I build products for industries where a mistake costs real money.

I've never accepted that a thing has to be done the way it's always been done. At nine I was programming. At sixteen I was a carpentry apprentice building houses. When two employers went bust I taught myself computer and network engineering from books, printing facts until the walls were covered in A4 paper, and passed every professional exam I sat, paid for by driving vans, mixing cement, making furniture, bar and restaurant shifts, and PCs I built and sold. Then I walked into a council to ask for six months' unpaid experience. They gave me a job that afternoon. Two years later I was supporting mission- and life-critical systems at Sun Microsystems with forty-five minutes to get them back up.

Since then the shape has been the same every time: find the problem nobody has solved, solve it, move on to the next one. The go-to-market for the UK's first 3G network. The first personal-finance tool built for banks: three Finovate awards, a Webby, the first real PFM inside Spanish online banking. A 10x strategy for FICO in five weeks. A CODiE-winning learning platform for National Geographic. Europe's first fully digital bank onboarding, after the bank had failed at it for six years, delivered in nine months and run from a sailing boat. The work that lasted was never the clever interface. It was the system underneath it that made the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard.

Today the job has changed shape. A small team with AI agents can build a working product in an afternoon. Deciding what is right, checking it, and keeping it right is the part nobody has made cheap. That is what I work on, and it is what The Intent Loop is about: own your written intent, not your code; settle arguments with working versions and real users; plan around human attention; design for people and agents. Where the old words didn't fit, I made new ones: intent debt, the judgment budget, the regeneration test.

I'm Co-Founder and CTO of Nelum, the AI assistant for the commodities industry, with a verification side so you know who you're dealing with, and a compliance layer so the record of what was agreed and what happened can never be rewritten. I designed and built it myself, with agents, and it has been live since July 2026. Before that I co-founded a crypto product company with a Ukrainian team, ran a free UX internship that trained two cohorts through the war, was among the first to teach Lean UX in Europe, and spent the years nobody was paying me on trading algorithms, Ethereum mining and a few hundred abstract paintings.

Based in Singapore. Three years in Asia so far.