Read Like Patrick Collison

The Stripe founder reads like an engineer trying to reverse-engineer how progress actually happens. The throughline here isn't business, it's the machinery underneath it: how research labs invent the future, why some economies grow and others stall, what good design and good science have in common. Expect computing history sitting next to philosophy of knowledge, a venture-capital history next to Tocqueville. These are the books behind the way he thinks about building things that compound.

1. Democracy in America — Alexis de Tocqueville #1
2. The Power Law — Sebastian Mallaby #2
3. Mindstorms — Seymour Papert #3
4. Poor Charlie's Almanack — Charles T. Munger #4
5. Masters of Doom — David Kushner #5
6. A Pattern Language — Christopher Alexander #6
7. The Rise and Fall of American Growth — Robert J. Gordon #7
8. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering — Richard W. Hamming #8
9. The Dream Machine — M. Mitchell Waldrop #9
10. The Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch #10