What and who has shaped how I think and behave over the years.
Friends
People doing, building, and writing about interesting things.
Trenton Bricken: Machine learning, neuroscience, and research at Anthropic. Watching him think through AI problems sharpens how I evaluate technical founders – what rigour actually looks like versus what it sounds like.
Alexander Bricken: Building and writing with intention. The kind of personal site that made me want to build my own – proof that clarity of thought compounds when you write it down.
Amenti Kenea: AI engineer, writer, builder. Thinking at the intersection of technology and creativity. A reminder that the best founders often come from unexpected angles.
Blogs & Podcasts
My current favourites.
Generalist: Mario Gabriele Deep dives that model how sector understanding and narrative integration combine – a template for my own diligence. The level of research here is what I aspire to in case studies.
20VC: Harry Stebbings The podcast that shaped how I think about founder conversations. Direct questions, no fluff, genuine rapport. The interviews reveal what great investors actually ask – and why.
Acquired: Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal History as pattern recognition. Understanding how NVIDIA, Costco, or Berkshire actually compounded teaches you what to look for in companies that might do the same.
Books
A select few across the literary spectrum.
Shoe Dog: Phil Knight. The story of Nike from a garage to a global brand. Honest about luck, timing, and the near-death moments most founder stories skip.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Ben Horowitz. What to do when everything goes wrong. No platitudes, just wartime lessons from building and running Opsware.
Cinema Speculation: Quentin Tarantino. Film criticism as memoir. Tarantino on the 1970s movies that shaped him and why obsession is its own education.
Poems & Prayers: Matthew McConaughey. Four decades of poetry from an unexpected source. A wrestle with belief, not a self-help book.
Films
My Letterboxd 4.
Good Will Hunting: Dir. Gus Van Sant | 1997 A janitor at MIT solves impossible maths problems while refusing to confront his past. "It's not your fault" – four words that changed how I think about trauma.
The Shawshank Redemption: Dir. Frank Darabont | 1994 A banker wrongly convicted of murder finds hope in a place designed to destroy it. Twenty years of patience for one night of freedom.
The Lives of Others: Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck | 2006 A Stasi officer assigned to spy on a playwright starts questioning the system he serves. East Germany, 1984. The best film about surveillance ever made.
The Big Blue: Dir. Luc Besson | 1988 Two free divers compete to break the world record. Besson before he became a brand. My dad's favourite film.