Why this page changed
The old version of this site promised a firm. There is no firm. There is one person, a set of skills that took a career to assemble, and a decision.
The previous version of this page said we. It talked about an elite network assembled per project, and about taking the wildest concepts seriously enough to make them profitable. None of that was a lie, exactly. It was just a size I had not earned yet.
So here is the accurate version.
What is actually here
One person. A civil engineering degree, which is where you learn that the cost of a thing is not a matter of opinion. Two Paris programmes that taught me the other half — who owns a project, who carries its risk, what makes an investment worth making.
And then the part that does not fit on a diploma: years of making other people's projects real. Ideas validated, and a few of them killed early, which is the more useful skill. Drawings carried into execution. New ventures started inside large companies, where the hard part is almost never the idea.
Most of that work carries somebody else's name. That is fine. It is also the reason for this page.
What changed
I became a father recently.
I want to be careful here, because becoming a parent changed everything is the most worn sentence available, and it usually means the person wanted more free time. That is not what happened.
What happened is narrower and harder. The question stopped being whether the work was good and became whether I would be able to explain, later, what I had spent the hours on. A career of doing excellent work inside other people's structures is a real answer. It stopped being mine.
What this is not
This is not a retirement from working for others. I still take a seat inside a company that genuinely wants to build something new, and I will carry that project the way I would carry my own. The condition is the same every time, and it is not negotiable: not as one more part of the machine. If the project needs somebody to own it, there is a conversation. If it needs somebody to execute a decision already made three levels up, there is not.
What to expect here
Entries while things are undecided, not after they worked. That is the only version worth reading, and it is the only one I am in a position to write, because nothing here has finished yet.
Three things are on the table. One is live. None of them has proven itself. When one does, it will be written down here — and so will the one that does not.