Top all-time · #15806
Kevin Gee
Personal blog · aletteraday.substack.combusinessstartups
Kevin Gee writes A Letter a Day, a personal blog at aletteraday.substack.com about business and startups. Since 2020, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Kevin Gee's series posts one historical letter or interview a week, such as Paul Graham on the Morris worm and Palantir's early history. HN readers most often link his post of David Packard's 1960 letter on company purpose and culture.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Letters from Investors, Founders, and Operators.
What Hacker News says?
PG spoke about the worm a bit in an interview here: https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-85-paul-graham-and... Some quotes from that: > The worm, no one would have ever known that the worm existed, except there was a bug in it. That was the problem. The worm itself was absolutely harmless. But there was a bug in the code that controlled the number of copies that would spread to a given computer. And so the comp…
Comment linking /p/letter-85-paul-graham-and-jessica
on “This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm”Submitted Letter #96: Larry Page and Sergey Brin (2004) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Can anyone yay or nay me here - is this what they do? A summary/history: https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letters-2930-palantir http://web.archive.org/web/20190724214959/http://www.socialc... Joe Lonsdale, cofounder of Palantir, on what they built: https://www.quora.com/Did-Palantirs-founders-consider-the-et... Why did Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale found Palantir? https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Peter-Thiel-and-Joe…
Comment linking /p/letters-2930-palantir
on “Leaked S-1 screenshots show Palantir losing $579M in 2019”Submitted XPO Logistics CEO’s pre-merger letter ($72M –> $16.8B) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis seems like a good time to remind everyone of a letter by David Packard, to his employees. There is more morality, common sense and insightful business advice here than in any 1000 business titles you would care to name. https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-107-david-packard-... I think that OPs essay identifies that something bad happened at HP but completely misses what it was. Look at this quote: Around…
Comment linking /p/letter-107-david-packard-1960
on “Atlas Shrugged (2024)”This ( https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-107-david-packard-... ) is one of the most remarkable things I've read about business, and should resonate with many HN readers. It is from 1960, and explains Packards view of what companies and engineers should aim to do. It is so obvious, so novel and refreshing to read, and so completely at odds with how most companies seem to be run, (Boeing being a prime example).
Comment linking /p/letter-107-david-packard-1960
on “David Packard's Strategies–How to Build a Culture of Innovation”It is time, once again, to remind people of this fantastically insightful 1960 letter from David Packard, one of the founders of HP. https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-107-david-packard-... In this letter, he states, concisely, and simply, the purpose of a company and its employees. The contrast between what he describes, and what happened at HP (many years later), Boeing, GM, Microsoft, Google, and many othe…
Comment linking /p/letter-107-david-packard-1960
on “A culture fail ruined Boeing”
