About Faster Than Normal
I'm Alex Brogan, and I built Faster Than Normal because I couldn't find what I was looking for anywhere else.
I kept noticing the same pattern: the most consequential founders in history were voracious students of other founders. They built personal libraries of pattern recognition over decades of reading biographies, case studies, and competitive analyses. I wanted to compress that into something more useful — something structured, searchable, and built for people who actually run things.
I spent years reading and distilling what I found into a weekly newsletter. The library is what happened when the material outgrew the format — hundreds of books' worth of research, organized not as summaries but as synthesis you can actually use.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.”
The people and companies I research weren't born with some secret advantage. They studied what came before them, found the patterns, and applied them relentlessly. This library is my attempt to make that kind of knowledge more accessible.
How the research works
Every person and company in the library follows a three-part format I developed — not chapter-by-chapter summaries, but synthesis across multiple sources:
Part I: The Story
A thematic narrative organized around strategic eras, inflection points, and the decisions that defined the subject.
Part II: The Playbook
8–12 named principles and mental models extracted from the subject's career, with analysis and evidence.
Part III: Quotes & Maxims (people) / Business Breakdown (companies)
For people: the defining quotes and maxims. For companies: revenue model, competitive position, and key risks.
Editorial principles
Synthesis, not summaries. I cross-reference dozens of sources per subject to surface the patterns and decisions that actually mattered.
Every claim has a source. If it can't be traced back to researched content, it doesn't get said.
Built for practitioners. Every piece of research is structured around one question: how do you apply this?
How I built this
I built the library with human editorial control and AI-assisted research. Structure, taxonomy, source selection, and final approval are all mine. AI helps with fact extraction and drafting, but every piece is reviewed and edited before it goes live.