Conor Doran

Tech Wisdom

I used to be uninterested in my engineering degree. That changed when I started to read up on the world outside of my university courses. I had no idea how much you could create and innovate on your own. I recommend these sources to people who desire to go beyond a traditional education, and see the bigger picture of technology and innovation.

Read:

  • Zero to One - Peter Thiel
  • Poor Charlie's Almanack - Charlie Munger
  • Essays - Paul Graham
  • Elon Musk - Walter Isaacson
  • The Sovereign Individual - Rees-Mogg/Davidson
  • The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch
  • The Techno-Optimist Manifesto - Marc Andreessen
  • The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Study People:

  • Elon Musk
  • Peter Thiel
  • Balaji Srinivasan
  • Jeff Bezos
  • Palmer Luckey
  • Marc Andreessen
  • Alex Karp
  • Pavel Durov
  • Brett Adcock

Study Frontier Technology:

  • Fintech (Polymarket, Stripe, Ramp, Coinbase)
  • Thermodynamic Compute (Extropic & Normal)
  • Quantum Compute (D-Wave, IBM, Google)
  • Synthetic Biology and Genomics Software (LatchBio)
  • Scalable Blockchain (Ethereum & Solana)
  • Startup Societies (Prospera, Network School)
  • Embodied AI (Figure, Tesla Optimus, Google Deepmind Gemini ER)
  • Space Infrastructure (SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, Starlink)
  • BCIs (Neuralink)

Listen:

  • Founders (James Dyson, Wright Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Jim Simons, Elon Musk, Henry Ford, Larry Ellison, Paul Graham, George Lucas, David Ogilvy, Edwin Land, Marc Andreessen, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison)
  • Lex Fridman Interviews (Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, DJ Seo)

Notes:

  • Innovators are all autodidacts even if they went to school.
  • All multidisciplinary, not just tech nerds, they know history, philosophy, economics, etc.
  • Dialectic of reasoning “bottom-up” from first principles and reasoning “top-down” from ambitious ideas.
  • Mission driven. Capital is a tool. Business is the means by which they can make their ideas reality.
  • Innovators are applied philosophers. Their endeavors correspond with their ideologies. (Telegram → privacy of speech, SpaceX → multiplanetary species)
  • Build things money cannot buy. (Elon can't buy a trip to Mars)