How I work across products, markets and growth

Career development path

I’ve built my career across gaming, Web3 and fintech, usually in roles that sit between product, marketing, operations and growth. The common thread has been working in fast-moving categories where the product, market and operating model are still evolving, and where progress depends on turning ambiguity into a clear plan that different teams can execute.

I did not grow up thinking of myself as particularly gifted or destined for an unusual career. For quite a long time, I thought I was fairly average academically, and much of my confidence developed later as I discovered subjects I was good at and realised that ability could be improved deliberately. Mathematics was one of the first areas where that happened. Once I understood something properly, I found that I enjoyed helping other people understand it too, and I became interested not only in learning but in the moment when something finally makes sense to somebody else.

Looking back, that period probably shaped more of my personality than I realised. I became comfortable with the idea that you do not need to start as the most talented person in the room, but you do need enough curiosity and persistence to keep improving. It also made me sensitive to people being underestimated, because I know how different somebody can become once they gain confidence, context and the opportunity to develop.

My career started somewhere completely different

My career started in gaming and esports, where I learned what it was like to work inside a category that was still forming. Roles, operating models and commercial conventions were evolving quickly, which rewarded people who could learn fast, work across functions and stay comfortable with ambiguity. That environment shaped the way I still approach new markets and complex products.

I moved into crypto through the Litecoin Foundation, initially in community and education, before taking on progressively broader commercial and operational responsibilities at Binance, Uphold and Crypto.com. Across those roles, my remit expanded into growth, retention, operations, product marketing and go-to-market strategy, with an increasing focus on how product, customer, regulatory and commercial decisions fit together.

My breadth across disciplines developed because the problems I worked on rarely fitted inside one function. A successful launch might require Product, Legal, Compliance, Operations, Marketing and regional teams to move together, so I learned to understand enough of each area to connect decisions, resolve dependencies and keep execution moving. That cross-functional operating style is now one of the defining characteristics of how I work.

What motivates my work now

What motivates me now is the opportunity to work on meaningful commercial problems where strategy has to become execution. I enjoy environments where the answer is not obvious, where teams need alignment, and where progress depends on combining customer insight, product judgment, operational discipline and commercial thinking.

I still have that ambition. I want to build businesses, create wealth and eventually reach a level of financial independence where I have far greater control over how I spend my time. What has changed is that achievement by itself has become less interesting. I increasingly care about whether what I am doing is useful, whether I am creating something I genuinely believe in and whether the people around me are progressing as well.

Helping somebody else understand something or become more confident gives me a disproportionate amount of satisfaction. I notice quite quickly when someone feels dismissed, uncomfortable or undervalued, and I find it difficult to treat that as irrelevant. I think part of that comes from remembering what it feels like not to see yourself as particularly exceptional. It has left me with a strong belief that people's current circumstances, titles or confidence levels often tell you very little about what they might eventually be capable of.

I am curious about things that have no obvious practical use

Outside work, I am naturally quite introverted and spend a lot of time thinking, reading or disappearing down subjects simply because I find them interesting. Philosophy is one of those areas, particularly epistemology and questions around how we know what we think we know. I find it fascinating that two intelligent people can look at the same event, have access to similar information and still reach completely different conclusions because they are starting from different assumptions or experiences.

Physics interests me for a similar reason, especially space, time and the parts of reality that become increasingly difficult to understand through ordinary human intuition. The scale of the universe, the nature of time and the fact that our everyday experience represents such a small part of what exists are subjects I can spend hours thinking about without needing them to lead anywhere useful. I like ideas that make the world feel less obvious than it did before I encountered them.

Financial markets and technology probably appeal to the same part of my personality. They combine mathematics with psychology, incentives, narratives and human behaviour. A market can be technically sophisticated and still be moved by fear, confidence, social dynamics and collective belief, which makes it much more interesting to me than viewing finance purely as a set of numbers.

Film and music have always been another way I process the world

I have loved films for as long as I can remember. When I was younger, I wanted to become an actor and spent a lot of time making videos with basic editing software, long before I had any idea what I wanted to do professionally. I do not think I was consciously trying to become a filmmaker. I simply liked creating something and seeing whether it could make somebody laugh, feel emotional or look at something differently.

That interest never disappeared. Films such as Interstellar, Dune and Rocky resonate with me for different reasons, but there is a common thread in the stories I tend to remember. I am drawn to people facing something larger than themselves, to questions about time and sacrifice, and to characters who are forced to discover what they are capable of through adversity. I like films that have an idea underneath the story rather than simply entertaining you for two hours.

Music has a similar effect on me, particularly film scores. I listen to a lot of Hans Zimmer and other cinematic music, often while thinking, working or imagining things I might want to create in the future. I can become completely absorbed in a piece of music and start visualising stories, moments or possibilities around it. That tendency to daydream is probably one of the reasons I have always generated more ideas than I could realistically pursue.

I want to spend more of my life building things that are mine

Entrepreneurship has interested me for years, although I have historically been better at generating ideas than acting on all of them. Part of that is analytical. I can see the risks and uncertainties quickly, which can make it easy to keep refining an idea rather than exposing it to reality. As I get older, I want to become more comfortable with that uncertainty and spend more time actually building.

Financial independence is part of that ambition, but it is not the whole thing. What I really want is optionality: the ability to choose what I work on, support the people around me, explore ideas that may not have an obvious corporate sponsor and create things because I think they should exist. I would like to write more, build products and businesses, explore creative work and eventually find ways of teaching or sharing what I have learned with other people.

This website is a small part of that transition. Most of what I have built professionally has belonged to the companies I worked for, which is completely normal, but I wanted somewhere that could accumulate over time as my own body of work. It gives me a place to document projects, develop ideas properly and begin putting some of the things I have spent years thinking about into the world.

The older I get, the more I think about time

Family is a very important part of my life. I spend a lot of time with my wife and the people closest to me, and as I have become older I have started noticing how quickly the structure of a family changes. You begin life dependent on your parents, gradually become independent, build a life of your own and eventually find yourself watching the people who once looked after you grow older.

There is something strange about how slowly those changes happen while you are living through them and how obvious they become when you look backwards. The roles within a family gradually change hands, one stage of life becomes another, and much of what once felt permanent turns out to have been temporary. My interest in time, cycles and the different stages of life is probably not separate from my interest in physics or film. It is another version of the same question about how we experience the limited amount of time we have.

That has changed my definition of success. I still care about ambition, achievement and financial security, but I do not want to spend an entire life collecting professional milestones and realise too late that they were only one part of it. I want enough independence to build interesting things, enough curiosity to keep learning, enough time to be present with the people I care about and enough perspective to remember that status is temporary.

I have met people at every level of organisations who have taught me something, and I have never been particularly comfortable assuming that someone's job title tells you their value. People carry experiences, abilities and stories that are rarely visible at first. The more of life I experience myself, the more interested I become in understanding how people arrived where they are, what shaped them and what they might still become. That is probably the most consistent thread through everything I have done so far: learning, building, trying to understand people and gradually discovering what is possible.