BACK MATTER

About the author

Doug Scott grew up in North Shields. He left school at sixteen, turned down a job at the Swan Hunter shipyards, and spent his twenties on the edges of various things.

In 2003 he started carrentals.co.uk, which rented a million cars without owning any. In 2016 he started Redbrain, which he ran until 2025. When he stepped back it was managing over a billion pounds a year in sales for its clients, on sixty-eight million pounds in revenue, profitably, without venture capital. He owns most of it but no longer runs it. The people running it now are the reason it works.

Across the same twenty-five years he backed founders privately, through accelerators, and as a direct angel investor.

He believes a kitchen table is a piece of infrastructure — in the same way water, electricity, and the internet are pieces of infrastructure. He believes the patch of grass at the top of a street is one too. He believes an aunt's house eight doors down is one. He believes a hand of cards in his grandmother's kitchen was one. He believes the people who held that infrastructure in place are the people the machines are missing.

He is the author of three books: If This Road, orphans.ai, and theheld.ai.

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