Inside Paperbacked - the BACKED Library

We back founders who deal in first principles. Founders who ask "why" until they hit bedrock. Founders who won't settle for the version of the truth that's easiest to accept.

That instinct doesn't switch off when the laptop shuts. Walk into BACKED HQ and you'll find it on the shelves too: physics sitting next to power broking, comics next to core banking. Nobody planned it to look like this. It's just what happens when a room of curious people all bring in their favourite book.

We hope your summer reading list is quirky and gets you thinking differently.

Start with the physicists.

Alex Brunicki put The Making of the Atomic Bomb on the shelf, Richard Rhodes' account of the Manhattan Project, told through the people who built the theory decades before anyone knew what it would become. It's a masterclass in what happens when curious people are given the room and the resources to follow an idea all the way down. Alex's second pick sits a few inches along and couldn't be more different: The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov's satire of the devil arriving in Soviet Moscow, weaving satire, romance and theology into one of the strangest, sharpest books of the 20th century.

Next to those, Andre de Haes left The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell's study of the "monomyth," the shared structure underneath hero stories across nearly every culture. Underneath every founder's pitch is an origin story. This is the book on how those stories actually work.

Then there's the Munger shelf. Poor Charlie's Almanack takes his speeches and mental models and compiles them into a working manual for thinking in multiple disciplines rather than defaulting to one. Founders who build durable companies tend to borrow frameworks from everywhere, and Munger is the patron saint of that habit.

Lucia Cerchlan, our resident book-worm, brought three, and they talk to each other. The Beginning of Infinity makes David Deutsch's case that good explanations, not accurate predictions, are what let us solve problems without limit. A pattern you can't explain won't survive contact with a new market, a new segment, or a new decade. Knowing why gives you reach.

The Infinity Machine, Sebastian Mallaby's biography of Demis Hassabis, shows what happens when that same explanatory drive meets scale. Hassabis had declared an enormous ambition once before, at Elixir, and went straight at the hardest version of it, which broke the company. At DeepMind the ambition was even bigger, but this time he built it as a sequence. Maximalist ambition only survives contact with reality when it comes with a plan.

And Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World lays out Girard's theory that desire is imitative rather than original, that imitation breeds rivalry, and that societies have historically discharged the resulting violence onto a single victim whose expulsion restores calm. Read as anthropology, it explains myth and ritual. Read honestly, it makes you wonder whose desire you're currently imitating.

Francis Pedraza, founder of Invisible and Infinity, sent over 7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer's tight framework for the handful of structural advantages that actually protect a business over time, from counter-positioning to network economies. Conviction needs a spine, and this is the sharpest short read we know for working out whether your edge is real or just borrowed time.

Paul Taylor rounds it out with three that all circle the same question: what does it actually take to run something well. The Toyota Way breaks down the Toyota Production System, lean manufacturing, continuous improvement, respect for people, not as slogans but as operating discipline. Building fintech infrastructure and building cars have more in common than people assume. Both live or die on process discipline.

The Generals traces American military leadership from World War Two through Iraq and argues the US Army slowly lost the habit of holding generals accountable for failure, and what that cost.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things gives no-nonsense advice for the parts of running a company nobody puts in the pitch deck: layoffs, demotions, the CEO's loneliest calls.

And it wouldn't be the BACKED bookshelf if it didn't include some events and marketing bibles. Clare is currently reading The Creative Act by Rick Rubin sets out his view of creativity as a practice rather than a talent, something closer to a state of attention you build and return to, whatever the medium. Whilst Sasha has The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker in her backpack, reading about why most gatherings, from dinners to conferences, fall flat, and argues that a sharp purpose and a bit of deliberate structure is what actually makes people feel something in a room.

So next time you come round BACKED HQ, pick your favourite and let us know what you think.