Business lessons from successful entrepreneurs.

Across the archive, five lessons recur regardless of era:

• Distribution beats product. Rockefeller controlled rebates; Walton controlled stores; Bezos controlled the customer.
• Compound the boring stuff. Munger, Buffett, Soichiro Honda — all obsessed with reinvestment and small operational gains.
• Long time horizons. Bezos's "seven-year bets," Watson Jr.'s IBM transformation, Inamori's amoeba management.
• Hire and fire on values, not résumés. Jobs's "A-players hire A-players"; Welch's vitality curve; Ohno's gemba walks.
• Survive long enough to get lucky. Drawdowns, recessions, scandals — most great companies are built by founders who refused to die.

Each titan profile pulls from authoritative biographies, primary interviews, shareholder letters, and on-record podcasts. We avoid hagiography and call out when a lesson only worked in a specific context (e.g., GE's portfolio model in the 1990s does not translate to 2025 capital markets).

A lesson is an observation ("ship before you're ready"). A framework is a repeatable process ("Amazon working backwards memo"). A mental model is a portable concept that explains many situations ("scale economies shared," "inversion").

Use lessons for inspiration, frameworks for execution, and mental models for decision-making under uncertainty.

Mid-stage founders looking for prior art, operators preparing for a new role, and investors trying to underwrite management quality. The archive is biased toward people who actually built and held something, not commentators.