software firms will disrupt incumbents across every industry.
The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me)
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.
Ethereum Whitepaper: A Next-Generation Smart Contract Platform
A Turing-complete blockchain enabling arbitrary smart contracts and decentralized applications.
The Internet Tidal Wave
The Internet is the single most important development since the IBM PC; Microsoft must reorient every product around it or be swept aside.
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Ranking web pages by the link structure of the web itself (PageRank) produces dramatically better search than keyword matching.
RIP Good Times
The 2008 crash is structural, not cyclical; cut burn, extend runway, get to cash-flow positive.
The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville
The concentrated success of value investors from a shared intellectual 'village' refutes efficient markets.
ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (AlexNet)
Deep CNNs trained on GPUs shatter the ImageNet benchmark, igniting the modern deep-learning era.