Bookshelf
I love reading, and sometimes I get asked for books I recommend. Here is a list of a few books I have read and really liked, with short notes on why they matter to me:
- Principles: Ray Dalio — Taught me about radical transparency (a MUST in OrderEAT) and the importance of explicitly writing down the core principles that guide your decisions and actions.
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Ben Horowitz — Great for understanding how to navigate unsolvable problems when you’re the one in charge. Brutally honest about many things like layoffs, pivots, crises, and the mental cost of being a founder. I try to read it once a year.
- Venture Deals: Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson — A clear and practical guide to the world of venture capital. Helped me understand how VCs operate.
- Zero to One: Peter Thiel — First book I read on how to build a company. Challenged me to ask: what do I know to be true that almost everyone else disagrees with?
- High Growth Handbook: Elad Gil — It’s a mix of interviews and advice sections covering many different subjects. All around strategic and tactical advice on scaling companies, from when to hire executives and how to structure teams, to insights on building generational, enduring businesses.
- Fundraising: Ryan Breslow — A practical, step-by-step view on raising capital. Clear examples of real interactions and how to structure the process. Really short and easy to read.
- Recruiting: Ryan Breslow — Same here. A tactical guide to hiring, from defining culture at a high level to the specific details of cold reaching strong candidates and closing them effectively.
- Leading: Alex Ferguson & Michael Moritz — Stuck with me: his obsession with discipline, culture, and long-term thinking. As well as how to lead by example.
- Steve Jobs: Walter Isaacson — With this book I understood the power of relentless vision, obsession with detail, even if people call you delusional.
- Elon Musk: Walter Isaacson — Obsession + execution. How to build not one, but several life-changing companies. It will be interesting to see how things evolve in the coming years for Elon and his companies.
- Shoe Dog: Phil Knight — The power of grit. A very different story on how to build a company, told from 60 years ago.
- Education: W. O. Lester Smith — It’s an accurate description of the main challenges education faced back in 1957, many of them still present now. Made me realize how little innovation happened in education.
- The Entrepreneurial State: Mariana Mazzucato — Changed how I see the role of the state in innovation, taking the biggest risks before startups or VCs in the past. It made me wonder how we can get that state back.
- The Prosperity Paradox: Clayton M. Christensen, Efosa Ojomo & Karen Dillon — Made me realize that innovation isn’t just helpful but necessary for nations to overcome poverty. Inspired me to think about how we can improve LATAM as a founder.
- Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Thomas Piketty — Helped me understand how wealth and income inequality evolve over time, why capital tends to concentrate, and how this shapes modern democracies.
- The Debt Squads: Sue Branford & Bernardo Kucinski — A powerful critique of how the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s was managed. It made me think about sustainable ways countries can finance themselves, and how to avoid traps that still echo 40 years later.
Articles
Not every great read is a book. A few articles that shaped how I think:
- a16z: The Power Brokers: Packy McCormick — This article made me think hard about how I want to change the world. It's the clearest proof that betting bigger than everyone thinks is rational, and building the infrastructure to make that bet self-fulfilling, can truly shape the course of the world.
Papers
Research papers worth the read:
- Your Spending Needs Attention: Modeling Financial Habits with Transformers: Nubank — They trained a transformer to read transaction sequences directly, no manual features. Crazy they can publish the whole thing openly, because no traditional bank has the clean, unified transaction data to actually pull it off.
Personal ones
When it comes to more personal reading, I’ve always loved science fiction, fantasy, and history novels, among others. Over the years, I’ve read dozens (maybe hundreds) that shaped the way I think. I won’t list them all, but here are a few pearls that stand out to me as especially meaningful.
- The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: Robin Sharma — Inspired me to start meditating (didn’t stick, but still). Really liked its approach to slowing down, finding purpose, and reframing life’s priorities.
- Fahrenheit 451: Ray Bradbury — Written in 1953, it’s pretty scary how much it reads like a prediction of 2026. Bradbury foresaw a culture that prefers fast entertainment and screens over deep thought, and in my opinion that’s exactly where we’re heading. A necessary read today.
- Four Thousand Weeks: Oliver Burkeman — I’ve read plenty of time management books, but this is the first one whose message is that you’ll never get everything done, and that’s not a flaw, it’s the entire point.
- The Ballerina of Auschwitz: Edith Eger — Great read. A reminder that no matter what happens, you can always choose how you respond, even in hard circumstances.
- The Pillars of the Earth: Ken Follett — My favorite of Ken Follett, one that slowly grows on you and puts your time on earth into perspective. Being the child of two architects made me appreciate it even more.
- Eragon Series: Christopher Paolini — Four books. One of my favorite fantasy series, wish I've read it when I was older.
- The Accursed Kings: Maurice Druon — An amazing 7-book series about the Capetian dynasty in medieval France. I read all of them in less than two weeks, one of the best historical novel series I’ve ever read.
- The Name of the Wind: Patrick Rothfuss — Great storytelling. Even if the promised third book never comes out, I’d still strongly recommend this story.
- The Lord of the Rings: J.R.R. Tolkien — A classic. A must-read.