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.
52,000+
Newsletter subscribers, September 2026
814
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
Playbooks organize a subject's story around decisive periods and practical principles. Follow the sources and read any dated update notes alongside the analysis.
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
Playbooks connect a subject's story with decisions and principles you can apply to your own work.
Source links let you revisit the material behind specific claims. Dated update notes describe which claims were checked and the scope of that review.
AI helps organize source material and draft articles. Research depth and review history vary across the library.
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