Read Rare presents itself as a digital shelf of the rarest internal memos, leaked handbooks, and forgotten books from technology leaders, offering free access to read or borrow each item. The site invites visitors to “pick one off the shelf” and describes its collection as comprising 54 documents and books from the people who built companies such as Apple, Intel, Google, Netflix, and Facebook. All items are presented as freely accessible without cost.
This image illustrates the site’s presentation as a digital shelf of rare internal memos and forgotten books, supporting the description in the opening paragraph.
The archive includes a wide range of highlights: the 1968 Intel Convertible Debentures Memo by Noyce, Moore and Rock; Warren Buffett’s 1972 Letter to See’s Candy outlining his early investment philosophy; Mike Markkula’s 1977 Apple Marketing Philosophy that emphasized empathy, focus, and impute; Roelof Botha’s 2005 YouTube Investment Memo from Sequoia Capital; Mark Zuckerberg’s 2012 Instagram Emails detailing the acquisition and his 2014 Thoughts on Messenger; Steve Jobs’s 2010 “Holy War with Google” email; Tom Wolfe’s 1983 Esquire piece “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce”; William Shockley’s 1949 Bell Labs paper “The Theory of p-n Junctions in Semiconductors”; and Tim Berners‑Lee’s 1989 CERN proposal “Information Management: A Proposal”. It also features books such as Facebook’s internal “Little Red Book” from 2012, Michael Moritz’s 2020 DTV, and James Wallace and Jim Erickson’s Hard Drive, a history of Microsoft’s early years.
According to the site’s introduction, many of these items were previously buried in court exhibits, dead links, and archive scans, making them hard to find. By gathering them onto one shelf, Read Rare aims to surface undervalued treasures that readers may have missed and to provide a single, accessible location for primary‑source insight into the decision‑making, culture, and early strategies that shaped major technology firms and investment approaches.