About Long Arc Research

What We Do

Long Arc Research produces deep, primary-source intelligence on the founders and operators who built the modern world. We go to the original documents—letters, memos, court records, autobiographies, biographies, interviews—and synthesize them into research you can actually use.

The result isn’t hagiography or listicles. It’s rigorous analysis of how people thought under pressure, made decisions with incomplete information, and built institutions that outlasted them.

Three Platforms

Legends

In-depth dossiers on history’s most consequential founders and business leaders. Each profile is built from primary sources and organized into volumes covering different periods and themes. Inside you’ll find narrative analysis, contextual marginalia, actionable playbooks, and the mental models that drove each leader’s decisions.

Library

The raw source material behind every dossier—the books, interviews, letters, and documents we synthesize into Legends profiles. Browse the shelves, see what informed each volume, and go deeper on the sources that interest you.

Latticework

A growing collection of mental models and decision frameworks drawn from every discipline—biology, physics, economics, psychology, military strategy, and more. These are the thinking tools extracted from the legends’ stories and organized so you can apply them to your own challenges.

Why “Long Arc”?

The most valuable patterns in business, strategy, and leadership only reveal themselves across the long arc of history—not in quarterly earnings or trending takes.

We named this project after our method: patient, primary-source research that studies how people actually thought and operated over decades, not how they’re remembered in two-paragraph summaries. The intelligence that comes from this kind of work compounds over time. That’s the long arc.

How We Work

• Primary sources first. We go to the original documents, letters, and accounts rather than recycling secondhand interpretations.
• Depth over breadth. Better to understand one leader deeply than to skim fifty superficially.
• Nuance over narrative. Real people made complex decisions in constrained contexts. We don’t sanitize or simplify.
• Patterns over anecdotes. The specific tactics change, but the underlying principles endure. We extract those principles.

Who It’s For

Founders navigating strategic decisions. Investors building pattern recognition. Students of business history who want more than case study summaries. Anyone who believes that understanding how people thought matters as much as knowing what they did.