Understand what it takes to put AI to work
Building with AI means making decisions about reliability, cost, security, and the people who have to use it. Those decisions shape which products survive and which companies win.
Chain of Thought follows those decisions through conversations with the people making them, and essays that connect their experience to changes across technology and business.
I’m Conor Bronsdon, the show’s host. I interview founders, engineers, and technology leaders about what they’re building, what broke, and what they’ve learned. In this newsletter, I pull on the ideas that deserve more time: how teams evaluate agents, where infrastructure becomes a competitive advantage, and what acquisitions reveal about a market.
Why subscribe?
Up to four free emails a month with deep strategic analysis from a cross-domain perspective:
Essays with a point of view - Analysis of AI infrastructure, developer tools, consolidation trends, and the decisions behind them
Ideas from interviews and experience: Insights and technical details from the leaders and luminaries I talk to, backed by my evaluation and infrastructure experience at Modular, Galileo AI and LinearB
Practical experiments and frameworks - practical approaches for complex strategic decisions, and lessons from tools and projects I’m trying, including what doesn’t work.
Cross-domain pattern recognition - insights from AI, political campaigns, startups, marketing, and technical leadership
If you’re building a product, leading a technical team, or deciding where to invest your time and money in AI, this is written for you.
Who subscribes?
Developers, engineering leaders, VCs, founders, and executives who need deep dives, competitive intelligence and strategic context, not just news headlines. Recent subscribers include senior leaders at companies like Amazon, Gartner, Atlassian, and Microsoft, as well as Gergely Orosz writer of The Pragmatic Engineer, the largest technology newsletter on Substack 👇
Chain of Thought is for those who need to understand not just what’s happening, but why it matters and what comes next.
About Conor Bronsdon
I am an independent media operator and angel investor. I’ve led developer communities and marketing at Microsoft, LinearB, Galileo (acquired by Cisco) and Modular (acquired by Qualcomm). I previously built and co-hosted Dev Interrupted from zero to one, organized political campaigns, and evaluated AI systems, giving me a cross-domain perspective on how technology markets evolve and their interactions with broader societal trends.
You can also follow me on LinkedIn where I share insights with 13,000+ followers, or on X/ Twitter.
