Here’s every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.
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We’re Living in the Golden Age of the Corporate Takedown
Why do we love reading about CEOs behaving badly? Perhaps it’s because we identify with their exhausted workers.
A Brief History of AOL
A short reading list on the many lives of AOL, which will be acquired by Verizon for $4.4 billion. Fifteen years ago, AOL acquired Time Warner for $165 billion.
A Brief History of AOL
A short reading list on the many lives of AOL, which will be acquired by Verizon for $4.4 billion. Fifteen years ago, AOL acquired Time Warner for $165 billion.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Our favorite stories of the week, featuring, The New Yorker, California Sunday, New York Times Magazine, MIT Technology Review, and Next City.
Before Google: Larry Page’s Early Ideas for Changing the World
Even in Google’s earliest days, Page had always wanted the company to do more than just basic Web search. Since he was a kid, he’d been dreaming up world-changing schemes. As an undergrad at the University of Michigan, he’d proposed that the school replace its bus system with something he called a PRT, or personal […]
Taking Care of Business: A Reading List
Hackers! Gen Y CEOs! Multibillion dollar success stories! International expansion! Top-secret projects! Cute clothes! Hamburgers! Capitalism is so exciting, and so are these longreads about popular U.S. companies. 1. “In-N-Out’s Burger Queen.” (Patrick J. Kiger, Orange Coast, Jan. 2014) 31-year-old Lynsi Snyder presides over In-N-Out’s $1.1 billion industry, founded by her grandparents in the 1940s. […]
Taking Care of Business: A Reading List
Hackers! Gen Y CEOs! Multibillion dollar success stories! International expansion! Top-secret projects! Cute clothes! Hamburgers! Capitalism is so exciting, and so are these longreads about popular U.S. companies. 1. “In-N-Out’s Burger Queen.” (Patrick J. Kiger, Orange Coast, Jan. 2014) 31-year-old Lynsi Snyder presides over In-N-Out’s $1.1 billion industry, founded by her grandparents in the 1940s. […]
Can a Company Keep Innovating After the Founder Is Gone?
Marc Andreessen is obsessed with the idea that tech companies need to focus on innovation above all else. He believes that the “output” of technology companies isn’t products — at least not the way the “output” of Ford is cars. The “output” of tech companies, he says, is innovation. Andreessen’s second theory of innovation is […]
The Story of Tim Armstrong, Patch and AOL
Another exhaustive biography from Nicholas Carlson and Business Insider, this time on Tim Armstrong, his hyperlocal startup Patch and his leadership at AOL: “He’s a very loyal guy. He made a commitment to different parts of that matrix organization, and damn it, he’s not going to let them down. And even though we brought in […]

