Griffin Cock Foster

Griffin Cock Foster

Co-founder of Nifty Gateway. Angel investor. Programmer.

About

I'm Griffin. I co-founded Nifty Gateway with my twin brother Duncan in 2018. Nifty Gateway was estimated to be valued at $1B in 2021 by Forbes. It went from $0 to $70M in annual revenue within two years of launching, did over $850M in total sales volume, and paid out $500M to artists. Nifty Gateway was acquired by Gemini in 2019.

I'm an angel investor and programmer based in New York. I'm happily married to my wife Josie, and we have a wonderful daughter, Florence. I spend most of my free time reading about history, business, and technology.

Press

Podcasts

Favorite Podcasts

Books

I'm an avid reader. Here's everything I've read since 2017.

2025

  1. The Japanese: A History in Twenty Lives
  2. Embracing Defeat
  3. The Rising Sun
  4. The Soul of a New Machine
  5. House of Huawei
  6. The Money Trap — Alok Sama
  7. Pyramid of Lies
  8. Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House
  9. TR: The Last Romantic
  10. Fatherland
  11. How the World Really Works — Vaclav Smil
  12. We Are the Nerds
  13. King Dollar
  14. Original Sin — Jake Tapper
  15. Gambling Man
  16. Apple in China
  17. The Optimist
  18. Dead Money — Jakob Kerr
  19. 2024
  20. The Man Who Would Be King
  21. Twelve Weeks to Twelve Hours a Night
  22. The Lost City of Z
  23. Bringing Up Bébé
  24. Disney
  25. Breakneck — Dan Wang
  26. King of Kings
  27. Our Dollar, Your Problem — Kenneth Rogoff
  28. 1776 — David McCullough
  29. 1929 — Andrew Ross Sorkin
  30. The Republic of Pirates
  31. Red Rising
  32. Blank Space
  33. Golden Son
  34. Morning Star

2024

  1. Blood and Oil
  2. Blood and Iron
  3. Romney: A Reckoning
  4. Extremely Hardcore
  5. Last Boat Out of Shanghai
  6. Walking with Destiny
  7. Troubled — Rob Henderson
  8. Empire of Pain
  9. Nuclear War: A Scenario
  10. The Key Man
  11. Children of Time
  12. The Anxious Generation — Jonathan Haidt
  13. The New Koreans — Michael Green
  14. Enemies and Neighbors — Ian Black
  15. Token Supremacy
  16. Dark Wire
  17. Unscripted
  18. The Demon of Unrest — Erik Larson
  19. Mercy of the Gods
  20. Teddy Roosevelt: The Last Romantic
  21. Play Nice
  22. Livesuit
  23. Reentry
  24. War — Bob Woodward
  25. The Nvidia Way
  26. The Traitor and the Spy

2023

  1. 7 Powers — Hamilton Helmer
  2. The Hardware Hacker
  3. Nemesis Games
  4. Chip War
  5. Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing
  6. Liftoff
  7. Babylon's Ashes
  8. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
  9. Theodore Rex
  10. Wool
  11. Outlive
  12. The Wager
  13. Dominion
  14. Colonel Roosevelt
  15. Persepolis Rising
  16. Tiamat's Wrath
  17. Going Infinite — Michael Lewis
  18. That Will Never Work — Marc Randolph
  19. The Guns of August
  20. Winner Sells All
  21. Play Nice But Win — Michael Dell
  22. The Grid
  23. Leviathan Falls
  24. The Medusa and the Snail — Lewis Thomas
  25. Same as Ever — Morgan Housel
  26. Captive Paradise
  27. Among the Bros
  28. More Money Than God
  29. The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory — Tim Alberta
  30. Empire of the Summer Moon
  31. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

2022

  1. The Lords of Creation — Frederick Lewis Allen
  2. April 1865
  3. Where Tomorrows Aren't Promised — Carmelo Anthony
  4. The Patriarch
  5. The Company
  6. Power Play
  7. The Power Law — Sebastian Mallaby
  8. King Leopold's Ghost
  9. The Absent Superpower — Zeihan
  10. Caliban's War
  11. Happy at Any Cost
  12. The Caesar's Palace Coup
  13. Too Big to Fail
  14. The Founders
  15. The Cryptopians
  16. Andrew Carnegie — David Nasaw
  17. Diary of a Very Bad Year
  18. Freezing Order — Bill Browder
  19. Abaddon's Gate
  20. Build — Tony Fadell
  21. When Genius Failed
  22. What It Takes — Steven Schwarzman
  23. The German Empire: A Short History
  24. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
  25. River of Doubt
  26. Burn Rate
  27. Liar's Poker
  28. Traitor to His Class
  29. Cibola Burn
  30. The Prize — Daniel Yergin
  31. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
  32. The Big Change
  33. River of the Gods
  34. Hero of the Empire
  35. Genentech
  36. The Beginning of Infinity
  37. For Profit

2021

  1. A Woman in Berlin
  2. American Kingpin
  3. The Second World War — Beevor
  4. Den of Thieves
  5. Disraeli — Blake
  6. Attention Factory
  7. 12 Rules for Life
  8. PayPal Wars
  9. Liftoff: The Story of SpaceX
  10. Samsung Rising — Geoffrey Cain
  11. Postwar
  12. Amazon Unbound
  13. The Fish That Ate the Whale
  14. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
  15. The Ministry for the Future
  16. Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir
  17. Edison
  18. Factfulness — Hans Rosling
  19. The Cult of We
  20. The Big Score
  21. Red Roulette
  22. Blood, Sweat, and Pixels
  23. The Contrarian
  24. July 1914 — Sean McMeekin
  25. Lost Horizon
  26. A People's Tragedy — Figes
  27. Leviathan Wakes
  28. Lights Out
  29. Snow Crash
  30. Richer, Wiser, Happier

2020

  1. Victorious Century
  2. Normal People — Sally Rooney
  3. How Will You Measure Your Life — Clay Christensen
  4. Disney War
  5. Red Notice
  6. The Guns of August
  7. No Filter
  8. Smartest Guys in the Room
  9. How the Internet Happened
  10. Imperial Twilight
  11. Making of the Prince of Persia
  12. Console Wars
  13. The Anarchy — William Dalrymple
  14. Flash Boys — Michael Lewis
  15. Return to the Little Kingdom — Michael Moritz
  16. The Patriarch
  17. Black Edge
  18. Billion Dollar Loser
  19. King of Crypto
  20. The Last Kings of Shanghai — Jonathan Kaufman
  21. The Psychology of Money
  22. Homeland Elegies
  23. Debt: The First 5,000 Years

2019

  1. Valley of Genius
  2. City of Devils
  3. Softwar
  4. Ogilvy on Advertising
  5. Titan — Chernow
  6. Empire — Niall Ferguson
  7. Barbarians at the Gate
  8. Hackers and Painters — Paul Graham
  9. Showstopper
  10. Masters of Doom
  11. Bitcoin Billionaires
  12. American Carnage
  13. Sales Bible
  14. Billion Dollar Whale
  15. Predator's Ball
  16. Pmarca Startup Blog Archives
  17. Super Pumped
  18. Barbarian Days
  19. History of the Future
  20. Troublemakers
  21. Ride of a Lifetime — Bob Iger
  22. The Man Who Solved the Market
  23. Googled

2018

  1. Principles — Ray Dalio
  2. The Facebook Effect
  3. Elon Musk
  4. Lean Startup
  5. How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars
  6. Sam Walton: Made in America
  7. Conspiracy — Ryan Holiday
  8. Hit Refresh — Satya Nadella
  9. How Google Works
  10. The Square and the Tower — Niall Ferguson
  11. Chaos Monkeys
  12. Founders at Work
  13. Hatching Twitter
  14. Zero to One
  15. Netflixed
  16. Creativity, Inc.
  17. Wild Ride — Lashinsky
  18. Bad Blood — Carreyou
  19. The Airbnb Story
  20. The Ascent of Money — Niall Ferguson
  21. Matchmakers
  22. Mornings on Horseback
  23. Measure What Matters
  24. The New New Thing
  25. Venture Deals
  26. Who Is Michael Ovitz
  27. In the Garden of Beasts — Erik Larson
  28. Angel — Jason Calacanis

2017

  1. Zero to One
  2. The Black Swan
  3. Sapiens
  4. The Everything Store
  5. Alibaba's World — Erisman
  6. The Upstarts
  7. The Hard Thing About Hard Things
  8. Shoe Dog
  9. Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson
  10. The Innovators — Walter Isaacson
  11. Life and Times of LBJ
  12. Thinking, Fast and Slow
  13. Predator's Ball