The empty spreadsheet
There was a job title, a Slack login, and a founder in Geneva who was fairly sure this was going to matter. I was in Cape Town, eight thousand kilometres away, with a blank sheet and a list of questions.
Eighteen months later that department had onboarded over a thousand creators, signed more than $2 million in contracts, and had five people running it.
I'd love to tell you it came from a brilliant idea. It came from writing down what we did on Monday, fixing what broke on Tuesday, and writing it down again on Wednesday. Then doing that for seventy-eight weeks, until the thing ran whether I was in the room or not.
That is the whole trick. I have been repeating it ever since.
Then I left crypto to sell gift hampers
Corporate gifting. Four hundred corporate accounts. No token launches, no Discord at two in the morning, nobody calling anything a paradigm. People I respect asked me, kindly, if I was alright.
It was the best education I've had.
With the noise stripped out, the job turned out to be identical. Know what the client actually needs. Remember what they told you nine months ago. Make the second order easier than the first. Build the system so the answer doesn't depend on whether you slept well.
Growth was never the new logo. Growth is what happens on day ninety-one.
I went back into tech able to see it everywhere. Most briefs hide the real problem. Very few companies have a strategy problem — most of them have a perfectly good strategy. What they have is a gap between the deck and the ground, and twelve capable people underneath it, guessing.
A launch that worked for boring reasons
I ran strategic operations for a global hardware launch.
None of that came from a clever idea either. It came from everyone knowing exactly what happened next. Outcomes, not outputs.
Why I'm doing this now and not in five years
AI has made execution close to free. Anyone can produce. Almost nobody can decide. The scarce thing is no longer the work. It's knowing which work, in what order, measured how, owned by whom.
The companies that win the next five years won't be the ones with the best ideas. They'll be the ones whose ideas reach the ground.
I've spent nine years doing that from inside one company at a time. Cape Town, Geneva, Paris, Sydney. Startups with everything to prove, and businesses with everything to lose. I'd rather do it for more than one at a time.
So: Curiosity Consultants. Three pillars, one obsession — asking the question leadership is too close to ask, then building the answer.
Relentlessly curious. Ruthlessly effective.