Writing
Notes from building financial businesses and running companies with AI.
Written from the work: payments inside banks, agentic operating models, building products, and leading people. Also posted on LinkedIn.
AI and AI Operating Models
- October 8, 2026 · 3 min read
What the agentic operating model produced: 90 days to 5, multiple releases a day, zero incidents
Numbers from a fintech of more than a hundred people running on this model. Lead time from 90 days to five for 85% of work, multiple releases a day with zero production incidents in the last year, revenue doubled and customers tripled at 45 to 50 percent unit margin while the team grew from 40 to 110. Here is what the numbers mean and what they don't.
- October 7, 2026 · 3 min read
The tools will change. The process only hardens.
Claude Code runs the pipeline, Cursor and Codex sit in the editor, and a weekly multi-model vetting and scoring process decides which model each agent uses for each job regardless of vendor. None of that is the model. The operating model is the thing that gets stronger every time the tools underneath it change.
Leadership
- October 21, 2026 · 3 min read
Power gets you compliance. Authority gets you a team.
A title gives you the power to get things done. It doesn't make anyone want to follow you. Most managers run on the first and wonder why their team does exactly what's asked and nothing more.
- October 19, 2026 · 3 min read
The leadership decision most managers never make
Most of us became managers because we were good at the work. Nobody asked what kind of leader we intended to be, and the calendar filled up before we asked ourselves. That skipped decision is where a lot of management problems start.
Product
- September 15, 2026 · 3 min read
Concept to cash in five months, and the insight that came from watching a stopwatch
A wholesale vehicle marketplace went from an idea in January to live in May, with $1B through it in nine months. The product worked. The business came from an analytics number nobody was looking for.
- July 30, 2025 · 5 min read
Software delivery transformation: scale through simplicity, not complexity
Feature branching feels like the productive choice and quietly destroys delivery predictability. The way out is a maturity progression to trunk-based development that forces early integration and fast feedback, and it is worth 10x faster delivery and 90% fewer production issues.
Payments
- October 19, 2026 · 4 min read
Under Visa's VAMP rules, your riskiest sub-merchant sets the bar for everyone
Visa folded its fraud and dispute programs into one ratio, measured across the portfolio, and tightened the merchant line this April. If you run payments inside a software platform, the merchants you board now share one number. Here is the math and what we would do about it.
- September 22, 2026 · 3 min read
Why embedded payments programs stall inside banks
Banks keep announcing embedded payments and then quietly shelving them. The one I launched inside a top-20 bank got to $10M in nine months. The difference was three decisions made before the first line of code.