Top articles of the week | March 28

March 28, 2020

Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!

How Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft Became $1 Trillion Companies Eric Feng (reading time: 11 minutes)

Excluding the fast that this is evidently a pre-Covid-19 article, it sheds some light on how the big tech have reduced their internal transaction costs.

Many believe that big tech will emerge stronger in the post-pandemic era and there is mountain evidence that this is indeed the case.

Technological Revolutions and the Governance Gap Tim Kastelle (reading time: 7 minutes)

Organizational change can’t keep pace with technological change. The rate of technological change thus creates a governance gap. This is great read on how business model innovation can help close this gap.

Personal Renewal John Gardner, Farnam Street Blog (reading time: 20 minutes)

“You never conquer the mountain, You only conquer yourself.”

This is a deeply philosophical post that I really enjoyed. Given our confinement, it gave me time to think about the nature of learning & personal development. John Gardner presented this to a group of McKinsey executives in 1990 and it is still as relevant as ever. You have to keep on learning. There are many pieces of wisdom in this article #highlyrecommend.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan Is Giving K-12 Schools His Videoconferencing Tools For Free Forbes (reading time: 8 minutes)

If you hadn’t hear Zoom before the crisis, chances are that you can’t stop hearing about them lately. The secret to their success in a crowded space? Their product & technology are simply better. It is one of the rare public stocks that has soared during this crisis. This post covers Zoom’s CEO and founder Eric Yan and how he built an amazing company.

Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus Fortune (reading time: 15 minutes)

An important article to finish on. Yuval Hariri has become Silicon Valley’s favorite guru but he also shares some words of wisdom in regards to the current crisis. This free article in Fortune paints the picture of how humankind can face this crisis together. He posits that we need to avoid a surveillance state, we need to focus on human values.

“Instead of building a surveillance regime, it is not too late to rebuild people’s trust in science, in public authorities and in the media.”