The man who named
the Exponential Gap
Somewhere in the 1990s, a young journalist at The Economist was writing about the internet for readers who mostly thought it was a phase. He was the publication's first-ever internet correspondent. The column didn't last long - not because readers ignored it, but because the internet stopped being a beat and became the entire story. That journalist was Azeem Azhar. He never stopped explaining technology. He just got better at it.
Azhar's central idea is both simple and alarming: technology advances on exponential curves, while human institutions - laws, companies, governments, norms - move linearly. The gap between those two speeds is where all the interesting problems live. He calls it the Exponential Gap, and he spent a career building the intellectual scaffolding to explain it. The 2021 book came after decades of watching the gap widen.
But the idea predates the book. In 2015 - two years before Substack launched - Azhar started Exponential View, a weekly email about technology and its consequences. He didn't know it would become a media business. He was just trying to think in public, with an audience. That audience grew to 152,000 free subscribers and earned the newsletter a spot at number seven in Technology on Substack globally. Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify, eventually called it "one of the best for understanding how tech can solve our biggest problems."
Azhar's journey to this point is not the straight line that retrospective profiles tend to draw. He read PPE at Merton College, Oxford, won the Gladstone Memorial Essay Prize, and then spent the 1990s moving between The Guardian, The Economist, and the BBC - where he helped design and launch BBC Online, one of Britain's first serious internet editorial experiments. He was writing about a world that didn't fully exist yet.
In 2009, he founded PeerIndex, a startup that used machine learning to map influence across social media graphs. It was early. It was right. It won the Europas Grand Prix in 2011 and was acquired by Brandwatch in 2014. The startup chapter ended, and the media chapter accelerated.
The Bloomberg Originals series "Exponentially," launched in September 2023, puts Azhar in a chair across from the people building the future: Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Vinod Khosla, Niall Ferguson. The format is long-form conversation - no debate, no hot takes, just the kind of interview where you can hear someone actually thinking. It fits Azhar's posture exactly. He is neither a booster nor a skeptic. He is a cartographer, drawing maps of territory that is still forming.
He is an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, a Visiting Fellow at Oxford's Martin School, and a Digital Fellow at Stanford's Digital Economy Lab. He co-chairs the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Complex Risks. He has invested in over 50 startups since 1999, with exits to both Amazon and Microsoft. He advises McKinsey, Accenture, and Microsoft.
None of which fully explains the newsletter. The newsletter exists because Azhar has a specific skill - he can take something genuinely difficult (transformer architectures, energy transition economics, the political economy of platform monopolies) and render it comprehensible without making it simple. He writes as though the reader is smart but busy, and has a 3-to-5-year horizon in mind. The Sunday morning ritual for 152,000 people persists because that combination is rare.
The meta-layer is interesting: he uses AI trained on 100,000 words of his own writing as an argument engine to critique his drafts. He built synthetic AI personas modeled on Vinod Khosla, Clayton Christensen, and John Paulson to help him scan hundreds of weekly inputs. He thinks of it as cognitive offloading, not cognitive surrender - a distinction he draws carefully and publicly, because he thinks the difference matters.
His username across Twitter/X, Instagram, and Medium is simply @azeem - a single-word handle that is either luck or the spoils of being very early. Probably the second. He was writing about the internet before most people had email. Thirty years later, he is still explaining where it's going.
"When rapid technological change arrives, it first brings turmoil, then people adapt, and then eventually, we learn to thrive."- Azeem Azhar, The Exponential Age
The Exponential Age
EXPONENTIAL
AGE AZEEM AZHAR
The central argument: AI, solar, batteries, and genomics are all advancing on exponential curves. Human institutions - law, culture, politics, corporations - move linearly. The widening chasm between those two speeds drives polarization, inequality, and unchecked corporate power. Azhar's name for this chasm is the Exponential Gap, and the book is an attempt to give readers the mental models to navigate it.
Published 2021 by Diversion Books (US) and Random House (UK). Named a Financial Times Best Book of the Year.
30 years,
one through-line
How to think with AI
- Azhar's mental models
"State-sized companies are on the rise - and they are challenging our most basic assumptions about the role of private corporations."- Azeem Azhar
Quotes that land
"Where workers do lose their jobs due to automation, it's not because they themselves are replaced by some piece of software. It's often because the firms they work for fail."
"The mantra that technology is bad is really, really quite unhelpful."
"In general, if an organization needs to do something that uses computation, and that task is too expensive today, it probably won't be too expensive in a couple of years."
"This is the Janus face of work in the Exponential Age. Those who are well-educated and lucky can thrive. Those who aren't might find themselves trapped in an unprecedentedly punitive workplace."
"I want to help people think like 'exponentialists.' The old rule books and business books don't necessarily apply anymore."
"A quick survey of New York Times articles from a century ago reveals that Americans were apprehensive about elevators, the telephone, the television and more." On technology anxiety.
What he's actually done
Things worth
knowing
What he's been
up to
In late 2024, Azhar published "The Next 24 Months in AI," noting that the generative AI sector had hit approximately $60 billion in annual revenue in 2025 - roughly 230% year-over-year growth, a pace comparable to early cloud adoption. He co-authored "AI in 2025: The Great Normalisation" with Nathan Benaich, predicting that AI miracles would become routine, consumer AI would become seamless, and generative gaming would emerge as a breakthrough category.
In February 2025, he published a Bloomberg commentary arguing that AI will upend a basic assumption about how companies are organized. In March 2025, he delivered a keynote at ProMat 2025 on AI opportunities for supply chains, covering AI-energy infrastructure bottlenecks and re-localization trends driven by renewables.
He appeared on DW News in early 2025 discussing Europe's response to DeepSeek, and continued his work with Microsoft on how AI agents are transforming workplace structures. The Exponential View Substack continues publishing weekly every Sunday.