Your Three Favorite Reads
On the kind of stories I want to tell.
The sun hadn’t risen yet that Monday morning when my alarm went off. Still half-asleep, I get out of bed and grab my phone from the wooden bedside table next to me. It takes only a few seconds before my thumb swipes up and I start skimming through the notifications already competing for my attention. A bad habit. As I walk toward the living room, one icon catches my eye. The Gmail logo, offset on the left of a notification. I tap. “Really enjoyed reading this one, Thomas. (It’s rare for me to finish an entire email like this.) You have a gift for writing.” A rather pleasant way to start the day.
The day before, I had sent out in this newsletter a profile of Jack Zhang, the founder and CEO of Airwallex. A journey shaped by audacity, resilience, and persistence. I had spent hours listening to podcasts, watching interviews, reading articles, trying to reconstruct his story as faithfully as possible. Receiving this message, and then seeing how widely that edition was shared, was a huge encouragement. But more than that, it was a confirmation. A confirmation of the direction I wanted to take with this newsletter: telling stories rather than dry, purely informational content.
After four years of creating content, I feel, for the first time, that I’ve found the way I truly enjoy writing. Reading played a major role in that. I immersed myself in the profiles published by Colossus, in the narrative journalism of The New Yorker or Nick Bilton, and in novels that sit at the boundary between fiction and reality, such as La guerre par d’autres moyens by Karine Tuil, in the original French.
Wrapping lessons and information inside stories and anecdotes, that’s what I enjoy. Not just to embellish, but because it’s often the details—a habit, a sentence, an obsession—that reveal the most about a person. And, through them, about power, money, and the systems they help shape. That’s the lens through which I approached the second and third editions of the year that you enjoyed the most: an essay on the Collison brothers’ passion for reading, and a narrative account of the race to profitability at the French unicorn Spendesk.
My curiosity continues to pull me toward profiles, narratives, and essays at the intersection of tech, money, and culture. Looking ahead to 2026, two editions are already in the works. The first will be a long-form story about the startup studio behind some of Europe’s largest unicorns. The second will explore the increasingly close relationship between fintech companies and the world of sports. Interviews are currently underway, with unicorn founders and heads of brand from some of today’s most prominent startups.
Each of these pieces will be accompanied by an illustration, like the one in today’s edition. I’m taking more and more pleasure in imagining and creating them with the help of AI.
I’m formalizing this new trajectory by renaming the newsletter simply Thomas’ Notes, a space that reflects my curiosity and my work as a ghostwriter, which has had a record year.
For someone who was still a banker just a few years ago, who would have thought.
Enjoy the holiday season.
Thomas