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.
Gordon Martinez-Piedra: One of the smartest people I've ever met, now at Nexthop AI building networking infrastructure for hyperscale cloud. The kind of mind that makes you sharpen your own thinking just by being around it.
Richard Givhan: Co-founder & CEO of Haiqu, building quantum middleware to make near-term quantum computing practical. A reminder that the biggest opportunities are often in the layers nobody wants to touch. Met on a trip in Berlin – what happens in Berlin, stays in Berlin.
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.