Harlan Ellison
Speculative fiction
Nobody wrote angrier or more honestly. He treated the short story like a knife fight and made me stop being polite on the page.
The Inspiration Station
The minds I keep returning to
Four orders of mentors, a shelf of books and papers, and the records that rewired me. Nothing here is filler; every entry says why it earned the wall.
The Authors
The writers who taught me that a sentence can carry a whole civilisation.
Isaac Asimov
Science fiction
He built galaxies out of clear prose and clearer thinking. The Foundation books are still how I picture long-term bets paying off.
Toni Morrison
Literature
She proved that language can hold grief and grace in the same sentence. I read her when my own writing gets too clever.
Stephen Fry
Wit and letters
The rare mind that makes erudition feel like hospitality. He taught me that knowing things is only useful if you can make people welcome inside them.
Shrilal Shukla
Hindi satire
Raag Darbari is the sharpest x-ray of small-town India ever taken. He showed me satire is just love that has done its homework.
Gulzar
Poetry and lyric
He folds an entire monsoon into two lines of Urdu. When I want to explain compression to engineers, I secretly think of him.
Mirza Ghalib
Urdu poetry
Two centuries old and still the wittiest man in the room. Ghalib taught me that doubt, done beautifully, is its own kind of faith.
The Scientists
The minds who made the universe feel like an open workshop.
Richard Feynman
Physics
My patron saint of explaining things simply. If I cannot make an idea plain to a curious twelve-year-old, I do not understand it yet.
Carl Sagan
Astronomy
He turned the night sky into an invitation. Every time I teach a child what the internet is, I am trying to do what Cosmos did to me.
John von Neumann
Mathematics
The architecture inside every computer I have ever programmed came out of one man's head. He is the reminder that raw thought scales.
The Builders
The founders and engineers who treat impossible as a scheduling problem.
Elon Musk
Rockets and factories
Whatever else changes, the lesson stands: pick the biggest problem you can find and let physics, not opinion, be the referee.
Palmer Luckey
Hardware
Built a headset in a trailer, then a defence company nobody wanted to fund. Proof that conviction plus soldering iron beats consensus.
David Holz
Midjourney
He runs one of the most important AI labs in the world like a small research boat, steered by wonder. That is the founder posture I want.
Demis Hassabis
DeepMind
Chess prodigy, game designer, Nobel laureate. He kept one question alive for thirty years: what is intelligence? Patience as strategy.
Vikram Sarabhai
Indian space programme
He launched rockets from a fishing village and a church shed. Building a world-class AI company out of India, I steer by his flag.
The Artists
The performers who showed me what total command of a craft looks like.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Qawwali
The closest thing to proof that a voice can be a spiritual technology. When he ascends, the difference between music and prayer disappears.
B.B. King
Blues guitar
One note, bent with intention, says more than a hundred fast ones. Lucille taught me economy long before any editor did.
Shawn Lane
Guitar
The fastest hands in history, wired to one of the gentlest musical minds. He is my reminder that virtuosity should serve feeling.
Aamir Zaki
Guitar
Pakistan's finest guitarist, criminally under-heard. His tone on Mera Pyaar proved that our subcontinent can speak blues fluently.
Darren Hayes
Songwriting
The voice of Savage Garden ran through my childhood. He writes pop the way engineers wish they wrote systems: nothing wasted.
Derren Brown
Mentalism
He engineers wonder with psychology and showmanship, then tells you it was a trick, and it stays wonderful. Honesty as stagecraft.
Anurag Kashyap
Cinema
He dragged Indian film into its dark, honest corners and made them sing. Gangs of Wasseypur is a masterclass in scale with soul.
Pink Floyd
Rock
The band that made me believe an album could be one continuous thought, with silence used as an instrument.
Snarky Puppy
Jazz fusion
A big band that thinks like a startup: no lead singer, all craft, everybody solos. We Like It Here lives permanently in my studio.
Animals as Leaders
Progressive metal
Eight strings, no vocals, pure architecture. They compose the way I want to design systems: dense, precise, still somehow warm.
Clown Core
Whatever this is
Two anonymous virtuosos playing jazz-grindcore in a porta-potty. The best argument I know that mastery and absurdity are close friends.
The bookshelf
Read and re-read until the spines gave up.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter
The book that first showed me mathematics, art, and music are one subject wearing three masks. I re-read a chapter whenever I forget that a strange loop can be beautiful.
The Beginning of Infinity
David Deutsch
It gave me permission to be an optimist on purpose. The argument that problems are soluble still governs how I pick what to build.
Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse
I read it at nineteen and again every few years. You cannot be told the river; you have to sit beside it long enough to hear it yourself.
Autobiography of a Yogi
Paramahansa Yogananda
The book that made the inner life feel as rigorous as the outer one. It sits on the same shelf as my ML papers, which is exactly the point.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert M. Pirsig
Quality as the thing that comes before subject and object. The closest anyone has come to why clean code and a good raga feel like the same feeling.
Dune
Frank Herbert
Ecology, religion, power, and prescience braided into one story. The standard I quietly hold my own science fiction against, and usually lose to.
The Bhagavad Gita
Vyasa
The oldest answer I know to the newest question a founder faces: how to act wholeheartedly when the outcome was never yours to hold.
The papers
Attention Is All You Need
Vaswani et al., 2017
Eight pages that quietly rewrote what a machine could do with language, and with us. I have read it more times than any novel.
Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models
Kaplan et al., 2020
The paper that reframed intelligence as something you could budget for. It changed how I think about what is coming, not just what is here.
Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks
Silver et al., 2016
Move 37 was the moment I understood these systems could be creative, not just fast. I still feel that vertigo when I build agents.
The Bitter Lesson
Rich Sutton, 2019
An essay, not a paper, and I return to it more than either. General methods that scale beat our clever handcrafted ideas, every single time.
The records
The Dark Side of the Moon
Pink Floyd
The record that made me believe an album could be one continuous thought. Structure and feeling are not enemies.
A Love Supreme
John Coltrane
Devotion recorded as sound. Proof that the spiritual and the virtuosic are the same act performed with your whole attention.
Shahen-Shah
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Play it loud and try to remain a materialist. I have never managed it.
We Like It Here
Snarky Puppy
Lingus contains the greatest keyboard solo ever filmed. I measure ensemble chemistry, in bands and in teams, against this record.
The station keeps growing. So does the debt.