Notes on Startups, Stability, and the Next Few Decades
When people ask me how to “get into startups,” they usually want a trick.
A framework. A funding shortcut. A way to skip the part where reality hits.
I don’t have that.
What I do have is a few decades of building things across very different worlds: trading technology, blockchain, augmented reality, e-commerce, travel, textiles, photography, and now writing. The details change. The rules underneath don’t.
This is an attempt to write those rules down in one place.
1. Start With Something Boring: Reality
A business is not a slide deck, an idea, or a brand.
A business is:
- Something people really want,
- Delivered reliably,
- For more than it costs you to provide it,
- For long enough that everyone involved can sleep at night.
Everything else is decoration.
At Boston Technologies, the first product was not “disruption.” It was solving very specific problems for one FX broker. We delivered. They paid. That cash funded the next client. Step by step, it turned into software, liquidity, white-label platforms, and eventually a global company.
The pattern repeats:
- Talk to real customers.
- Solve a real headache.
- Charge real money.
- Repeat without drama.
If you can’t draw the cash flows on a piece of paper in five minutes, you’re probably lying to yourself.
2. Execution Over Story
Investors love stories. Customers love execution.
When you’re early, your pitch is fragile. The one thing that cannot be fragile is your ability to deliver what you promised, on time and on budget.
That means:
- Small, clear contracts.
- Short feedback loops.
- Shipping something simple that works instead of something impressive that breaks.
At scale, this turns into culture. People copy what the founder rewards. If you reward theatrics, you get theatrics. If you reward quiet, boring reliability, you get that instead.
I prefer boring.
3. Stability Is Not a Luxury – It’s the Foundation
There’s a reason some countries produce more long-lived companies than others, and it’s not “national character.”
It’s stability.
As a founder, you are often committing five to ten years of your life to a single bet. You can handle risk. What you cannot handle is total randomness: laws that change overnight, contracts that mean nothing, regulators who move the goalposts every quarter.
If I don’t have a reasonable idea of what the rules will look like in six to twelve months, I don’t start.
This is true in macro (countries, regulations) and micro (your own word). If your team can’t predict how you will react, they won’t stick around to build with you. Stability scales from your calendar all the way up to the legal system.
4. Small Teams, Real Ownership
I’ve built companies with small teams and with complex org charts. The small teams win more often.
Why?
Because everyone actually feels the outcome.
In a tight group:
- Wins are felt personally.
- Mistakes are obvious.
- Politics has nowhere to hide.
You don’t need 100 people to get to product–market fit. You need a handful of people who care enough to debug reality at 2 AM and who trust each other enough to say, “This isn’t working, let’s change it.”
Hire slowly. Work with adults. Give them real responsibility and honest information. The org chart will draw itself.
5. A Sober View of AI – and Why Robots Matter
Right now, a lot of capital and attention is flowing into AI. Some of it is deserved. Some of it is fashion.
My view is simple:
- Today’s AI is extremely good at prediction and imitation.
- It is not “thinking” in the way people want to believe.
- It is, however, a very powerful interface between humans and computers.
As an interface, AI can remove friction: drafting, summarizing, translating, exploring options. That matters. But it’s not magic. It doesn’t replace clear thinking about customers, markets, or physics.
Where I see more long-term potential is in humanoid robots and embodied systems that can operate in the messy physical world—kitchens, warehouses, apartments, hospitals. Places where:
- Objects are different every time,
- Layouts change,
- Humans still spend hours doing repetitive, low-leverage tasks.
If we combine robust robotics, decent computer vision, and sensible business models, we can create a future where one person supervises many machines—and where new categories of work appear around them.
The hard part is not the demo. It’s fitting the technology into real economics and real workflows.
6. Breadth as a Competitive Advantage
My father once told me there are two kinds of experts:
- Those who know everything about almost nothing, and
- Those who know a little about almost everything.
I ended up in the second category—physics, engineering, finance, photography, travel, children’s books.
On paper, this looks scattered. In practice, it is an advantage:
- Trading systems teach you about risk and latency.
- Travel companies teach you logistics and customer support.
- E-commerce teaches you operations and cash.
- Photography teaches you about perception, taste, and patience.
- Writing for children teaches you clarity.
When you build new businesses, all of that comes with you. You see patterns other people miss. You avoid mistakes because you’ve seen their cousins before.
If you’re young, my advice is: go broad first, then go deep where you feel genuine pull. The breadth will pay dividends later in ways you can’t predict today.
7. The Future I’d Like to Help Build
If I look ahead twenty or thirty years, the future I find interesting is not one where humans disappear behind screens while machines “do everything.”
It’s one where:
- We use AI to remove friction from thinking, not to replace it.
- We use robots to remove drudgery from the physical world, not to pretend work doesn’t exist.
- We build companies on clear rules, honest numbers, and long-term relationships.
- Children grow up seeing the real world—waves, markets, airports, cities—not just filtered feeds.
I don’t believe in utopias. I do believe in slightly better systems, built by people who keep their promises and understand compounding.
If there is a philosophy behind the companies I have built and the ones I still want to build, it is this:
Start small. Tell the truth. Protect your downside. Share the upside fairly. And build things that will still make sense when the current hype cycle is long gone.