The Investor's Shelf — one person
PC
Patrick Collison
Patrick Collison is an Irish billionaire entrepreneur
847 books they recommend
Books they recommend 847
Collison's reading taste is shaped by a single sustained question: why does rapid progress happen when it does, and why does it stop? That question pulls him toward two types of books — deep biographies of the people who actually built things and structural accounts of how institutions, incentives, and luck combine to accelerate or throttle discovery. He publishes a running bookshelf at patrickcollison.com and discusses picks in long-form interviews. The books are not a greatest-hits list; they form an argument, and reading them together makes his Progress Studies project legible.
Bookshelf — patrickcollison.com 756
Technology and Computing 84
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Not yet given a topic 82
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Fiction 73
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General History 60
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Biography and Memoir 54
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Science 50
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Art and Design 38
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Philosophy 37
Reference Works 33
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Sociology and Culture 27
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Mathematics and Statistics 25
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Politics and Government 23
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Economics 18
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Writing and Communication 17
Medicine and Biology 14
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Travel and Exploration 13
Artificial Intelligence 13
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Company Histories 10
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Education and Learning 9
Psychology and Behaviour 9
Business and Management 8
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Not a Book 8
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Biography of Scientists 6
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Investing 5
Environment and Energy 5
Health and Fitness 5
Entrepreneurship and Startups 5
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Games and Puzzles 4
Productivity and Habits 3
Leadership 3
Food 3
Decision Making 3
Sport 2
Sales and Marketing 2
Finance and Markets 2
Religion and Spirituality 1
Financial History 1
Negotiation and Persuasion 1
Book recommendations listed on their Good Books profile 76
General History 10
Science 8
Stephen Webb · not in an entry yet aggregator only
Technology and Computing 8
Company Histories 7
Fiction 5
Politics and Government 5
Economics 4
Sociology and Culture 3
Business and Management 3
Environment and Energy 3
Biography and Memoir 3
Biography of Scientists 3
Philosophy 3
Art and Design 2
Investing 1
Sport 1
Entrepreneurship and Startups 1
Sebastian Mallaby aggregator only
Decision Making 1
Travel and Exploration 1
Writing and Communication 1
Artificial Intelligence 1
Peter Norvig · not in an entry yet aggregator only
Mathematics and Statistics 1
Education and Learning 1
Superbook reading list 15
Not yet given a topic 5
Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin · not in an entry yet
“The biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and by extension the biography of a moment when theoretical physics and massive state resources briefly converged. Collison has cited this as one of the most revealing books about what it actually takes to organize scientific talent toward an ambitious goal.”
Robert A. Caro · not in an entry yet
“The second Caro Johnson volume, covering the stolen 1948 Senate election. Caro spends more time on a single eighty-seven-vote margin than most historians spend on entire administrations, and the result is a portrait of political will that Collison finds endlessly instructive.”
Robert A. Caro · not in an entry yet
“The third Johnson volume, covering LBJ's transformation of the Senate from a dysfunctional antebellum relic into a working legislative instrument. For Collison, this is Caro at his best — a detailed case study in institutional change driven by a single relentless operator.”
Richard P. Feynman · not in an entry yet
“Feynman's own stories, self-edited into a portrait of relentless curiosity applied to everything from safecracks to samba. On Collison's list as a companion to the Gleick biography — together they show both the method and the personality.”
Richard Holmes · not in an entry yet
“Richard Holmes's account of the Romantic-era scientific revolution — Banks, Davy, Herschel, Shelley — when science was still entangled with poetry and natural philosophy. Collison sees this as one of history's underappreciated acceleration episodes.”
Biography of Scientists 3
Robert Kanigel · not in an entry yet
“Robert Kanigel's biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the self-taught Indian mathematician who produced theorems of extraordinary depth with almost no formal training. Collison has pointed to Ramanujan as an example of how intellectual talent can emerge in the most improbable circumstances when the right opening appears.”
James D. Watson
“Watson's account of the race to crack DNA's structure is unsparing about the sociology of science — the competitiveness, the luck, the way credit gets allocated. Collison values it as an honest look at how major discoveries actually happen rather than how they are commemorated afterward.”
James Gleick · not in an entry yet
“James Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman. Collison is an admirer of Feynman's way of thinking, and this is the most complete account of where that style came from — the Rockaway childhood, the Los Alamos years, the Caltech decades. Better than Surely You're Joking for understanding the full arc.”
Biography and Memoir 2
Robert A. Caro · not in an entry yet
“Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses is central to how Collison thinks about power and institutional inertia. Moses built more of 20th-century New York than any elected official ever did — the book is about what that kind of concentrated leverage looks like in practice, for better and worse.”
Robert A. Caro · not in an entry yet
“The first volume of Caro's Lyndon Johnson series, tracing Johnson's origins in the Texas Hill Country to his first Senate race. Collison has spoken about Caro repeatedly — this volume is the foundation, establishing how ruthless ambition and genuine policy conviction can coexist in a single person.”
Technology and Computing 2
James Gleick · not in an entry yet
“James Gleick's history of information, from African drums to Shannon's formalization of entropy. Collison is drawn to books that trace the long prehistory of what now seems obvious, and this is one of the best at that.”
Walter Isaacson · not in an entry yet
“Walter Isaacson's history of the digital revolution, structured as a set of portraits of the people behind each step. Less hagiographic than his Jobs biography and better for it — Collison has cited it as useful for understanding how computing's key breakthroughs required both individual genius and collaborative infrastructure.”
General History 1
Richard Rhodes
“Richard Rhodes won the Pulitzer for this account of the Manhattan Project, and it earns the prize by being both rigorous physics history and a study of institutional design under extreme time pressure. Collison has recommended it as a window into how progress actually gets made.”
Science 1
Thomas S. Kuhn
“Kuhn's 1962 monograph on how scientific fields actually change — through crises and paradigm shifts rather than steady accumulation — is foundational for Collison's thinking about why progress is lumpy and how institutions resist it. Short and still argues well with you.”
Travel and Exploration 1
Alfred Lansing · not in an entry yet
“Alfred Lansing's account of Shackleton's trapped Antarctic expedition. Collison has mentioned it as the best available study of leadership under conditions where every option is bad and the only variable is how you make decisions under duress.”