My 2025 Reading List

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Digital illustration of a colorful stack of books representing the 2025 Year-End Reading List. The visible titles on the spines are Human Acts, Populus, The Engineers of Chaos, Nexus, and Distancia de rescate.

It’s been a few months since my last reading update, and as we wrap up 2025, I wanted to share a fresh batch of books that have sparked my curiosity.

If you’ve followed my blog, you know I’m drawn to topics that explain why the world works the way it does, whether through the lens of history, technology, economics, or the complexities of human behavior. The non-fiction titles in this list reflect that mix, ranging from AI and populism to the daily life of the Roman Empire.

In fiction, I have been drawn to emerging Latin American writers and global masters, including several recent Nobel Prize winners.

Below, you’ll find my latest reads, followed by a recap of the books I recommended earlier this year.

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Global economic outlooks for 2026 from leading investment banks

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Collage of nine 2026 market outlook report covers from major investment banks, arranged in a 3x3 grid, with large centered text reading “2026 Outlook Reports.

One more year, I’m sharing a list of 2026 economic outlook reports from leading investment banks around the world.

In previous years, I got this list from various sources and simply reposted it. This year, I asked an LLM (ChatGPT 5.2) to build it from scratch. The result is solid, and I’m pretty sure it was done much faster than the old way. Enjoy.

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Startup Equity & Dilution: What’s Normal in 2025?

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When a startup raises capital, it is always a delicate balancing act. You have the valuation of the startup on one side and the size of the round on the other. This tension is what determines dilution.

Simply put, dilution is the percentage of ownership that goes to your new investors, and by definition, it is the percentage that everyone else’s slice of the pie shrinks.

I came across this chart from Carta, which breaks down the average equity sold (dilution) in 2025 by round stage. It paints a very clear picture of the current fundraising environment. While this data reflects the US market, it serves as a critical benchmark for us in Latin America. Even though our check sizes and valuations are often lower in absolute terms, the dilution targets—the slice of the pie you sell—should remain similar.

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Mi charla con IT Masters sobre el ecosistema emprendedor en México

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Siempre disfruto las buenas conversaciones sobre el estado del venture capital y el emprendimiento en nuestra región. Hace poco tuve el gusto de platicar con Mónica Mistretta, Maricela Ochoa y Francisco Iglesias, el gran equipo editorial de IT Masters Mag.

Fue una charla sobre el ecosistema de emprendimiento en México. Conversamos sobre sus particularidades, los retos actuales y las características que definen a los emprendedores mexicanos que buscan escalar y construir empresas de impacto.

Remembering Jane Goodall, a Titan of Conservation and Climate 🐒

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Dr. Jane Goodall delivers a speech at her last conference in Mexico City, holding her beloved chimpanzee toy. She stands behind a black podium.

The news landed last week, and it’s a profoundly sobering moment for anyone who cares about this planet: Dr. Jane Goodall has passed away at 91.

She was the pioneering primatologist and probably the top biologist of her time. Her groundbreaking discoveries—that chimpanzees use tools, have distinct personalities, and complex social lives—didn’t just change science; they forced humanity to look at itself in a new, humbler mirror. Incredibly enough, she first went to Tanzania in 1960 without a college degree. She was a young woman who dared to get up close and personal with animals most people thought were just “things.” You can read her definitive obituary here.

This news hit my wife and me especially hard because we attended her last conference, which was right here in Mexico City, the Saturday before her passing. Being in the room and hearing her voice—still sharp, still full of fire—was a powerful, final experience.

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Join Dalus, NVIDIA, Stripe & Google Cloud to Talk the Future of AI

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Promotional graphic for the event 'The Founder Equation: AI, Investment & Growth in Action'. Features a robotic hand and logos for partners Dalus Capital, Stripe, NVIDIA, and Google Cloud.

At Dalus, we are convinced that AI will create a massive disruption, unlocking huge productivity gains for businesses in the short and medium term. We have been actively investing in AI-native startups that are developing easy-to-deploy tools to solve specific business problems.

These companies are building products on top of LLMs to work more efficiently. For example, our portfolio company Darwin AI, which recently announced a new funding round, develops AI agents—think of them as digital workers—hyper-focused on sales processes. Another investment, Qomplement, automates data entry from PDFs to Excel and ERPs, cutting up to 90% of manual work. And we have other very exciting companies in our investment pipeline.💡

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AI Cartoon of the Week

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A pretty accurate representation of AI versus existing digital infrastructure. That slingshot is about to launch.

What do you think happens when it does? 😬

A cartoon showing a slingshot labeled "AI" aimed at a fragile tower labeled "All Modern Digital Infrastructure."

Why We Doubled Down on the Darwin AI Team

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Darwin AI logo.

I’m thrilled to share that our portfolio company, Darwin AI, has closed a $4.5 million funding round led by Base10 Partners. 🚀 We at Dalus are excited to be participating in the round alongside other previous investors, doubling down on our belief in the team.

Darwin AI is building the future of business operations with AI agents, with a sharp focus on the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking markets in Latam (try them here). The traction is already undeniable: they’ve onboarded more than 300 clients across 20 countries and have surpassed $2 million in annual booked revenues.

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Insights from the AI 2027 Report

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This past weekend I read the AI 2027 report, a fascinating piece of future foresight on the trajectory of artificial intelligence, released a few months ago. The report is long, dense, and full of tech jargon, but it lays out two vivid scenarios for how AI might evolve over the next five years.

The methodology follows the practice of “future foresight,” where scenarios are created and presented as a chronological story, without assigning them an exact probability of occurrence. This approach does not aim to predict the future, but to explore plausible paths, stress-test assumptions, and open space for informed debate about what might happen.

The report was created by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, and Eli Lifland under the collective name AI Futures Project. Their goal is to draw attention to the possible implications of AI’s extremely rapid progress. The intent is not to predict the future with certainty, but rather to generate realistic scenarios that can spark conversations about public policy and preparedness, recognizing that the exact forecast and timing could change.

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Latin America venture capital shows resilience in 2025 but challenges remain

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LAVCA released its semi-annual metrics on the Latin American startup and VC ecosystem for the first half of 2025. There’s plenty to analyze, but I want to highlight three aspects.

Latam VC investment volumes remain flat
Total investment value stayed essentially flat in the first half of 2025, with a slight downward bias. In fact, volumes have been holding steady at more or less the same level since 2H22, when the global correction in VC fully hit Latin America. The positive side is that this suggests we have reached the bottom of the cycle, and further material declines seem unlikely.

Latin America venture capital investment by stage from 2022 to first half of 2025 showing flat and slightly declining volumes since the global market correction.
Source: LAVCA
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