Alex Brogan

Founder. Investor. Amateur writer.

About

Grew up in Perth, Western Australia.
Studied at the University of Western Australia, graduated valedictorian.
Played water polo for Australia.
Briefly worked at Goldman Sachs.
Built and sold Intelligence Age, an AI media company.
Co-founded Maple.
Scout for AirTree Ventures.
Built Faster Than Normal, a research library on the most consequential people and companies in history.
Top 0.005% Spotify listener of Rufus Du Sol.
Live in San Francisco.

Writings

Investments

Questions I'm currently thinking about

How do you measure the contribution of a venture capital firm to human flourishing — and what changes when you can?
What is the rate-limiting factor in humanity's collective learning rate, and what would it take to remove it?
What would a civilization-scale R&D allocation system actually look like, and who would be qualified to run it?
What would it take to build an oracle for the world — a system that processes social, market, and research signals into a real-time map of what's actually happening?
What is the equivalent of capitalism — a self-correcting incentive system — for truth-telling in democracies?
If venture shifted from passive selection (waiting for founders) to active coordination (identifying what civilization needs and equipping people to work on it), what institution would that actually be?
Why did the great venture incubators (Idealab, Kleiner, Rocket Internet, Flagship, Sutter Hill) stop being copied — and what would it take to rebuild that capability inside a modern fund structure?
What does scientific publishing look like once AI automates most of the research it was built to disseminate?
What does a media-first private equity firm look like, and why hasn't anyone built one at scale?
If AI systems begin training their own successors within the next two to three years, what does the institutional architecture for governing recursive self-improvement actually need to look like — and who builds it?
What are the next categories of genuine scarcity in a world of abundant intelligence?
What are the preconditions that produced Wiz, Snowflake, and Palo Alto Networks — and can those preconditions be manufactured?
What is the next material base — at the level of ammonia, cement, plastics, or steel — that civilization will depend on, and is unsolved?
How do you get widespread adoption of healthy practices in a population? Most of the answer is persuasion — so what's the persuasion technology of the next century?
What is the best heuristic for identifying genuine experts on a topic — or for choosing what to believe when apparent experts disagree?
When most knowledge work can be done by machines, where does meaning come from — and what is the institution that helps the next generation find it?

Beliefs

The principle of optimism is the only defensible default. Anything that isn't a law of physics is moldable, given sufficient knowledge, time, and the right people. Treating the present arrangement of the world as fixed is an empirical error, not a virtue.

Commitment is upstream of capability. You cannot know in advance whether you're on the right mountain; the act of committing is what produces the conditions under which you can find out. People who keep their options open are usually paying rent on all of them and climbing none.

Intuition is compressed evidence, not feeling. When something pulls at you across years, it is thousands of unindexed observations your conscious mind hasn't yet decoded. The error is dismissing it because you can't articulate it. The larger error is acting on it before you've stress-tested it against reality.

Process compounds; outcome-thinking does not. Every major win in my life has come from showing up to a defined process for long enough that the outcomes became inevitable. Most ambition is performed; consistency is the rarer signal.

The level of ambition is essentially free. Building a $10m business and a $10bn business demand similar personal sacrifice. The latter attracts better people, better capital, and more interesting problems. Lowering ambition rarely lowers the cost.

Specificity is the price of seriousness. “I want to build something meaningful” is not a plan; it's a wish wearing professional clothes. The exercise of forcing your goals into precise, falsifiable form is itself how you discover whether you actually mean them.

Most timelines are fabricated. Someone with half your IQ is earning ten times your income because they don't doubt themselves. The constraint is rarely capability — it is the implicit permission you've granted yourself.

Choose your hard. Everything worthwhile is hard. The choice isn't between hard and easy; it's between the hard that compounds and the hard that doesn't.

There is rarely anything new under the sun. Almost every important company is a recombination of existing ideas applied at the right moment with better execution. Originality is overrated; cross-domain pattern recognition is dramatically underrated.

Volume corrodes standards. Posting for its own sake — content, opinions, presence — flattens whatever made you worth listening to in the first place. Speak when you have something to say. The compounding case for quality is overwhelming over a career.

People rarely change; believe them when they show you who they are. The first time someone reveals their character is usually accurate. Most disappointment is the cost of having ignored an early signal because the surrounding evidence was inconvenient.

Truth-seeking has an unusually low ratio of practitioners to admirers. Most people would rather be morally just than empirically correct. The willingness to be wrong out loud, repeatedly, in pursuit of an accurate model is a rarer trait than IQ and compounds harder.

Reasoning by analogy is how most people avoid thinking. Analogies are the comfortable middle layer between reality and abstraction. First-principles reasoning is uncomfortable precisely because it strips away the borrowed scaffolding most people are leaning on.

The need to feel smart is one of the most expensive habits in the world. It blocks you from looking stupid long enough to learn something genuinely new. The people who advance fastest in any field are those willing to ask the question everyone else is too embarrassed to ask.

Direction beats optimization. A roughly correct direction at high speed beats a perfectly optimized plan in the wrong one. Most strategic deliberation is procrastination wearing a tie.

The default state of any institution is sclerosis. Bureaucracies do not maintain themselves at their founding quality; they decay toward whatever produces the least friction internally, which is usually the opposite of what produces the most value externally.

The hard, neglected quest is the only one worth taking on early. If the path is well-trodden, the returns have already been competed away. The interesting opportunities sit in the space between what is obviously possible and what is obviously impossible.

Most people are running someone else's program. The beliefs they defend, the careers they pursue, the partners they choose — most of it is inherited script they have never paused to inspect. The unexamined life is not just unworthy of living; it is statistically the modal life.

Capital allocation is mostly belief allocation. Where money flows is downstream of which stories the relevant 500 people find compelling. The implication is that narrative is an industrial input, not a soft skill.

The most useful question is usually “what does the limit look like?” Where do venture incubations end up? What does the AI-native economy look like fully formed? What is the end state of a media business with infinite distribution? Reasoning from the limit forces you past the comfortable incrementalism that dominates most strategic thinking.

Projects I think should happen

A gamified, interdisciplinary reading platform that maps the great books, papers, and lectures into a structured curriculum for understanding history, science, and human nature.
An AI-enhanced library that translates the world's greatest books into higher-fidelity learning experiences, extracting and reinforcing their core lessons.
“Munger's mental models for all of reality” — a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary framework taxonomy with predictive applications to history, markets, and human behavior.
An open, AI-searchable database of global research papers that auto-translates academic findings into commercial opportunities with built-in market sizing and competitor analysis.
A public, continuously updated repository summarizing the state of knowledge across every major field, distilled from interviews with top researchers (e.g., “where we are on antiviral drug development”).
An interactive world history platform that turns timelines, causal chains, and primary sources into navigable, explorable maps rather than static text.
A network of retreat centers combining Hoffman-style emotional work, supervised psychedelics, and physical rehabilitation under one roof.
A modern luxury hotel chain styled after Victorian and colonial-era grandeur, designed for the high-end traveler who wants atmosphere over minimalism.
A submarine cruise line offering multi-day underwater voyages as a new luxury travel category.
A “third place” chain combining a café, gym, library, and longevity clinic — a daily-use space for knowledge workers who care about health and focus.
Houseboat communities for remote workers, equipped with Starlink and built around canal and coastal infrastructure as a low-cost, mobile alternative to home ownership.
An industrial conglomerate that vertically integrates the foundational inputs (energy, materials, robotics) for the next generation of physical industries.
A high-speed rail network connecting major Australian cities, plus key cross-border corridors.
A construction firm specializing in ancient and classical architectural styles for civic, residential, and commercial buildings.
A software platform that helps democratic governments allocate budgets more efficiently using economic modeling and citizen input.
A consumer-grade decision-support tool for voters, translating policy proposals into expected effects on their lives.
A nationwide “personal census” that interviews citizens every decade on their values, priorities, and expectations, releasing anonymized data and giving each citizen their own longitudinal record.
A Thiel Fellowship for Australia: $100K grants and a structured program for Australian under-22s building companies instead of attending university.
A talent-spotting agency operating inside top universities, identifying exceptional students for venture, research, and operating roles before graduation.
A structured parenting curriculum delivered as a multi-year program, covering child development, education, and family systems.