My personal library in Boston — the books that made me, and the ones I'm passing on. Reading notes, curated lists, and marketplace listings live alongside the shelf.
These are the subjects I tutor, in English or Japanese — TutoringJay
Within each genre, books sit in publication order, evenly spaced — not to a year scale. Select any book for its placard.
Inspired By
Books that shaped how I think about building.
Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler
Diamandis reframes ambition itself — the idea that the same exponential curves reshaping computing are now compressing the timeline to building something genuinely world-scale. What stuck with me was the 6 Ds framework: how technologies go from deceptive to disruptive to demonetized almost without warning. As someone working at the intersection of AI, education, and software, this was less a business book and more a forcing function for thinking bigger about what's actually possible right now.
Makers: The New Industrial Revolution
Chris Anderson
The web revolution democratized bits; Makers argues the same wave is hitting atoms. Anderson wrote this at exactly the right moment — when desktop fabrication was crossing from hobbyist to serious — and his thesis has only gotten stronger since. For me the insight wasn't just about 3D printing; it was about what happens when the barrier between idea and physical object collapses the same way the barrier between idea and published software already had.
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
Chris Anderson
Most businesses are built around hits — the bestsellers, the blockbusters, the top 20. Anderson's argument is that the internet made the tail infinitely long and infinitely profitable in aggregate. Running several niche businesses at once, I've lived this: the audiences that matter most to you aren't the mass market, they're the specific people who care deeply about exactly what you do. This book gave me a vocabulary for something I'd been experiencing but hadn't fully articulated.
