• Three beers changed my life more than all the news headlines in New York, Lodon, Washington DC, Beijing and even Hong Kong. You must be aware that BoJo won the UK elections… That Trump’s poll numbers rise as impeachment hearings run in parallel with FBI/FISA hearings… That USA’s stock market is booming while Europe and…

  • No News Is Good News

    The headlines are relentless. Just today: UK Elections Imminent China Trade Deal (Again!) US Stock Markets Break Records (Again!) Greta as Time’s Person of the Year Mass Shooting Trump – Impeachement Trump – Horowitz Report on FISA / FBI Trump – Mean Tweets! China Bond Defaults The real question: Who cares? Most of the news…

  • MBA LoL wut?

    Things we learned in business school 15-20 years ago: Porter’s 5 Forces: Threats of competitors, new entrants, suppliers, customers & substitutes should drive business strategy. BCG Matrix: Market growth rate and Market share should drive corporate prioritization between business lines. Marketing’s 4 P’s: Product, price, placement & promotion should drive marketing strategy  NPV, ROI &…

  • Tokenizing Funds 101

    You probably own traditional funds, whether ETF’s, LPs, or simple mutual funds. You might even own a “digital asset” fund investing in cryptocurrencies and utility tokens. I bet you do NOT own a digital shares of traditional asset fund. The legal issues are tricky, and the first digitized funds are just hitting the market now.…

  • “Banking is not rocket science. It’s actually much more complicated.” Morgan Stanley told me this at new hire orientation ~15 years ago. A lawyer explained that banking involves thousands more regulations than launching rockets.  All these regs also apply to Fintech startups. So do regulations around cryptography, telecom, cross-border technology transfers, data privacy, and more.…

  • It has been a year of massive change for Hong Kong. As we look ahead to 2020, take a moment to reflect on where we are: What do we love about this city? Why do we choose to base our lives here? The perspective below is BY and FOR expats with poor Chinese language skills.…

  • Situation in China & HK

    Quick thoughts on hugely complicated issues. Just my opinion and possibly very wrong. Getting reliable data out of China is hard. Internal communications are monitored & edited in real time. Externall the “Great Firewall” is a thing. Anecdotal evidence is noisy & slow but provides the clearest picture. Hong Kong’s official data is more reliable…

  • Relaunching this URL as my personal website. It’s time. It used to be for my previous consulting firm. When I joined Loopnest as full time COO, I put up a “splash page” to hide the consultancy’s content. I just had my 1 year anniversary with Loopnest. We are doing great things. Very proud. We’ve been…

  • Brave or Stupid?

    Brave leaders take risks that can make or break their organizations.  Stupid ones just break stuff. Venn and Why Bravery is about taking action in spite of risk, facing potential consequences while pursuing a worthy objective.  Stupidity is basically the same thing minus the worthy goal. The two overlap where the risk/reward is foolhardy. Corporate…

  • Your startup needs to do EVERYTHING:  Raise money, build a team, develop a product/service, sell to customers, build the admin infrastructure to support it all… It’s hard to prioritize.  It’s even hard to make a semi-complete “to do list”. That’s why I created this horrible acronym: ASAP EFF PP The letters make more sense in…