01 / OWN
A real problem.
Something messy enough that product, economics, regulation and execution have to be solved together — not an “innovation theatre” brief.
I want a real problem, a team, a metric and responsibility for the outcome — preferably where product, regulation, trust and new technology collide.
I am open to full-time roles, EIR / New Bets, product leadership, special projects and selected hands-on advisory or fractional work where ownership is real.
Something messy enough that product, economics, regulation and execution have to be solved together — not an “innovation theatre” brief.
I am comfortable being No.1, No.2 or one of several strong owners. What matters is direct responsibility, speed and measurable output.
Give the unit a customer, a P&L or another hard metric, and the right to scale, re-design or die.
I am not a decomposition fetishist. I split systems only when it creates better ownership, observability, economics or failure containment.
Use the product. Visit the customer. Talk to operators and regulators. Buy the competitor. Try the unhappy path. A presentation tells you what somebody wants to be true; the transaction tells you what is true.
Split the first no into hard constraints, soft constraints, incentives, data gaps, operational risk and economics — then ask what must become true for yes.
Customers often ask for “more horses”. I want the workflow around the request. In regulated finance the user may be the SME, the compliance team, a partner bank — or the regulator consuming your reporting.
A risky unit should be inspectable — and, when necessary, stoppable — without taking the entire machine down. Regulation can be product architecture, not just policy text.
Ask whether a support function is actually a platform or future business with its own customer, pricing, capex/opex, P&L and strategic optionality — internal product, subsidiary, JV or spin-out.
I enjoy finding a route to “yes”, but I do not confuse solvable with investable. Price the controls, team, capital and opportunity cost — then scale, re-design or kill.
The hard part was not simply building software. It was making product, regulation, risk, capital, partnerships and distribution behave as one system.
I did not start by building another digital bank for everyone. We focused on international SMEs, fintech and higher-compliance-complexity businesses — customers mainstream banks often disliked or misunderstood.
Since leaving day-to-day bank (and fund) management I have used research, prototypes, hardware experiments, writing and founder conversations as a practical lab for what to build next.
Reusable regulated identity, assisted verification, multimodal biometrics, delegated authority and trust graphs for humans, organisations, products and AI agents.
Prosumer AI hardware, local inference, decentralised compute, power/energy constraints and the economics of building AI capacity outside hyperscalers.
New financial infrastructure, security/civic resilience and institution design — explored through books, prototypes, public research and real-world experimentation.
:: internal project names and domains are intentionally de-emphasised here, these are research/prototype areas + some papers here
I built a venture platform and then a bank. I know the emotional reward and the cost of being No.1. I do not need another CEO title to prove I can sit there.
I spent years being the person expected to have the answer. I now want to become materially better at listening and asking inside a strong team whose operating system I did not design.
CEO work taught me that I can fundraise, hire, manage regulation, boards, operations and P&L. The work I love is taking a messy system apart and rebuilding it into something valuable.
I would genuinely like to hear about it. I am looking for somewhere to work.