FRONT MATTER

Under my own name

A word about who is writing this, and why it is unusual.

I am Doug Scott. I grew up in North Shields. I ran a company called Redbrain for nine years. Before that I ran carrentals.co.uk. I have backed founders, privately, for twenty-odd years. I am sixty-two. I have not written a book before. If you know me, you did not expect me to.

This is the middle book of three. The first, If This Road, was written in the voice of an imagined woman narrator. The third, theheld.ai, is closer to my own voice but holds its scenes at a careful distance. This one is different. This one is me, on the page, under my own name.

I want to say plainly why that is unusual. For me, and for the moment the book is being written in.

For me, it is unusual because I have spent twenty-five years not doing this. I have not given interviews. I have not spoken at conferences. I have not written articles. I have not posted. The temperament that built the companies was the same temperament that kept the companies out of the public record. Putting myself on the cover of a book is the first real breach of that temperament in a quarter of a century. The book's own argument is that the act of writing about this kind of practice is, at the margin, a threat to the practice. I am doing it anyway. I am sixty-two. If some of us do not say some of it now, it will not be passed on.

For the moment, it is unusual because the wider culture is going in the other direction. More and more of what used to be carried in private is being pulled into public view. The people who carried the quiet practice the book is about — the ones who paid the hotel bill and did not mention it, who replied in three words after a year of silence, who set a place at the table for a son nobody had told them was coming — are, as a category, less willing than they ever have been to be named in anything that might end up in a search result. Their stories are being lost as they withdraw from the record.

My family is here under their own names. Some of them I can still ask. Some I cannot. My mam, Margaret. My dad, Albert. My other half. My daughter, who is unnamed because she is my daughter. My grandmothers, Nana Sally and Little Nana. My uncles, Charlie and Noel. Aunty Sandra, my dad's sister, eight doors down.

Beyond family, a small number of people are named with their consent or because their public role makes naming consistent with what is already on the record. Tade Oyerinde, the founder you will meet at Euston in chapter one. Paul Smith, who built Ignite above a pub in Newcastle. Mike Burgess, who ran the Phoenix Detached Youth Project on Chirton High Street, and Luke Johnson, who runs it now. Sherman Lee, the man who turned round at his own fortieth and said what you doing here. Kathryn, Helen's daughter, who was on the build with us in April 2020. Mike Dickson, in the chain of introductions that brought me back to the streets I grew up on. Gordon, my sister's husband. A man called Si, who I lived with for six months in my twenties and have not been able to find since, and Tim and Chris, who I lived with for a while in the same period and have not been able to find either, are all named because their scenes need the names to carry what they carry.

Two scenes turn on people who are deliberately not named. One man asked not to be. One I have chosen not to ask. Both are the book working as it argues for. The names are not what the book is asking you to remember. The shape is.

A later edition will restore further names of those who say yes. For now, the book is anonymous where it can be, specific where it has to be, and honest about which is which.

This is one of three books. Right now, it exists as a file — a PDF someone sent you, a link someone posted, a document you found in an email thread. It is not a book in a shop. It did not come with a cover you could hold. You probably did not decide to read it the way you would decide to buy a book. Someone passed it to you, or you stumbled on it, and you opened it, and here you are. That is how most of what matters in a life gets to a person. The book you are reading is itself a small example of what it is about.

If you are not the reader I was writing for, hello. I wrote this one for people I have spent twenty-five years working alongside — technologists, CEOs, investors, builders, the people who can, if they want to, change the shape of what is being made. If that is not you, you are welcome here anyway. The quieter companion to this one is called If This Road, in the voice of an imagined woman walking through the pressured decade we are all in. The third book, theheld.ai, is about the working relationship between a person and a machine, and is closer to the people building the machines than this one is. All three are the same argument, told at three different distances. Whichever door you came in through, there are two more rooms.

We may meet one day.