I write from inside the intelligence transition. When capability is abundant, standing gets scarce. https://xitter.cf/t.co/m9kfJiM0XB
Arizona, USA
Joined April 2025
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In 1999, I re-proposed to my wife in case the world ended at midnight.
Now there’s no single midnight — just the ongoing discovery of what intelligent systems can do, intended and otherwise.
That’s the work. New essay, free subscription always:
dougstandley.com/essays/no-s…
ALT Y2K came down to one midnight. Intelligent systems won’t — and someone still has to make them work on an ordinary Tuesday.
Doug Standley retweeted
We are launching a PHP Capture the Flag challenge integrated with our Bug Bounty program to test our WAF protections. Security researchers are invited to bypass our defenses and capture the flag to help make the Internet safer. cfl.re/4iqHaQ1
Microsoft offering voluntary buyouts to around 60,000 employees is an interesting signal.
Over the past five years, its revenue has grown from $198B to $332B, while headcount has stayed around 220,000.
The business has grown substantially without a comparable increase in the number of people.
I think AI will make this pattern more common over the next few years. Companies will be able to automate more routine work, move faster, and get more out of the teams they already have.
That doesn't mean hiring will stop or every role will disappear. Some teams will grow, others will change, and some companies may need fewer people to do the same work.
But the old assumption that growing a business means growing headcount may become less reliable.
The interesting question is what companies do with that extra productivity. Do they build more, serve customers better, and create new opportunities? Or do they simply use it to reduce costs?
The technology is only part of the story. How leaders choose to use it matters just as much.
There’s a lot of capital going into AI, and Nvidia’s $3B investment in Meta is a good example.
I understand the bet. Better AI creates more opportunities, and both companies are positioned to benefit.
But I keep coming back to one thing: the economics.
Building better models is one challenge. Turning them into products people rely on and are willing to pay for is another.
I’ll be watching how well the returns catch up with the spending.
Doug Standley retweeted
As of today @stripepress officially has *two* full-time editors: myself & @_theplaza!
Eloise comes to us from Folio, where she was a literary agent and nurtured by some of the best in the business.
~1.3 million books later we’re still only *just* getting started, and have huge ambitions to grow. More job postings coming in the next few weeks for NYC-based roles 😌📚
Anthropic's IPO could tell us a lot about where the AI industry is headed.
The company reportedly generated $16.3B in revenue in the first half of 2026, alongside an $80.7B net loss, largely driven by changes in the fair value of convertible bonds.
That distinction matters. The reported loss shouldn't be treated as a straightforward measure of cash burned.
But there's a bigger question here.
AI companies are growing revenue quickly. What will it cost to sustain that growth as spending on compute, model training, infrastructure, and talent continues to rise?
Investors won't just be looking at how capable these models are becoming. They'll want to know whether that capability can translate into a durable, profitable business.
Anthropic's IPO is more than one company's move into public markets. It's a test of how much investors believe in the future of frontier AI, and how much they're willing to pay for that belief.
Revenue growth matters. But the economics will ultimately determine how valuable that growth really is.
Doug Standley retweeted
CONGRATS Anthropic on their S-1 filing! Unsurprising, but first observations: inflection in operating profit, strong emphasis on novel discovery/bio, mismatch b/w consumption based revenue and long term compute obligations, limited shareholder influence. a lot of case studies!
Doug Standley retweeted
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful
-- Sigmund Freud
Doug Standley retweeted
Who owns the benefits of AI? In this essay I co-authored with @IasonGabriel for the DeepMind Institute, we offer four moral arguments — grounded in rights, reciprocity, fairness, and beneficence — that together make the philosophical case that the benefits of AI should reach everyone.
Read the piece here and let us know what you think: institute.deepmind.com/essay…
The feedback to No Single Midnight has been great — thank you!
Stay tuned for Part 2
In 1999, I re-proposed to my wife in case the world ended at midnight.
Now there’s no single midnight — just the ongoing discovery of what intelligent systems can do, intended and otherwise.
That’s the work. New essay, free subscription always:
dougstandley.com/essays/no-s…
ALT Y2K came down to one midnight. Intelligent systems won’t — and someone still has to make them work on an ordinary Tuesday.
Doug Standley retweeted
This really is one of @BillMaher’s best-ever monologues, and I don’t say that just because I got a namecheck. Tldr: Socialism is what old people already get and young people want a piece of it.
We pushed a small but important #UXDesign update, fix a few bugs, tweaked rendering, and expanded context — take a look.
Also, this week packaging it up and open sourcing it.
#BookLovers #readingcommunity
I’ve tracked my reading for years. Now my bookshelves are public.
831 books.
One shelf per year. Blue marks connect books to my essays.
Take a look—I’d love to hear what you think (DM for more info).
What book changed how you read or write?
dougstandley.com/shelf/
#BookTwitter
Doug Standley retweeted
I think @NaveenGRao is one of the most under-discussed but brilliant entrepreneurs of our time.
He is able to consistently see where a market is going and place himself ahead of it.
- Founded Nervana and sold to Intel for $400M.
- Founded MosaicML and sold to Databricks for $1.3BN.
- Raised $450M seed round at $4.5BN valuation for Unconventional.
This success has given him license to say things that few people would have the confidence to say.
- “Most software investors today are f*****”.
- “Agentic coding is overrated and uninvestable”.
- “It is completely techno-optimist to assume companies will have their own models and own their own intelligence”.
This discussion rallies against some of the conventional beliefs of the valley in a way you have not heard before.
My notes from the discussion with Naveen below. (Link in comments).
1. Are Software Investors F**ked?
Pure software investors are "kind of f**ked" because SaaS will no longer be where margin is gained. Since around 2010, cloud services let founders spin up products quickly and chase $100M to $200M markets. As applications shift toward the intelligence layer, Naveen does not see software being a huge market in 20 years.
Do you agree software investors are f***** in a much more infra/hardware centric landscape @PalmerLuckey @mttgrmm @shaunmmaguire
2. Why Agentic Coding Is Overrated and an Uninvestable Category
Agentic coding is overrated as a market because the value moves to the model provider. The harness and the IDE are not very sticky, and people move between tools fluidly. Outside of the model providers, it is a category he would not invest in today.
What is the single biggest reason why the coding agent should not sit within the model provider @ScottWu46 @matanSF
3. Is It Completely Techno-Optimist to Assume That Companies Will Own Their Own Intelligence With Their Own Specialized Models?
Owning your own intelligence takes scale. A firm like Cooley can invest to make it happen, while a mom-and-pop shop in Nebraska will buy an out-of-the-box service instead. Big players will customize because rivals using AI to supercharge their margins force them to.
4. Where Is the Value in the Robotics Stack?
The value in robotics will not sit in the model alone. Naveen invests in companies building robotics models and expects them to end up building end-to-end devices, selling the robot together with a model that does something very well.
Where will the most value accrue in the robotics stack? Model? Data? Hardware? @tonyzzhao @joshavata @bercankilic
5. Why Steve Jurvetson Is My Favorite Investor Meeting
Of roughly a thousand investor meetings, the one that stood out was with @FutureJurvetson. He geeked out on numeric representations and marked up the papers Naveen sent him like a technical colleague. In 2014, when no one had pitched a hardware startup in 10 years, he was keen to invest because he had been thinking about the space himself.
6. How American Investors Differ From European Investors
Founders in the US are given permission to think bigger. In Europe, the investor network is so conservative that a founder with a crazy idea is written off as mad, while in the US the same founder is seen as awesome for thinking big.
EF has largely moved focus to the US and SF specifically, would you agree with this @Alicebentinck @matthewclifford?
7. Why the Inference Market Will Be $10 Trillion Within 10 Years
AI models alone will be a trillion-dollar market in the next few years, and inference will reach $10 trillion within 10 years. Cutting the cost of delivering a token by one order of magnitude effectively 10Xs the market, since the base of potential uses grows more than 10X, which Naveen ties to Jevons paradox.
What does no one see that everyone should see about the inference market @GavinSBaker @lqiao @bernhardsson
Doug Standley retweeted
Just wrapped up a 3+ hour deep dive into the mind of @DougStandley
It was a beautiful and magnificent ride.
To everyone out there stuck on what to do in this crazy, fast-changing world Doug left me with this:
“Take you’re feet out of the concrete and just go do/build something.”
Podcast drop next week!
Doug Standley retweeted
the current fear is is that AI homogenizes culture and turns humans into passive consumers
one counterpoint: in Go, human play showed very little improvement from 1950 to 2016 until alphago beat lee sedol - then human decision quality jumped. players started developing moves that were distinct both from previous human moves and from the novel moves introduced by machine intelligence
this seems more likely to me - fun times ahead
Doug Standley retweeted
"The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen." - Phil Knight, Shoe Dog
Ask yourself which of these groups you're in:
- The cowardly
- The weak, or
- Those who take on the challenge.
You can change groups at any time.
I woke up at 12:15 this morning thinking about Y2K, trust, and where we are with AI.
In 1999, I spent New Year's Eve wondering what would happen when the clocks rolled over. I was running a wireless infrastructure company that had acquired 18 companies in 12 months. We had ambitious technology plans, competing systems, and a lot of integration work ahead of us.
I wanted what the technology could make possible. I also had a company to run. A great demo wasn't enough. Someone had to make the whole thing work.
I think about that a lot with AI today.
I'm genuinely excited about what increasingly capable systems can do. But capability is only part of the story. We also need to figure out when people should trust these systems, who takes responsibility when they fail, and what happens to the people affected by their decisions.
Trust isn't something you get to declare. You earn it through how you build, how you respond when things go wrong, and whether people have a way to challenge the outcome.
I'm working through these questions in an essay. The more I explore, the more I realize how much there is to figure out.
I'm optimistic about what's possible. I also want to help do the work required to make it reliable.
dougstandley.com/essays/no-s…
