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My LinkedIn headline currently reads: Technical Product Leader | Payments & Fintech | ex-Nium · ex-AmEx. I haven’t decided how long I’ll keep it that way. Some days it feels like useful context. Other days it feels like I’m leaning on something I should have moved past. I haven’t fully resolved it, which is…
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There’s a particular kind of suffering that has nothing to do with what’s actually happening to you, and everything to do with what you’re telling yourself about what’s happening. You miss one deadline at work, and within minutes you’re convinced you’re going to be fired, your career is over, and you were never good…
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Somewhere in the near future, and the leading edge of that future is already visible today, you will tell an AI to book you a flight, and the AI will book the flight. Not research flights and show you options. Not open a browser tab and wait for you to click confirm. It will…
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Start with a simple question. When a company in California pays a software vendor in Bangalore, what actually happens between the moment someone clicks send and the moment the vendor’s bank account shows a number? The answer, if you have spent any time in the payments industry, is that a lot happens. The bank…
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There is a particular quality of unhappiness that is generated not by anything that has actually happened to you but by looking at what is happening to someone else. It is a familiar feeling. You are doing reasonably well, by most available measures. And then you encounter evidence of someone who seems to be…
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There is something happening quietly on the internet right now, and it does not have a name yet, which is probably why it has not been ruined yet. It shows up in small moments. A person posts a painting they did over the weekend. The proportions are slightly off. The colours do not match…
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There is a specific kind of pleasure that arrives about thirty pages into a book you have decided to take seriously. The initial friction is gone. The writer’s voice has become familiar. The particular logic of this particular work has started to settle into something you can inhabit rather than merely follow. And then…
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The body is almost always the last thing we listen to, even though it speaks first. Before the mind has fully registered that something is wrong, the body usually already knows. There is a tightness somewhere. A flatness in the energy that does not match the calendar or the caffeine intake. A sleep that…
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Every time you tap your card at a store, a small fee moves in the background. You do not see it. The cashier does not mention it. The receipt does not show it. But the merchant who sold you your coffee, your groceries, your shoes, paid it. In the United States, that fee averaged…
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At some point, the idea of the self-made person became one of the most celebrated stories a culture can tell. The person who started with nothing, who relied on nobody, who through pure will and effort arrived at something significant. It is a powerful story. It is also, in almost every case, not entirely…