In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Alex Komoroske, the co-founder and CEO of Common Tools. Alex has spent his career thinking about how individual incentives can add up to significant collective outcomes.
Before starting Common Tools, he spent more than a decade at Google leading product management for the Chrome web platform, ambient computing, AR, and Search, and later served as Head of Corporate Strategy at Stripe.
We traced his slow (emergent) hunch from an early fascination with Wikipedia, through his years building internet-scale systems at Google, to his current work rethinking how AI is architected.
A big part of our conversation centered on emergence: why the most durable systems grow from the bottom up, and what that means for product design, org culture, and the future of technology - especially AI.
We also spoke about the hidden security risks in today’s AI ecosystem: why “chat” may not be the defining paradigm for complex work, how fusing data to apps risks locking us into an AI monoculture, and why policies should travel with data if we want healthier emergent effects.
It’s always fun catching up with Alex. Hope you enjoy!
Chapters: