When people in tech want to sound smart, one name you can drop is Carlota Perez. Her book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital is a rare accomplishment: it’s a top-down “grand theory” book about the innovation economy, written by an academic rather than an on-the-ground practitioner, that actually gets things right. Read it alongside Bill Janeway’s Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, the number one book that’s most influenced my own thinking.