- Richard Branson — Listed in Richard Branson's own 'My Top 65 Books To Read In A Lifetime' published on Virgin.com source ↗
Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler argue that technology is on track to meet the basic needs of every human on the planet within a generation. They survey exponential technologies — AI, robotics, biotech, nanotech, infinite computing — and show how each one is converging to solve problems of water, food, energy, education, and health at costs approaching zero.
Richard Branson includes Abundance on his 65 lifetime reading list on Virgin.com, alongside his picks of Diamandis's X Prize Foundation work. For founders, Abundance is the most forceful argument available for a technologically optimistic worldview — not optimism as a personality tic, but as a reasoned bet based on the trajectory of exponential curves. The book's core frame is that most people (including most investors) think in linear terms while technology compounds; a founder who internalizes that gap and acts on it has a structural advantage over incumbents who extrapolate the present forward in a straight line. Diamandis makes the case that the 'grand challenges' are actually business opportunities masquerading as problems, and that the entrepreneur who solves one of them gains a market larger than any that currently exists.