This site does a terrible job of curating what is supposed to be a limited, selective list. I tried to access the first 60 entries. 11 of them were dead links. 4 were just links to advertisements for books (very much not a "memo, a deck, a whitepaper, a thread").
Billion Dollar PDFs
21–27 of 27 posts
Re: Billion Dollar PDFs
#22Should we then add a pdf for early pdf specs?
Re: Billion Dollar PDFs
#23Wild to see NFT nothingburgers next to "real ideas". Also very bizarre to see 2026 thinkpieces floating around in the same space as Gates' internet memos. Maybe these are more million dollar PDFs than billion dollar ones, if only because there's enough VC money churning around for "friends" to give any idea by people in a certain segment a minimum of funding no matter how bad it is.
That NFT entry leads to a 404, and even if you Google the one quote they provide from it ("You do not understand NFTs yet, but you will"), the only reference to it is the "Billion Dollar PDFs" site.
Re: Billion Dollar PDFs
#24*according to techbros
god i hate this so much
Re: Billion Dollar PDFs
#25Wild to see NFT nothingburgers next to "real ideas". Also very bizarre to see 2026 thinkpieces floating around in the same space as Gates' internet memos. Maybe these are more million dollar PDFs than billion dollar ones, if only because there's enough VC money churning around for "friends" to give any idea by people in a certain segment a minimum of funding no matter how bad it is.
That NFT entry leads to a 404, and even if you Google the one quote they provide from it ("You do not understand NFTs yet, but you will"), the only reference to it is the "Billion Dollar PDFs" site.
There's other web3 nonsense sprinkled about too. I agree with sibling's view on this (provincial SV mindset).
Re: Billion Dollar PDFs
#26Move billions of dollars != help society in any meaningful way. In fact many of the cited papers have been considered extremely harmful to society.
You're introducing a moral claim that this site does not make.
Absence of such a claim is a commentary on its own, intended or not. Economic activity is almost always presented as a positive thing. It’s said to create jobs, generate wealth, increase production, etc. And here most of the things on the list moved massive amounts of capital without producing any of the positive effects. We get an odd WWW proposal that did actually produce those effects, but for each of those we also get a dozen of blockchain links. I’d say same goes for AI. While it has more utility than blockchain ever did it’s hard to say it was net positive overall to date.
Re: Billion Dollar PDFs
#27Given that the stock market completely crashed upon the release of DeepSeek-R1 it's fair to say that it was a negative billion dollar PDF.