Let me start with a confession. “Decentralised finance” is one of those phrases flung about constantly and explained clearly rarely. It sounds important. It sounds technical. And a great many of the people nodding along to it in conversation are doing precisely that nodding along. I was one of them for an embarrassingly long time.
DeFi: The Financial System With No Head Office Read More »
The journey from that redundancy letter to where I stand today has not been linear. There have been false starts. Recalibrations. Days of genuine doubt, when the safety of the old life looked almost appealing set against the uncertainty of building something new; days when I caught myself idly wondering what the old team was
Twenty-Four Years. Then One Decision Epilogue Read More »
There is something nobody prepares you for when you leave a long career. Not the paperwork. Not the practicalities. Not even the identity crisis, though that arrives reliably enough, usually around week three, when the novelty wears thin, and the silence gets loud. What nobody prepares you for is the temptation to go back. Not
Twenty-Four Years. Then One Decision – Part 4 Read More »
When the offer came, I was not entirely sure what I expected to feel. Shock, perhaps. Anger. That particular sting of being told a role you have given years of your life to is no longer required the small, undignified indignation of it. What I actually felt, sitting at the kitchen table with that letter
Twenty-Four Years. Then One Decision – Part 3 Read More »
There comes a point, and I do wish somebody had told me this a decade earlier, where the question is no longer whether you can do the job. It is whether the job is still doing anything meaningful for you. For a very long time, I confused capability with purpose. I was still good at
Twenty-Four Years. Then One Decision – Part 2 Read More »
On leaving a career that no longer fits, finding the courage to start over, and building something that is entirely, unapologetically mine. Twenty-four years in corporate. When I say it out loud, it still surprises me. That is not a phase, and it isn’t a chapter. That is a substantial portion of one life, handed
Twenty-Four Years. Then One Decision. Read More »
Part 4 of 4: what blockchain is genuinely good for, and what it is not. Here is the part nobody leads with, because it doesn’t sell tickets. Blockchain is slow. It is expensive. It is fragmented into hundreds of chains that cannot speak to one another. Seventeen years after the first block was mined, it
The Blockchain Series – Part 4 Read More »
Part 3 of 4: When the ledger stops recording and starts doing. Bitcoin proved that a shared ledger could record who paid whom without a soul in the middle vouching for any of it. Which is a marvellous achievement, and also, if you and I are going to be honest with one another, a rather
The Blockchain Mini Series – Part 3 Read More »
Part 2 of 4: why nobody can rewrite the past, and why nobody wants to. The shared notebook is brilliant, until somebody picks up an eraser. That is where we left off: a public ledger, copied across thousands of computers, readable by anybody who fancies a look. Wonderful feature. Rather obvious problem. If everyone can
The Blockchain Mini Series – Part 2 Read More »
How do you send money to a stranger on the other side of the world no bank, no middleman, and still be certain that nobody cheated? That is the question which invented blockchain. And I’d like to walk you through the answer slowly, because it is genuinely one of the more beautiful ideas of the
Blockchain The Mini Series – Part 1 Read More »
