About

I’m Alex Brogan — founder and writer based between San Francisco and Sydney.

I studied finance at the University of Western Australia, graduating as valedictorian. I then started my career at Goldman Sachs in investment banking before realizing the most valuable work I could do wouldn’t happen inside a spreadsheet. Since then, I’ve led go-to-market at early-stage startups and grown a large audience around my writing.

Last year, I sold my first company — an AI media startup called The Intelligence Age — to The Neuron, one of the most widely read AI newsletters in the world. I'm now exploring what to build next.

This series began as an attempt to clarify my own understanding but has evolved into this comprehensive review of humanity's most consequential technological inflection point.

The noise around AI is deafening — hype, doom, distraction. But behind it is a real signal: something is shifting fast, and most people are unprepared. This is the beginning of a new economic, cognitive, and even civilizational system. And we’re accelerating into it with our eyes half open.

This series is my attempt to map what matters:

1. Where we are

2. What’s likely to happen

3. And what founders, operators, and investors should be doing about it

To share feedback on this work, you can reach me on X or email me.

What next?

1. If you're in Sydney or San Francisco, planning on building in AI or would like to attend a series of round table dinners to discuss the implications of AI, send me an email to get added to the list.

2. If you're currently building or looking for funding, send me an email. I’m a scout for Australian Venture Capital Firm AirTree Ventures (~$1.3bn fund).

Related work

• The AGI arms race: A look at the unstoppable forces driving AI progress.

• The Runaway AI Train: How AI systems are increasingly contributing to their own development.

• The Intelligence Landing is Near: How we've never seen so many experts urgently calling for safety measures despite enormous economic incentives to rush forward.

• Intelligence Is Not Unique: How deep learning has succeeded in creating intelligent systems by implementing prediction as the core function.

• Increasing returns to focus: The winners of the next decade will be those who can leverage AI without succumbing to the relentless tsunami of modern day distractions.

• Agency is your ability to shape circumstances: How every extraordinary human throughout history shared one trait: they refused to believe they couldn't shape reality.

• What trait do 9/10 billionaires credit for their success?: A deep dive into how to be more agentic.

• Problems worth thinking about: 80+ of the world’s most pressing problems.

• How the world might look in 30 years: How I think things will be in the future, based on the approximate year I think they’ll come true.

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