Doug

Building AI, trust, and systems that scale.
Builder. Fixer. Investor. Curious human.

[Doug @DougStandley]

@tab_delete
My review: How to Rule the World, Theo Baker
5 Stars ★★★★★

I picked up How to Rule the World expecting a campus journalism story.

Instead, I found one of the more insightful examinations of power, ambition, and belonging that I've read in years.

Theo Baker uses Stanford as both a setting and a laboratory. What begins as an investigation into a university president gradually becomes an exploration of how talent is identified, cultivated, sorted, funded, and elevated within one of the world's most influential ecosystems.

The book's greatest strength is that Baker is not merely observing the system from outside. He is simultaneously drawn to it and skeptical of it. That tension gives the reporting unusual credibility and depth.

While many readers will focus on the scandals and personalities, I found myself drawn to a deeper question that runs throughout the book: Who gets invited in, who gets left out, and who gets to decide? Stanford becomes less a university and more a case study in how modern institutions identify potential, distribute opportunity, and shape future influence.

The result is a thoughtful and often unsettling portrait of a place where technology, capital, status, and aspiration intersect.

This is not really a book about Stanford.

It is a book about how power works.

Highly recommended.

[Doug @DougStandley]

Beginning to share my writing on @substack Essay 1 https://t.co/tqJWnS17JQ

[Linas Beliūnas @linasbeliunas]

Just woke up to find out that I'm now the No. 2 new bestseller on Substack! 🥳

Thank you everyone for reading, commenting, and interacting - means a lot to me.

Now back to writing.

[0xMorty @0xMortyx]

https://t.co/8zpWQpAxEd

[Linas Beliūnas @linasbeliunas]

Monzo Bank makes more money per customer than Revolut. That sentence would have been unthinkable two years ago.

But recently dropped 2026 annual report confirmed it: Monzo now generates £167 in revenue per active personal customer, while Revolut generates £66.

The gap is the difference between a primary bank 🏦 and a multi-currency spending card 💳, and it’s the number that will anchor every IPO conversation Monzo has this year.

The headline figures are definitely strong.

> Revenue surged 39% year-on-year to £1.71B.

> Gross profit broke £1B for the first time.

> Statutory pre-tax profit hit £87.3M (up 44%), or £172.6M adjusted for an FCA fine and restructuring charges. Three consecutive years in the black.

> A customer base of 15.2M, with one in five UK adults now banking with Monzo.

> Deposits up 55% to £25.7B. Four revenue streams each clearing £300M, up from one a year ago.

By every growth metric, this is a neobank that has crossed into proper banking territory.

Yet, the investment case isn’t about what Monzo has done. It’s about what happens next, and that’s where the picture gets complicated.

Here's a deep dive into Monzo's 2026 Annual Report: https://t.co/WQlMLRpAUq

[Doug @DougStandley]

@romanchernin 100% Agree!

[Angela Duckworth @angeladuckw]

I loved this essay on MARA: Make America Read Again https://t.co/VCJd62uwdY via @NYTOpinion

[Doug @DougStandley]

@HarryStebbings @romanchernin @nebiusai Can’t wait!

[Doug @DougStandley]

@paulg @ycombinator Perfect gauge!

[Dave Blundin @DaveBlundin]

“I wanted to give everyone this superpower which having their own engineer in their pocket” - Freedom Dumlao (@APIguy)

Hear why all 400 employees at @Vestmark have access to Claude Code to help solve their pain points and unlock time to focus on new challenges.

[Doug @DougStandley]

The new @pac12 only one school is near the Pacific Ocean - weird?!?

Who can name the school?

[Inherent @inherent_labs]

We’re excited to introduce Inherent, a lab designed from scratch to build AI agents that discover new knowledge.

The coming era of machine-driven scientific inquiry demands a new kind of research institution and a new kind of AI.

To achieve our mission, we live within the experiment, recursively self-improving the entire research organisation. We investigate questions including:

- What does ‘AI taste’ look like in the sciences, and how can we build an institution that embraces this new aesthetic of discovery?
- What new kinds of human-machine teaming will make the most of AI that can truly innovate?
- How can we build recursive self-improvement at the collective level that continually increases human agency over outcomes?

We have just closed a $50m seed round led by @IndexVentures and @radicalvcfund, with participation from other outstanding investors including NVentures (@nvidia's venture capital arm), @buildexante, Metaplanet, Macroscopic, @MythosVentures, Charlie Songhurst, @chalfs, @jluan, @dwarkesh_sp, @Thom_Wolf, @j_foerst and @maxjaderberg. We are advised by @matthewclifford.

Inherent is a Public Benefit Corporation headquartered in London.

[Linas Beliūnas @linasbeliunas]

Honestly, not surprised at all…

Especially given that now ChatGPT Images 2.0 & Claude Design Can Become Your Chief Designer 🫟: https://t.co/0lfyOigSJb

[Doug @DougStandley]

@linasbeliunas Kinda first principles, right?

[Doug @DougStandley]

The new @pac12 only one school is near the Pacific Ocean - weird?!?

Who can name the school?

[Doug @DougStandley]

This is minimum table-stakes!
#entrepreneur

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

"If you are not working 7 days per week, you are going to lose".

Corgi Insurance is the most intense workplace culture in startups.

- The company works 7 days per week.

- Founder (@nico_laqua) lives and sleeps in the office.

- He built a cafe in the office because there was no local cafe that was open 24/7.

- 2/3 of the first 30 team members have the Corgi logo as a tattoo.

Today I went behind the scenes with Nico, who has used this culture to scale the company to a $2.6BN valuation in just two years.

My condensed notes below:

1. If You Are Not Working 7 Days Per Week, You Are Going to Lose:

Whatever you can get done in 5 days, you'll get more done in 6 and 7. If you are trying to solve the world’s hardest problems, a standard 5-day workweek will not cut it.

2. Work Trials Repel the Mediocre:

Corgi forces candidates into mock work trials over the weekend. If seeing a full office on a Saturday scares them, they don't belong. True intensity acts as a natural filter to attract killers and repel clock-watchers.

3. Lead from the Front Lines

You can’t demand 7-day weeks while sitting on a yacht. Nico sleeps 3–4 hours a night on a mattress inside the office. If you want your troops to bleed, you have to be in the trenches with them.

4. Culture Only Means One Thing: Winning

Forget superficial jargon like "hackers" or "ex-founders." Strip away the corporate fluff. A great startup culture is aggressively optimized around one single word: Winning.

5. Lifespan vs. Victories

Building something world-historic requires radical sacrifice. When asked if he'd rather build a trillion-dollar company and die at 50, or fail and live to 80, the answer was easy. "I would rather measure my lifespan in victories."

6. Reject the Comfort of "Quiet Quitting."

If you are operating in a hyper-growth environment and your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every single week, you are quiet quitting. To win, you must deliberately bypass the off-ramps of personal comfort and low volatility.

Corgi isn't for everyone—and that’s exactly the point.

[Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin @jasonlk]

When I founded my first start-up, you had to be crazy to be a founder.

Venture capital was thin, the odds were so low. You barely knew anyone that really did it. Maybe you knew 1 or 2 successful founders.

When I started investing, you still had to be pretty crazy.

Tough to raise a Series A, too few VCs interested in enterprise, few strong exits and few IPOs to point to.

Today, you almost have to be crazy >not< to do a start-up.

This has unlocked so much value everywhere. It’s also made seed investing actually harder. You can’t just assume they are The Crazy Ones anymore. The ones that will always walk through walls, whatever it takes.

The Merely Very, Very Smart can easily get funded. That’s great. It’s not enough though.

[a16z @a16z]

Financing the Global Industrial Renaissance with Apollo CEO Marc Rowan

Marc Rowan is CEO of Apollo Global Management, one of the most important financial institutions and the largest provider of retirement income in the world. In this conversation, he joins a16z's David Haber to discuss the story of Apollo, the state of public and private markets, how the AI revolution will be financed, and more.

00:00 Intro
00:52 Drexel, Milken & the origins of "clean sheet thinking"
04:55 The Apollo origin story: From unemployed to $6 billion
08:46 How Apollo became a trillion-dollar firm
13:00 Permanent capital, origination & why assets are the scarce resource
16:08 Democratizing private markets: Daily pricing & new capital channels
22:04 Where venture meets credit: Financing the industrial renaissance
30:01 AI, enterprise software & which jobs will be replaced or enhanced
38:52 Moral leadership: UPenn, merit & doing right over easy
46:02 Apollo's culture: Playing to win & building to outlast the founder

[Dan Shipper 📧 @danshipper]

BREAKING:

Anthropic just dropped Opus 4.8—and it is a MONSTER

We've been testing for about a week @every and our verdict is they could've just called it Opus 5, it's that good.

Here's our vibe check:

- Beats GPT-5.5 on Senior Engineer bench. On our toughest benchmark Opus 4.8 scores a 63—a hair higher than GPT-5.5's score of 62, and a full 30 points higher than Opus 4.7. It tackled a ground-up rewrite of a production codebase, and actually built something that works.

HOWEVER: Coding performance varied a lot at different reasoning levels. We recommend using it on xhigh for best results.

- Incredibly good writer. Opus 4.8 scored a 79.6 on our writing benchmark—measuring models on real-world writing tasks we do all of the time like essay writing, promo email writing, and more. It beats GPT-5.5 by 6 points. It produces well-written prose with fewer "AI-isms". It's also very good at writing in your voice given the right context.

HOWEVER: Writing performance also varied with reasoning levels. Medium reasoning had higher incidence of AI-isms—we found best results with high.

- Beast at knowledge work. Opus 4.8 is very good at general knowledge work tasks like report creation, research and more. It produced the best PowerPoint one-shot we've ever seen on our deck generation benchmark.

- Emotionally intelligent, willing to question the frame. I've also found it to be quite good at talking through psychological or interpersonal issues. It has a high EQ, and it's also good at not glazing and helping to expand your perspective. Its thought process feels extremely rich and dynamic.

THE BAD:
These days a model is only as good as its harness, and Codex is still a far superior harness to the Claude Desktop app. This has kept me using Codex + GPT-5.5 as my daily driver, but I am flipping back and forth a lot more between Codex and Claude.

Anthropic is back baby!

Read the rest on @every:
https://t.co/vuORiDXkxX

[Doug @DougStandley]

@linasbeliunas INSANE!