Joined August 2012
We would never pay a CPA without a funded client behind it. The exclusivity premium we pay with a handshake behind it.
Monday: the handshake. Every month: the premium for exclusivity. Then a weekly run, and the question nobody at the table wanted to ask. Who Else Pays? The Exclusive, in four panels.
5
Client lists are guarded by NDAs, access logs and exit interviews. Nobody checks who else is paying the person with access.
Three of your best clients move to the same rival in one week. Everyone suspects the client list, and it stays a guess. If the rival paid one of your people in crypto, that payment is not a guess. It is a public transaction. Who Else Pays? Episode 1.
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Three things from this week worth a founder's attention: – AI: @Meta released open weights for a model it says runs on two Mac Studios – Tech: @Apple now bans hidden features that switch on after review – Crypto: the EU banking regulator oversees @USDC directly from Nov 12
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188
Every broker can tell you a client's lifetime deposits to the cent. Few can tell you the name of that client's other broker.
Your client has another broker. Which one? Retention runs on your own books, and the other broker never appears in them. Seven slides on where it does appear.
10
46
Most plans are waiting for a better week. After the launch, after the holidays, after things calm down. That week tends to look a lot like this one. The real difference is how much time is left when it finally arrives.
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47
Finance reconciles a partner's CPA to the client. Compliance reads every banner he runs. The word we pay extra for, we take on faith.
A partner agreement gets checked line by line: CPA against funded clients, banners against the rules, payouts to the cent. The exclusivity clause, the one you pay a premium for, is checked by trusting it. We wrote down what that trust costs.
10
69
Somebody's launch post is one good day, written up after the fact. The months before it are not in the frame. January is a fairer benchmark: same person, same market, same hours in the day. Most of us have moved further since then than it feels on a slow week.
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56
A week of friendly yeses can still be a week where nothing moved. A call, an intro, send me the deck, let us stay in touch. No tends to show up only once the ask costs the other side something. A week with a few of those in it was a week of real asks.
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123
In most fields the people ahead of you have decades, and no amount of weekends closes that. These tools are an exception for now. The people who sound fluent mostly started a little earlier and were bad at it in private first.
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86
A no takes the other person a few seconds, somewhere between two other things they had to deal with that day. We are the ones who turn it into an evening. And the evening is usually where the next few asks quietly do not get made.
11
102
Most doors used to come with a form. Where you studied, who sent you, how long you had been in the industry. The most capable tool most of us have ever touched has no form. It answers whoever asks, so the question you bring is most of the advantage.
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168
What an event! Huge thanks to the Ultimate Fintech team for an amazing #iFXEXPOAsia2026 in Hong Kong! 🇭🇰 Big shoutout to Janet, and Michael for the coordination and for making this unique opportunity possible. This was the official launch of @deviaticlabs 🚀 (Pretty sure I talked to literally everyone on the floor, follow-ups are out, waiting for those deals! 😉) Loved the vibrant booths & mascots, felt less like a B2B expo and more like a full-on fintech theme park! 🦊✨ #Fintech #Deviatic #HongKong #iFXEXPO
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174
If there were a reliable signal that something was about to work, everybody would wait for it and then move at once. There isn't one. That is the whole reason the thing is still available to you.
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73
We discount a yes we had to ask for three times. Then we reword the question until an assistant gets the company right, and count that one.
Correcting an assistant in the chat reaches one reader: you. The new piece covers where the correction goes instead, and in what order: what you can publish today, what you can claim, what has to be earned.
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51
We ask a ten-year-old what they want to be, and stop asking at about the age the answer starts to matter. It is still the one part of an introduction the public record leaves blank, and whoever reads yours fills it in without asking.
Read your own profiles for tense. Roles held, companies built, years listed: almost all of it finished. Somebody deciding whether to back you is reading for what comes next, and that sentence exists only if you wrote it.
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44
We service the car every year and test the fire alarm every month. A person with access to the client base is mostly checked on the way in.
Most of the checking a broker does on a person happens before day one: references, a background check, a signature. The wallet you then pay keeps receiving for years. From you, and possibly from someone else. Only one of those flows is in your books.
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42
20 years after university, catching up in Hong Kong at iFX EXPO Asia. Great discussions on potential synergies ahead. #iFXEXPOAsia2026
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259
A machine can write the thing, run the thing, and in plenty of cases do it better than I would have. What it cannot do is sit in the room afterwards and answer for it. That part is still a person, and it is not a small part.
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48
Badge in hand. @iFXEXPO Asia opens today in Hong Kong. Outside it is hot. Inside, for three days, the people who run brokers, all in one hall. If you are there, say hello. #iFXEXPO
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11
148
The day something starts working looks like every day before it. Same desk, same list, nothing announcing itself. Which means the week that feels pointless and the week before everything changes are indistinguishable from the inside.
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