Loading…
Faster Than Normal
Faster Than Normal turns biographies, company histories, and primary sources into practical playbooks for making better decisions.
The most consequential builders were obsessive students of what came before them. This library makes their accumulated experience searchable.
70,000+
Newsletter readers
812
Published playbooks
3 parts
Story, playbook, evidence
The point
01
See recurring moves across industries, eras, and careers before they become obvious.
02
Understand what worked, what failed, and the conditions that made each decision rational.
03
Turn history into mental models you can use when the answer is uncertain and the stakes are real.
04
Benefit from experiments other people already spent careers, companies, and fortunes running.
The research mechanism
Not chapter-by-chapter summaries. Each subject is reconstructed around decisive eras, reusable principles, and evidence you can inspect for yourself.
Enter the library
How specific knowledge, leverage, and long-term games shaped AngelList and a distinctive philosophy of wealth.
Read the playbook →
How a commodity product became a cultural object through category design, entertainment, and earned attention.
Read the playbook →
How obsessive product focus created a challenger brand—and what happens when growth outruns strategic discipline.
Read the playbook →
A note from Alex Brogan
I grew up in Perth, played water polo for Australia, worked briefly at Goldman Sachs, and sold my first company at 26. Across each chapter, I kept returning to the same advantage: learning from people who had already confronted the problem in front of me.
The best founders do this relentlessly. They collect biographies, case studies, and competitive histories until isolated facts become pattern recognition. Faster Than Normal began as my attempt to build that library for myself. It became a newsletter, then a structured research platform for anyone responsible for making consequential decisions.
The ambition is simple: compress decades of hard-won experience without flattening the context that made it useful.
Earned trust
Subject selection, source selection, structure, taxonomy, and final approval remain human decisions.
Claims are grounded in the underlying research, with citations carried into the published work.
AI assists with extraction and drafting. Nothing is published as raw model output.
One useful idea every week
Join 70,000+ founders, operators, and investors. Free, concise, and built to be applied.