Mind Club is run by Aggie Branczyk.
Aggie has a PhD in quantum physics from the University of Queensland, and spent seven years at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo teaching in the PSI Masters program, an intensive one-year theoretical physics bootcamp. She was heavily involved in curriculum design and developing problem sets for topics at the frontier of the field, where no teaching materials existed yet.
After that, she spent time at IBM Quantum, holding roles that ranged from technical work to leadership. She left in 2024 to start Quantum Salon, a strategic communication studio for the quantum tech ecosystem. She's based in Waterloo, Ontario.
During all of this, she become fascinated with the interplay between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards in knowledge work. Academia skews heavily toward intrinsic rewards: you do the work because the work is rewarding in itself. Industry skews the other way: the deliverable is what matters, and the thinking that produced it is largely beside the point. Neither gave her the balance she was looking for. Building her own practice is partly her attempt to find it.
AI has added a new angle. For most knowledge workers, the two have historically come bundled together. Whether your focus was on the satisfaction of working things out or on the deliverable, you typically got the other in some measure. Now AI is starting to unbundle that. The outputs can still get produced (the document, the analysis, the code), but the deep level of thinking that used to produce them is no longer required. Many people who do knowledge work are starting to notice this as well.
Aggie wondered if there was something she could do to help mitigate this loss. The result is Mind Club.