I've spent twenty-five years in payments and infrastructure, and more recently focus on agentic AI and web3. This is where the work gets written down: what I'm shipping and what hard things I'm solving.
Stripe already owns stablecoin issuance, wallets, and a chain. Buying PayPal would put 438 million funded accounts one app update from Web3.
Fixed Temporal workflow IDs, an UPDATE that doubles as a lock, and fail-closed reconciliation: layering double-charge protection into a payments system.
With agentic teams, two hackers can spin up five MVPs while a normal team ships one feature. The case for keeping a skunkworks in your back pocket.
Coding agents should run unsupervised, but inside a dev environment that's safe to be wrong in. The agent boundary is the wrong line to defend.
Most companies run a migration campaign to clear users off a deprecated API. Anthropic just tripled the price of theirs and let market forces do the work.
GitHub had 3,800 internal repos exfiltrated via a poisoned VS Code extension. If your private repos have ever held a secret, rotate it today.
I came up through four, and the useful part has never been any one of them on its own. It is the squares where they meet, because that is where the expensive mistakes get made and where, in most companies, nobody is holding the whole picture at once.
I have been building software for twenty-five years and leading the teams that build it for fifteen of those, mostly as a CTO across payments and infrastructure, and in crypto since 2013. Most of my attention now goes on AI systems and the unglamorous engineering that makes them dependable enough to put in front of customers.
More about me
Twenty-five years of building, scaling, and selling technology companies, distilled into the practical playbook I wish someone had handed me about a decade ago. Selected chapters serialised on Notes ahead of release.
