Mental models database

100 People Love

Paul Graham

Build something 100 people love rather than something 1 million people kind of like. Intensity of need beats breadth of appeal.

7 Powers (Hamilton Helmer)

Hamilton Helmer

The seven — and only seven — sources of durable competitive advantage: Scale Economies, Network Economies, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resource, and Process Power.

BATNA

Roger Fisher / William Ury

Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement — your power in any negotiation comes not from persuasion, but from the strength of your walk-away option.

Competition is for Losers

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel's thesis: every moment spent competing is a moment not spent building something unique. The goal is to escape competition entirely.

Disagree and Commit

Once a decision is made after genuine debate, everyone — including dissenters — commits fully to execution. Solves the paralysis of consensus-seeking.

Disruptive Innovation

Clayton Christensen

Inferior products in niche markets that improve until they overtake incumbents.

Distribution

How products reach customers matters more than the product itself.

Lollapalooza Effects

Charlie Munger

When multiple cognitive biases or forces act in the same direction simultaneously, the combined effect isn't additive — it's multiplicative. Recognising these confluences is essential for predicting extreme outcomes.

Do Things That Don't Scale

Paul Graham

The best startups are built through unscalable, hands-on work first.

Extreme Ownership

Jocko Willink

Leaders own everything in their world — no excuses, no blaming subordinates.

Forcing Function

Constraints deliberately introduced to compel desired behaviour.

Founder-Market Fit

Chris Dixon

The founder's unique fit to the problem determines startup success more than any other factor.

Growth vs Fixed Mindset

Carol Dweck / Claudia Mueller

Abilities develop through effort and learning, not innate talent alone.

Availability Heuristic

Kahneman & Tversky

We judge the likelihood of events based on how easily examples come to mind, not on actual frequency. Dramatic, recent, or emotionally vivid events get massively overweighted.

Hook Model

Nir Eyal

The four-phase cycle that builds habitual product usage.

Innovator's Dilemma

Clayton Christensen

Good management is the reason great companies fail when disruption arrives.

Iteration Velocity

John Boyd

The team that learns fastest wins — speed of iteration is the ultimate advantage.

Jobs to Be Done

Clayton Christensen

People hire products to accomplish specific functional, emotional, and social jobs.

Luck Surface Area

Jason Roberts / Seneca / Louis Pasteur / Naval Ravikant

Increase exposure to serendipity by doing more and telling more people.

MVP

Frank Robinson / Steve Blank / Eric Ries

The smallest thing that tests your riskiest assumption.

Moats

Warren Buffett / Hamilton Helmer

Durable competitive advantages that protect long-term profitability from competitive erosion.

Asymmetric Payoffs

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Seek situations where the upside is uncapped and the downside is limited. The expected value of a decision depends not just on probability but on the magnitude of outcomes in each direction.

Network Effects

Robert Metcalfe

Value increases with each additional user, creating exponential competitive advantage.

Platform Business Model

Sangeet Paul Choudary / Geoffrey Parker / Marshall Van Alstyne

Connect distinct user groups and create value through network orchestration.

Porter's 5 Forces

Michael Porter

Some industries print money. Others burn it. The difference is rarely about the talent inside the companies or the quality of their products. It is about the structure of the...

Product/Market Fit

Andy Rachleff / Marc Andreessen

When customers buy faster than you can build — the only thing that matters.

Red Queen Effect

Leigh Van Valen

You have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. In competitive environments, standing still means falling behind because everyone else is improving.

Asymmetric Risk

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Not all risks are equal. Some decisions carry small downside with enormous upside; others carry catastrophic downside with modest upside. The shape of the risk matters more than its probability.

Pygmalion Effect

Robert Rosenthal / Lenore Jacobson

High expectations create high performance through self-fulfilling prophecy.

Positioning

Michael Porter / Al Ries & Jack Trout

Where you compete matters more than how hard you compete. Choosing the right strategic position — the intersection of your strengths, customer needs, and competitive gaps — determines most of the outcome.

Radical Candor

Kim Scott / Sheryl Sandberg

Care personally and challenge directly — feedback that builds trust and drives improvement.

Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions

Jeff Bezos

One-way doors demand deliberation. Two-way doors demand speed.

Choosing Important Problems

Richard Hamming

The most important decision in any career or research agenda is which problems to work on. Working hard on the wrong problem is worse than working moderately on the right one.

Simplify

Simplification is the ultimate sophistication and competitive advantage.

Start With Why

Simon Sinek

Communicate purpose before product — people buy why you do it, not what you do.

Strategy vs Tactics

Roger Martin

Strategy decides where to play. Tactics decide how to execute.

Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Michael Porter

Advantages that persist because competitors cannot easily replicate them.

Switching Costs

The higher the cost of leaving, the stronger the moat.

Two Pizza Rule

Jeff Bezos / Frederick Brooks

Small autonomous teams outperform large ones — keep teams feedable by two pizzas.

Viral Marketing

Sabeer Bhatia / Jack Smith

When each user brings more than one new user, growth becomes exponential.

Zero to One

Peter Thiel

Create something new rather than copying what exists — aim for monopoly, not competition.

Abstraction

Edsger Dijkstra

Hide complexity behind simpler interfaces to reason at higher levels.

Explore-exploit Tradeoff

Balance gathering new information against leveraging what you already know.

Metcalfe's Law

Robert Metcalfe / George Gilder

Network value grows proportionally to the square of connected users.

Moore's Law

Gordon Moore / Carver Mead

Transistor counts double every two years, driving exponential computing gains.

Mythical Man Month

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Adding people to a late project makes it later.

Technical Debt

Ward Cunningham

Expedient decisions create compounding costs that must be repaid.

Barriers to Entry

Joe Bain / Michael Porter

Structural obstacles preventing new competitors from entering a market.