Who Am I
A good first post starts with an introduction and a welcome.
I’m an entrepreneur and strategist with a restless, unconventional mind, and, I’ve been told, an uncomfortable habit of asking the question the room was hoping to avoid. I build ventures, advise organisations at strategic inflection points, and think seriously about why most innovation fails on its own terms rather than for lack of effort or capital.
What makes my perspective unusual, and I say this descriptively rather than as a boast, is that I’ve operated across domains that rarely overlap in one person. I’ve been an entrepreneur with exits, a partner at venture capital firms, a designer of national innovation ecosystems, and a university lecturer. Each of these has changed how I see the others. The VC experience made me a better entrepreneur because I understood what capital is actually looking for. The ecosystem work made me a better investor because I understood the institutional and political dynamics that determine whether ventures actually land. The lecturing made me more precise, because you cannot hide behind intuition when someone asks you to explain your reasoning from first principles.
Running in parallel to all of this (not before it, not despite it) has been a life in writing and criticism. I’ve published poetry, translated literature, edited publications, and written about technology, culture and ideas for audiences that expected rigour and an original point of view. This is not a former life. It is the sensibility that runs underneath everything else: a critical, essayistic way of encountering the world that refuses to accept the received framing as the only one available.
The combination produces a specific kind of usefulness. I’m not a specialist who has gone deep in one domain. I’m someone who has operated seriously across several, and whose value lies in the connections between them — the moment when a pattern from economic history illuminates a venture design problem, or when a philosophical framework clarifies what a strategic choice is actually about.
For a full professional biography, LinkedIn is the right place.