In December 1966, a shipment of wheat sat somewhere in the Atlantic, and an Indian official in Washington was waiting on a phone call to find out if it would be released. This wasn’t unusual. It happened most months that…
Sandeep Pai sells fire extinguishers for a living in Mumbai. In 2007, at the peak of a roaring bull market, he put a good part of his savings into a basket of mid-cap stocks. When the crash came the following…
Peter Lynch took over Fidelity’s Magellan Fund in 1977, when it was a small, obscure fund most people had never heard of. By the time he left in 1990, he’d turned it into the best performing mutual fund in the…
In October 2007, two friends stood outside a bookstore on Church Street in Bangalore, handing out bookmarks with a website address, hoping someone would go home, type it into a browser, and place an order. That tiny experiment became one…
In 1962, a small team led by Vikram Sarabhai set up shop in Thumba, a fishing village near Thiruvananthapuram, it sat almost exactly on the magnetic equator, ideal for the atmospheric research they wanted to do. There was no facility…
On the night of June 23rd, a 30-year-old in Seoul sat with his phone, watching a third of his savings disappear. He’d put his money into a product that promised to double whatever SK Hynix’s stock did that day, expecting…
Six years ago, I became a first-time founder. This year, I’ve become a first-time author. Around three years ago, I started writing about ESOPs online, mostly because I kept meeting accomplished people with meaningful equity and no real framework to…
In 1930, John D. Rockefeller broke ground on a 22-acre complex in the heart of Manhattan that would become one of the world’s most valuable pieces of real estate: 14 office towers, Radio City Music Hall, the NBC studios, and…
In the White Mountains of California, there is a bristlecone pine tree that has been alive for over 5000 years. It was a sapling when the pyramids were being built. It has survived ice ages, centuries of drought, and weather…
Walk through a colliery town in Yorkshire or South Wales in the 1850s and coal is everywhere, stacked at the pit-head, loaded onto barges, feeding the steam engines that had turned Britain into the workshop of the world. For most…