My 2025 reading/listening recommendations

Content suggestions to enhance your understanding of the world

Over the last few years I’ve shifted from ‘builder who also invests’ to ‘investor who also builds’ which has some subtle nuances to it. These are mostly centered on my operational leverage (I suspect AI tools are allowing a lot of serial founders to think similarly) but they also show up in my reading. Broadly speaking, my reading is clustered into a) stuff which vaguely relates to the portfolio I’m investing in/building b) neolithic history and c) anything else I find interesting. Your mileage may vary (although I’ve been quite surprised at the number of people who seem to have similar ancient history interests).

My favourite reading/listening this year

Jessica Riedl, independent economist, deconstructing US tax myths. Have come back to this a few times. I’d love to see a version for the UK.

The FT’s write-up of Sam Altman’s kitchen reminds me of what we lost with Valleywag’s demise.

The story of Infinite Reality (a name which says so much about what’s going on here) has kept me endlessly entertained. How it started, how it was going, how it currently is. Maybe it concludes in 2026? I don’t know but surely either Matt Levine or Michael Lewis can’t be far from this.

Razib Khan wrote an excellent long essay about the overwriting of the Neolithic culture (ancient farmers) with the Indo-European (ancient pastoralists) that made me think deeply about where we are in the arc of history.

Gary Fox interviewed Sean Blanchfield (Jentic co-founder), completing a trilogy of interviews with Ronan Perceval and me that covers an arc of company building (both together and separately) across about twenty years and half a dozen companies. It’s a nice way to see how the Irish startup scene has grown over that period.

Christ Morton at Starboard released a very good set of board principles for startups (which I think scales beyond that stage). I suggest you make everyone on your board read them.

This interview with financial historian Russell Napier made me think about a lot of things.

My most enjoyed books this year

Making IT Work: a history of the computer service industry. This seems like a bizarre choice but it’s a surprisingly well written (the cover suggests otherwise) history of IT consulting since its effective origins after WW2. Behind every great technology bubble has been a lot of money made in helping companies actually adopt it.

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. Dan Wang’s annual letters on China have always been excellent. His book is at least as good. The title is slightly misleading though, as this is very much a set of observations about both the US and China.

Apple in China: if you want to have a better understanding about the challenges of re-industrialising the west (especially for areas like semiconductors), read this book. Or just read it to understand a quite different perspective of Apple’s ‘outsourcing to China’ strategy over the last couple of decades. Super work by Patrick McGee

Proto: how one ancient language went global. Laura Spinney does a brilliant job of summarising the latest theories on where the Indo-European language originated. It’s also a gentle (I promise!) onboarding into the world of ancient DNA analysis too.

I can’t not mention The Power Broker, which I finally finished (and added to my personal essentials list). It’s intimidatingly enormous but start reading it anyway. You will understand New York (and other things) in an entirely different way. And maybe you’ll also understand why I disagree with Dan Wang’s take on Robert Moses.

The rest of my reading is on my Goodreads and additional listening recommendations scattered through my X feed. Possible 2026 sidequest: rebuilding Goodreads?

Oh, one last thing, my 2025 rap playlist is here. Mostly UK. All excellent.