AI IN PRODUCTION, ON INFRASTRUCTURE YOUR FIRM OWNS — 1435 mm
The rails your firm runs AI on. Including after we're gone.
Standard Gauge puts investment firms onto a common, portable substrate for running AI in production — on infrastructure you own, using patterns you can hand to anyone. A gauge is a specification, not a vendor.
01The break of gauge
Early railways each picked their own track width. Every regional line was internally coherent and none of them connected. Where two gauges met, freight came off one train and went onto another by hand. The industry called it a break of gauge, and for decades it was simply the cost of doing business.
Standardization is what turned a collection of regional lines into a network. Not better locomotives. An agreed distance between two rails.
Firms are adopting AI the same way the railways laid track. A pilot in one group, a vendor tool in another, a set of prompts that live in somebody's notes, a contract nobody can exit. Each piece works. None of them connect. The reloading cost gets paid over and over, and it never appears as a line item.
Underneath it, most firms are still running a 2018 systems model. Not through carelessness. 2018 was the last time the ground held still long enough to build on. The distance between that and how work actually gets done now is wider than it looks from the inside, and it does not close by buying a tool.
02The rails
Not a strategy deck. A working substrate, installed in your environment, that your firm operates. The same in every engagement, which is what makes it a standard rather than a project.
The stack runs where your data already lives. No third party holds the keys, and no counterparty sees the positions. Sovereignty is the default, not a premium tier.
Systems that plan, execute, review and hand back finished work with an audit trail — not chat windows and not demos. Built on the same patterns we run in production every day.
Research, operations, compliance and IT on a common substrate, so work moves between them without being rebuilt at every boundary.
Before a model touches licensed data, someone has to establish that the contract permits it. Most firms cannot answer, because nobody holds the inventory. We build the answer into the rails, so permitted use is enforced by the system rather than assumed by whoever is closest to the keyboard.
Access, logging, review gates and a record of what the system did and why. Written to be read by your auditor, your allocators and your board, and built for firms answering to the SEC and FINRA rather than retrofitted for them afterward.
03The proof
The reference installation is my own operation. Nothing on this page gets recommended anywhere before it has been running somewhere.
Kubernetes on hardware I own, managed by GitOps. No third-party cloud in the path.
Every note, decision and document version-controlled in a repo. No exceptions.
Adversarial. A second agent reviews the work before it lands, and can refuse it.
Operated through MCP. The actions taken in it are reviewed for efficiency.
An agent fleet plans, writes, reviews and ships work across 17 development projects in flight at once.
Chief technology officer of a hedge fund, under the constraints you have. Master's candidate in information technology, AI emphasis.
04The commitment
A standard is not a vendor.
Rolling stock built by anyone runs on standard gauge. That was the entire point of standardizing, and it is the entire point here. What we install is documented, portable, and yours. Your own staff can run it. Another firm can take it over. We are the least expensive thing to replace in the arrangement, and that is by design. Any consultancy whose value depends on you not being able to leave has already told you what the work is worth.
05Who it is for
Roughly twenty to three hundred people. Data that genuinely cannot leave the building, obligations to allocators and regulators, and nobody internally who has done this before. Large enough that the problem is real, small enough that nobody has been hired to solve it.
06How it works
A fixed-scope assessment of what you run, what you pay for, what is exposed, and where AI would actually change the arithmetic. You get a written record whether or not we go further.
The substrate installed in your environment, integrated with what you already run, with the controls and documentation in place from the first day rather than retrofitted. Each rail is in use before the next is started.
Your people trained, the runbooks written, a named internal owner, and the whole thing operable without us. A retainer is available afterward. It is not the goal, and it is never the exit cost.
07The principal
Thirty years in technology, twenty-five of them running it for investment firms, from every seat there is: inside the firm, as the vendor selling to it, as the advisor guiding it, and as the engineer building the software it buys.
One person by design. The firm gets the engineer who made the decisions, not a bench — and everything installed is documented well enough to outlast the arrangement.
Head of systems for a $30B+ manager across nine offices, San Francisco to Moscow to Hong Kong. 150 people, every system hosted in-house.
Director of operations for an early federated social platform serving millions of users worldwide. Moved it off AWS, onto Joyent, then onto owned hardware — cloud repatriation, in 2009, against the direction of the entire industry.
Founded and ran the outsourced IT and security department for 75 hedge funds, private equity firms, VCs, family offices and RIAs. $2M ARR, three offices, ten people.
Founder, CTO and CISO. Led the team of five that built its market data management platform for banks and commodity traders: what contracts do you hold, when do they term, and what are you actually allowed to do with the data.
Chief Technology Officer.
08Start with the survey
A first message saying what the firm does, what it is trying to run, and what cannot leave the building is enough to start. The assessment stands on its own — if the answer is that you do not need this yet, that is a fine outcome and you will have it in writing.