I build marketplaces, AI products, and founder communities.
I'm Adam Alpert — founder, builder, and MIT Sloan MBA. I started a company in a dorm room, took it through Y Combinator, and I've been building at the intersection of technology and human connection ever since.
I grew up making films and posting them online. Studied history at Brown, where I spent 40 days in the Alaskan wilderness and built the first version of what would become Pangea. After graduation, I turned that student project into a real company — taking it through Y Combinator's W21 batch, raising $3.3M, and growing it into an AI-native staffing platform operating in 150+ countries. Along the way, I started building founder communities in New York and Cambridge — curated groups of ambitious people who meet IRL. Now I'm at MIT Sloan, going deep on agentic AI systems and figuring out what comes next.
The future of work is fractional. AI makes small teams more powerful than large organizations. The best talent wants flexibility, autonomy, and the ability to work on multiple things at once.
Distribution beats product. The companies that win aren't the ones with the best features — they're the ones with the best networks and the deepest trust.
Real communities can't be built in a feed. Curated, in-person, high-trust networks are the antidote to algorithmic isolation — and they'll become more valuable, not less, in an AI-first world.
Ship fast, then systematize. Get to market, learn from actual customers, then build the systems to scale what works. Not the other way around.
[What I'm working on]
// Where my time and energy goes
Pangea.app
The first AI-native staffing platform for fractional creative, marketing, and growth talent. Built from a Brown dorm room through YC to a profitable marketplace operating in 150+ countries. I do everything — strategy, data engineering, shipping code, talking to customers.
Founder Communities
Curated IRL founder networks in New York and Cambridge — intimate dinners, meaningful collisions, and a custom-built platform I developed from scratch. The NYC network has grown to 5,000+ with ~50 paid members.
MIT Sloan
Deep in agentic AI — building experimental platforms around agentic CRMs, memory systems, and agent-to-agent interactions. On the MIT $100K leadership team and bridging Sloan with the Media Lab.
Also built: Reprally — Head of Product for a 3-sided CPG marketplace. SurviveAI — offline survival app powered by on-device LLMs.
[Writing]
// Thoughts on marketplaces, communities, and building