This is a developmental source apparatus, not the final citation system. It identifies the principal primary or first-party sources behind the named cases and marks claims that should be rechecked before publication. Company sources are useful for dates, programme descriptions and stated results; they should not be treated as independent assessments of company quality.
Chapter 1 What Is the Price of a Thing
Zepto. Y Combinator company profile and founder interview, used for the company's quick-commerce model and early operating account.
Source: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/zepto
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKZCU0ynEbs
Chapter 2 The Two Frontiers
Zepto and compression. The chapter's interpretation—that Zepto compresses an inventory, fulfilment and routing system into a request—is the author's analytical framing. The source material establishes the company and founder account; detailed unit economics should be sourced separately before publication.
Chapter 3 Goliath Is an Architecture
The five-layer incumbent architecture is the author's framework. The academic backbone should include complementary-assets theory, technology adoption and organisational buying. The current research ledger contains provisional references; a final edition should use a consistent endnote format.
Chapter 4 What the Power Is For
OpenAI. First-party material on organisational purpose, structure and broad benefit. Product-capability examples in the chapter are illustrative and should not be read as measured productivity claims.
Source: https://openai.com/index/built-to-benefit-everyone-our-plan/
Source: https://openai.com/our-structure/
TSMC. TSMC's 2001 annual report describes the dedicated-foundry model, its non-compete position relative to customers and the growth of fabless companies. TSMC's foundry explainer describes the model as lowering the threshold to create an IC design company.
Source: https://investor.tsmc.com/static/annualReports/2001/ar2001.pdf
Source: https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry
NASA COTS. NASA's programme history documents the use of funded Space Act Agreements, milestone-based progress and the cargo-demonstration missions.
Source: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/sp-2014-617.pdf
Steve Jobs and the bicycle. The Steve Jobs Archive and Library of Congress materials preserve Jobs's description of the computer as an amplifier of human capability.
Source: https://stevejobsarchive.com/
Macintosh startup time. Andy Hertzfeld's firsthand account, “Saving Lives.”
Source: https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html
Apple retail and customer experience. Apple retail announcement and Jobs's 1997 developer-conference answer on beginning with the customer experience.
Source: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2001/05/15Apple-to-Open-25-Retail-Stores-in-2001/
Source: https://sebastiaanvanderlans.com/steve-jobs-wwdc-1997/
Airbnb. Brian Chesky's account of going to hosts, improving photographs and working backwards from an extreme “eleven-star” experience.
Source: https://mastersofscale.com/brian-chesky/
Pixar Braintrust. Ed Catmull's account of candid peer feedback and creative ownership.
Source: https://hbr.org/2008/09/how-pixar-fosters-collective-creativity
Chapter 5 The Long Game
Katalin Karikó and mRNA. Nobel Prize interview and 2023 Nobel Prize press release. The chapter deliberately avoids presenting mRNA as one person's work.
Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2023/kariko/podcast/
Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2023/press-release/
Repeated games. The Veritasium video supplied by the author is used as an accessible introduction to iterated cooperation. Martin Nowak provides a research overview of mechanisms supporting cooperation.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3279745/
Long-term games and specific knowledge. Naval Ravikant's public writing.
Source: https://nav.al/specific-knowledge
Toyota and andon. Toyota's official history of the Toyota Production System.
Challenger. Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, especially the discussion of the launch decision.
Source: https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v1ch5.htm
Taleb, convexity and ruin. Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Constantine Sandis, “The Skin In The Game Heuristic for Protection Against Tail Events,” and Taleb's public technical writing on ruin.
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0958
Chapter 7 The Difficult Middle
The Acceptance Ladder is the author's synthesis. It should be compared with domain-specific readiness, qualification and regulatory systems rather than treated as a substitute for them.
Chapter 9 The Product That Builds the Next Product
Apple's product sequence. Apple product announcements and archival materials establish the iPod, iTunes and iPhone sequence. The claim that earlier products left organisational capability behind is an analytical inference from the integrated systems the company built; it is not a claim that the iPhone was an inevitable result of the iPod.
Source: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2001/10/23Apple-Presents-iPod/
Source: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/01/09Apple-Reinvents-the-Phone-with-iPhone/
NVIDIA CUDA. NVIDIA's programming guide states that CUDA was introduced in 2006 to make GPU throughput available to general computational workloads. NVIDIA's ecosystem material documents the surrounding tools and libraries. Adoption figures are first-party and should be independently checked if retained in the final manuscript.
Source: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-programming-guide/01-introduction/introduction.html
Source: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-zone
Chapter 12 The Receipts
NASA COTS and SpaceX. NASA's programme history records SpaceX Dragon's May 2012 cargo demonstration to the International Space Station. NASA's October 2012 release describes the first contracted cargo-resupply mission.
Source: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/sp-2014-617.pdf
ASML EUV. ASML's history and 2019 annual report place EUV in high-volume manufacturing and document the hundredth-system milestone at the beginning of 2020. These are company sources; a final edition should add customer and semiconductor-industry corroboration.
Source: https://www.asml.com/en/company/stories/2022/making-euv-lab-to-fab
Source: https://www.asml.com/en/investors/annual-report/2019/highlights
Source: https://www.asml.com/en/company/about-asml/history
NVIDIA CUDA. Same sources as Chapter 9.
mRNA, COVID-19 and oncology. The Nobel Prize materials provide a concise account of the scientific foundation. The Merck and Moderna release dated 19 August 2026 reports that the Phase 3 INTerpath-001 trial met its recurrence-free-survival and distant-metastasis-free-survival endpoints. At the date of this manuscript revision, intismeran autogene remained investigational; the companies said they planned to present the data and engage regulators.
Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2023/press-release/
Publication checks still required
1. Replace provisional web links with a consistent endnote and bibliography style.
2. Add independent sources for company performance and disputed causal claims.
3. Date every market-size, adoption and programme-status claim.
4. Separate company announcements from customer acceptance and independently verified results.
5. Recheck every current clinical, regulatory and programme claim immediately before publication.