59. Half 1, 2026, Reading List

Growing up on the island of Ischia in the late 1990s and early 2000s, knowledge was constrained by geography. We had one bookstore. If the book you wanted happened to be on the shelf, great. If it wasn’t, the owner would order it from the mainland and you would wait at least a week before it arrived. There was no next-day delivery, no Kindle, no YouTube lecture to fill the gap while you waited.

The internet wasn’t much help either. First came the 56k modem, followed by the earliest DSL connections. Both required enormous patience to accomplish even the simplest tasks and, every time there was a proper storm, the connection would disappear altogether. Looking back, almost every step involved friction. But it was the right kind of friction. Once your book finally arrived, there wasn’t much else competing for your attention. You picked it up, sat down and read it. Access was the problem; attention wasn’t.

Twenty years later, the equation has completely reversed. Almost every book ever written is available within seconds. The world’s best university lectures are freely available online. Founders publish essays, researchers share papers, and experts record podcasts. More knowledge than any previous generation could have imagined now sits inside the device we carry in our pockets. Knowledge has never been cheaper. Access has never been easier. Yet it feels harder than ever to learn.

The friction hasn’t disappeared; it has simply moved. Today the obstacle isn’t finding information but protecting your attention long enough to absorb it. Every notification, recommendation algorithm and infinite scroll competes for the same finite resource: your focus. Knowledge has become abundant, while attention has become scarce.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since becoming a father. Coach Matthew is now three years old. He’s learning everything from scratch, although he already has one advantage over me: he happily switches between English, Italian and German, while I’m still comfortably limited to the first two. Like most parents, Alessia and I sometimes joke that it would be wonderful if we could simply download into his brain everything we’ve learned over the past forty years. Of course, that’s impossible. Knowledge still has to be acquired one idea at a time. But when I think about what we will actually need to teach him, it won’t be how to find knowledge. By the time he can read, everything ever written will be a tap away. It will be how to choose what deserves his attention.

Which is the question I keep coming back to myself: when the material is infinite and the attention is finite, what earns it?

Over the years I’ve settled on a simple test. The writing most worth your attention is the writing that keeps explaining the world long after it was published. The best ideas don’t predict the future with precision, but they equip you with the mental models to recognise important patterns a little earlier than everyone else. This year, my reading handed me a perfect example.

It took me back to one of the defining debates in venture capital. Bill Gurley argued that unicorns should go public earlier. Public markets, he believed, imposed discipline. Auditors, bankers, regulators and public shareholders would force founders to confront reality in ways that increasingly private markets did not.

Around the same time, Yuri Milner was demonstrating a different model. His investment in Facebook in 2009 showed that exceptional companies no longer needed public markets as early as they once had. If enough private capital was available, founders could continue building without the quarterly scrutiny and short-term pressures that come with being listed.

Reading those two perspectives in 2026 is fascinating. Today we are watching companies like SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic remain private for far longer than previous generations of technology companies ever could. In many respects, Milner’s vision became reality. Yet as private companies reach valuations of hundreds of billions of dollars, Gurley’s question about accountability, governance and discipline feels more relevant than ever.

Here’s the thing: neither of them was writing about 2026. Both of them explained it. Arguments put on paper more than a decade ago turned out to be the most useful framework I’ve found for understanding what is happening in technology and capital markets right now.

That, more than anything, is why I continue to read books. The best ones don’t simply explain the past; they expand the set of mental models you carry with you. They allow you to borrow the experience of extraordinary people, compress decades into days, and recognise patterns that might otherwise have taken a lifetime to learn. Then, years later, when the world changes, those models help you understand what you’re seeing a little sooner than you otherwise would have.

Gurley and Milner made their arguments long before the moment they explained. Which means that somewhere, right now, someone is publishing the idea that will explain the next decade — long before the rest of us realise we’re already living through it. Finding writing like that is, to me, the single best use of scarce attention.

With that question in mind, here are the books that shaped my first half of 2026.

Supremacy by Parmy Olson — The story of the rivalry between OpenAI and DeepMind and the race to build artificial general intelligence.

The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby — A fascinating portrait of Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the quest to build artificial superintelligence.

Empire of AI by Karen Hao — A deeply reported account of OpenAI, Sam Altman and the true costs of the race for AI dominance.

The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman — A thoughtful look at how AI and synthetic biology will reshape society and challenge existing institutions.

Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick — A practical guide to collaborating effectively with AI rather than competing against it.

Liftoff by Eric Berger — The improbable story of how SpaceX survived its earliest years and changed the aerospace industry.

The NVIDIA Way by Tae Kim — The story of Jensen Huang’s relentless pursuit of a vision that transformed NVIDIA into one of the world’s most important companies.

Tim Cook by Leander Kahney — The story of the understated operator who successfully led Apple after Steve Jobs.

Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald — The story of how a Kyoto playing-card company became one of the most creative and beloved forces in entertainment.

Muskism by Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff — A thought-provoking critique of Elon Musk’s influence on technology, politics and society.

The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby — An outstanding history of venture capital and the investors who transformed the technology industry.

More Money Than God by Sebastian Mallaby — The definitive history of the hedge fund industry through the investors who reshaped modern finance.

Streetwise by Lloyd Blankfein — Reflections on leadership, markets and decision-making from the former Goldman Sachs CEO.

How Africa Works by Joe Studwell — A compelling case that the development playbook behind East Asia's rise offers a roadmap for Africa's economic transformation.

Range by David Epstein — A compelling case for why broad experience and interdisciplinary thinking often outperform early specialization.

Richard Feynman’s Mental Models by Peter Hollins — A practical introduction to the thinking principles behind one of history’s greatest scientists.

The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey — A timeless guide to mastering performance by learning to get out of your own way.

The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg — Sustainable high performance built through consistency rather than intensity.

Life in the Pitlane by Calum Nicholas — Lessons on teamwork, pressure and execution from inside the Red Bull Formula One garage.

Runnin’ Down a Dream by Bill Gurley — Principles for building a career you love and avoiding career regret, from one of Silicon Valley’s most respected investors.

The Martian by Andy Weir — Hard science, resilience and humour combine in one of the best modern science fiction novels.

One small weekend project was installing Pi-hole on my home network. I mainly wanted a simple networking project to learn something new, and it turned out to be a great excuse. As a bonus, it blocks ads across every device on the network, making the internet at home a little cleaner and less distracting.