Cosmos

Carl Sagan's companion volume to the 13-part television series takes the reader on a tour of the universe — from the library of ancient Alexandria to the surface of Venus, from the evolution of the human brain to the search for intelligent life beyond Earth. Sagan weaves astronomy, evolution, physics, and history into a single narrative about humanity's place in a vast cosmos.

Richard Branson lists Cosmos among his 65 lifetime reading recommendations on Virgin.com, alongside A Brief History of Time — the two popular-science cosmology books on an otherwise business-and-leadership-heavy list. For a founder, Cosmos is not a science textbook; it is a demonstration of how to make the incomprehensible intelligible by connecting it to what people already know. Sagan's method — relatable metaphor, historical narrative, framing the unfamiliar through human-scale stakes — is the same communication skill a founder needs when explaining a novel product, a new market, or a technical architecture to people who have never seen anything like it. The book also models a kind of scale-switching that founders need: zooming from the subatomic to the galactic within the same chapter, holding multiple levels of abstraction in mind at once.