People underestimate how much a small team can build when everyone actually cares. High agency. Aligned mission. No waiting around. I'll take 20 people like that over 200 waiting for instructions every time.

I've been in rooms with a lot of founders over the past few years. Different industries. Different stages. Different backgrounds. The ones who build something that lasts share something I didn't expect when I first started paying attention to it. They're not the most confident people in the room. They're the most curious. They talk about the problem obsessively. Not the product, not the company, not the fundraise. The problem. What's broken, why it's broken, why everyone else has got it slightly wrong. They're also comfortable being uncertain for longer than most people can stand. Building something new means living with questions that don't have answers yet. The founders who need certainty too early make decisions too early, and usually the wrong ones. The last thing: they know exactly what they're not building. The clearest founders I've met have a sharper sense of what they've decided not to do than what they have. That discipline is what keeps a company focused when everything around it is pulling in different directions. Skills matter. Experience matters. But I've seen highly skilled people build nothing of value, and people with no obvious advantages build things that change industries. The difference is almost never what's on paper.

Everything has been globalized. Goods. Services. Information. But the driver of globalization was left behind by globalization itself. Money. 1.3 billion adults still don't have a bank account. Onchain rails are changing that. Check it out in my latest @Forbes article 👇

Stablecoins processed $33T last year vs $25.5T for @Visa + @Mastercard. But this isn't about replacing Visa or Mastercard. In fact, both are already building and investing (a lot) in stablecoins. Stablecoins are the new global payments rail. More in my @Forbes article ↓

The "WhatsApp moment" for crypto has arrived. Last year, stablecoins settled more volume than @Visa + @Mastercard combined. The rails are here. It's now a war for distribution. I wrote about this in my latest @Forbes article ⤵️

Everyone is talking about how easy it is to build now. A $20 subscription gives you coding capabilities that were reserved for the best engineers just a few years ago. Building a product has never been cheaper or faster. But that's exactly the problem. When building is commoditised, the technology stops being the moat. Everyone has access to the same tools, the same models, the same capabilities. The advantages that once differentiated startups are disappearing. The companies that win from here aren't the ones with the best product today. They're the ones with the best team. A team with enough trust, conviction and energy to keep showing up every single day. Through the hard stretches, the slow periods, the moments when nothing is working the way you expected. AI can accelerate execution. It cannot replace belief. It cannot replace shared ambition. That's the real competitive advantage in 2026. And it's the hardest one to build. I shared this in the latest @ForbesTechCncl article on the biggest challenges facing tech startups today.

I've interviewed a lot of people. But what tells me if someone is right? How they show up in the room. You can teach skills. You can't teach someone to care. The most impactful people weren't the most qualified. They were the most alive.

Credit is essential to modern life. But loan origination hasn't changed in decades. Traditional settlement: T+1 or T+2. VS Onchain: instantaneous. The shift is already happening. @jpmorgan, @BlackRock, @GoldmanSachs, @DeutscheBank are all quietly building products onchain.

First proper break in a long time. No laptop. No calls. Just the sea and a speargun. Reminder for builders: real breaks are not wasted time. Recharge properly → come back sharper. Fully back. Grateful for the reset.

Folks Finance is part of @GBBC_io’s 101 Real-World Blockchain Use Cases. The handbook is a valuable guide for government agencies, regulators, and central banks, providing an educational resource to deepen their understanding of blockchain & digital assets. Learn more ↓

Moving onchain doesn't have to begin with a transformation plan. It usually shouldn't. Find the use case where onchain is measurably better for your operation. Prove it there. Then scale with conviction. The institutions defining the next phase of finance aren't the boldest. They're the most disciplined. I write about this for @Forbes here 👇

The biggest banks in the world spent years dismissing crypto. Now they are (quietly) building on public blockchains. In May 2025, @JPMorgan completed its first public blockchain settlement for tokenised treasuries. Months later, it launched a tokenised money market fund on @Ethereum. @BlackRock launched a multi-billion dollar tokenised fund across multiple chains. Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Citigroup began exploring shared stablecoin infrastructure. These are literally the biggest banks in the world. Normies still think blockchain is a speculation story. Institutions are increasingly treating it as infrastructure. Because traditional financial rails still move like they did in 1990. Settlement takes days. Intermediaries take a cut at every layer. That friction still exists simply because the underlying infrastructure was never upgraded. Onchain systems are changing that. Instant settlement. Programmable transactions. Global capital movement operating 24/7. Larry Fink described tokenization as a structural upgrade to capital markets. Not an experiment. An upgrade. The institutions that benefit most from this shift probably won’t talk about it much publicly. They’ll just quietly become more efficient while everyone else debates whether it matters. That transition has already started. I wrote more about this for @Forbes below. Read it now, or bookmark it for later ↓

🤝 @FolksMobile The future of AI finance requires intelligent and accessible consumer infrastructure. We are partnering with Folks Mobile to explore AI-powered financial experiences for the next generation of users. As advances toward becoming the foundational financial infrastructure for the AI Agent era, Folks Mobile’s AI-driven optimization, DeFi integrations, and crypto-native card infrastructure help bridge autonomous finance with real-world usability.

Remote work gives you speed and flexibility. But it hides something. The human side of building disappears when a team only meets on a screen. That's why before a heavy building phase, I gathered the entire @FolksFinance team together, in person, in Bali. Get aligned first. Then move with intensity.