I am in Spain right now, spending a few days with the family. And when I get time like this - away from the day-to-day, away from the noise - I tend to reflect.

I thought I would put together a list of my fundamentals. The guiding principles I use for business and life in general. Not because I have it all figured out. I definitely do not. But because I think there is value in hearing how other people think about these things. Maybe some of it resonates. Maybe it helps you put into words something you already felt but had not formalised yet.

A bit of context if this is your first time here. My name is Axel Molist Cordina. I am originally from Spain, and I have been living in the UK since 2008. I founded a telecoms services company called circle.cloud - built it from scratch to about 140 people - and I now run a telecoms software company called We UC, which we are in the process of launching as a SaaS product. So I have been building for over a decade. Everything I am about to share comes from that experience.

These principles are not for everyone. They are what works for me. But if the rationale behind any of them feels right, then perhaps they will be useful for you too.

1. Love What You Do

This is the foundation for everything else.

I genuinely believe the only way to do great work is to love what you do. Building something - a company, a product, anything worthwhile - is incredibly hard. There are countless moments where a rational person would simply walk away.

The only people who push through are the ones who actually love the work itself. Not the money. Not the status. The work.

Steve Jobs put it well in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech: "The only way to do great work is to love what you do." He also said that only the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who actually do. I think he was right. You have to be obsessive. You have to love it.

And if you do great work, money follows. Not immediately. Not always on your timeline. But it follows. The mistake is chasing money first and hoping quality comes later. It does not work that way.

2. Keep Your Word

There is a line from Scarface that has always stuck with me: "All I have in this world is my balls and my word, and I don't break 'em for no one." It resonated because there is genuine truth in it.

You have to keep your word. If you say you are going to do something, do it. It does not matter how small the commitment seems. If you said you would call on Tuesday, call on Tuesday. People remember when you follow through. And they remember even more clearly when you do not.

I stay true to my word. Always. It is not negotiable. Your reputation is built one kept promise at a time.

3. Do the Right Thing

This one sounds obvious until the moment arrives when the right thing is also the harder thing. The slower thing. The less profitable thing in the short term.

I have watched people cut corners because they could see a quick win. But that quick win sometimes meant hurting someone, or doing something ethically grey, or going down a path that bypassed lessons they actually needed to learn.

Do not take the shortcut. Even if doing the right thing takes three times longer to get you where you are going, you will arrive with your integrity intact. And that matters more than speed.

4. Be Patient but Relentlessly Persistent

There is an old saying that a woodpecker does not peck a thousand trees once - it pecks one tree a thousand times and gets dinner. I love that because it is exactly how building a business works. You pick a thing. You commit to it. And you keep going.

Most things take longer than you expect. That is fine. The people who stay the course - who do not jump to the next idea every time things get hard - are the ones who eventually break through.

5. Ask for the Order

Do not be shy. Ask for what you want.

I have lost deals simply because I did not ask for the order. I was waiting for the customer to say yes. They did not. Sales is not just about building relationships. At some point you have to say, "Let's do this." That is it. Assume you have the order. That is the part most salespeople avoid.

It is the same outside of sales. If you want something - a meeting, a favour, an introduction - ask. If you do not ask, you do not get. It really is that simple.

6. Mueve el Culo (Move Your Arse)

This one is related but different. Do not wait for things to come to you.

Some companies build their entire model on referrals and word of mouth. That is fine. But I believe you also need to go and get the business. Pick up the phone. Show up. Speak to people. Meet new people. Move. Be proactive.

The phone is not going to ring itself. And opportunities do not land on your lap. You have to go out and create them.

7. Set Unrealistic Deadlines

I set myself deadlines for everything, and I make them optimistic on purpose.

When you give yourself a tight amount of time, you fill that time with focused work. Give yourself two weeks, it takes two weeks. Give yourself five days, you find a way. That is Parkinson's Law in action.

Many of my projects have overrun their original timeline. That is fine. The deadline is not there to punish me. It is there to create urgency. Without a deadline, things drift. And drifting is what kills most projects.

8. Think Ten X

However big you are thinking, think bigger.

Whenever I come up with a goal or an idea, I ask myself: can we do ten times this? Can we make it bigger, better, bolder? That does not mean every idea needs to be massive. It means you should test the ceiling before accepting the floor.

Most people set goals based on what feels safe. Safe goals produce safe results. Push the number. You can always scale back. If the idea does not scare you a little, you are probably not pushing far enough.

9. Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

Your comfort zone is your limiting zone.

Every significant thing I have done - the first cold call, hiring my first employee, stepping back from the company I built, making videos like this one - felt uncomfortable at the time. That discomfort was not a warning. It was a signal that it mattered.

If you are not regularly doing things that make you uncomfortable, you are not growing. It is that simple. Push yourself out of the comfortable space. That is where progress lives.

10. Action Trumps Inaction

Move. Act. Stop thinking about it.

Overthinking kills more progress than bad decisions ever will. There is a real cost to inaction. A wrong decision gives you information - you learn, you correct, you move forward. No decision gives you nothing. You are just stuck.

I would rather make a move and get it wrong than sit and analyse until the moment passes. If you got it wrong, you will figure it out. But you have to move first.

11. Follow Your Gut

They say your gut is your second brain. There is real science behind it - neurons exist in your gut, and that is what people call the "gut feeling."

I think it is how you connect your conscious mind to your subconscious. In so many decisions I have made in business and life, I have made them when the decision felt right - not when the spreadsheet told me to act.

Our brains are far more powerful than we give them credit for. I believe your gut is your gateway to that deeper level of intelligence. Your intuition. I trust my gut on every major decision, and so far it has served me well.

12. Don't Trust No One

My father always told me something his mother used to say.

"No et fiis ni de la teva mare." That is Catalan. It means "do not trust even your mother."

It sounds extreme - and it is extreme - but the principle behind it is sound. Be careful with people. Especially when money is involved. I have seen people do surprising things when the stakes are high. People I thought were solid.

Trust with limits. Do not trust anyone entirely.

13. Hire Based on Attitude

When hiring, attitude beats skills. Every time.

Skills can be taught. You can teach someone a system, a tool, a process. But attitude - which is based on their perspective on life - determines how they show up, how they handle pressure, whether they actually care. All of that is rooted in how they see the world. And you cannot teach that. It is who they are.

I have learned this the hard way. I have hired people with incredible CVs who simply did not have the right attitude. And I have hired people with very little experience who turned out to be brilliant because they genuinely wanted to learn and improve.

Find people who care. Teach them the rest.

14. Learn to Delegate

This one is hard. Genuinely hard.

I founded circle.cloud. Built it from nothing. Did the telemarketing, the sales, the installations, the billing, the support - all of it. But in order to grow the business, I had to step back. I hired an operations manager, an engineering manager, a sales manager, and eventually a board of directors and a CEO. I moved to chairman. The business operates without me day to day now.

For a founder, letting go feels like losing control. But it is the opposite. It is gaining freedom.

And I believe your leadership team needs to be genuinely invested. The only way I have found to make the key people in your business feel like owners is through equity. Give them a minority stake. Something that aligns their incentives with the long-term success of the business, not just a salary. Never give away control. But give them something to care about.

15. Empathy Is Your Superpower

This one is underrated.

Being able to see things from someone else's perspective - understanding how they actually feel in a situation, not how you think they should feel - gives you a genuine edge. It changes how you lead, how you sell, how you handle conflict. Everything.

Most people listen to respond. Very few people listen to understand. There is a massive difference.

16. Make Time to Think

I have a policy: no meetings before 11 AM, unless completely necessary.

The morning is when my brain is sharpest. That is when I think, plan, and work on the hardest problems. Most people fill their mornings with meetings and emails - other people's agendas - and by lunchtime they have spent their best cognitive hours on things that could have waited.

I use my mornings to putter. To think about business direction, company structure, whatever the biggest challenges are. Sometimes I do not produce anything visible. But that thinking compounds over time.

Spend time alone. Ruminate. Let your mind work through the hard problems before the day takes over.

17. One Thing at a Time

When your to-do list is a mile long and everything feels urgent, the worst thing you can do is try to deal with it all at once.

One thing at a time. Give your full attention to the thing in front of you. Finish it, or get it to a point where you can move on, and then - and only then - shift to the next thing.

This is not about productivity. It is about preventing overwhelm. When you try to hold ten problems in your head at once, your stress rises and your output drops. Deal with one. Then the next. It sounds too simple to work, but it does.

18. Focus on the Signal

Every day there is noise. Emails, messages, requests, small fires. Most of it does not matter.

The signal is the one or two things that actually move you forward. Everything else is noise. And the hard part is not ignoring the things you do not want to do - it is ignoring the things you do want to do.

There is a story about Steve Jobs. Jony Ive said Steve used to ask him how many things he had said no to. And when Jony listed a few, Steve was not impressed, because Jony did not want to do those things anyway. That is not focus. Focus is saying no to the things you want to do with every fibre of your body - because the signal matters more.

Increase the signal-to-noise ratio. Say no to everything that is not the main thing. And do the main thing until it is done.

19. The 80/20 Rule

When deciding what to work on, do the work that will produce the majority of the results first.

That is the Pareto Principle - roughly 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort. So when prioritising, ask yourself: what is the thing that will get me the biggest result in the least amount of time?

Start there. Because that early progress gives you momentum. It gives you a feeling of accomplishment that you can carry forward - either onto the next task or to keep pushing on the one you are on.

Most people spread their effort evenly across everything. Do not. Find the 20% that produces 80% of the output. Hit that first. Then reassess.

20. Prioritise Sleep

I think sleep is the most underrated performance tool there is.

I aim for seven and a half hours every night. I do not always hit it, but I know the difference it makes. Everything deteriorates when you are under-slept. Your decisions, your mood, your patience, your clarity, your ability to handle stress. Everything.

And the data supports it. Sleep deprivation has been shown to impair cognitive function to the same degree as having a few drinks. That is not a small thing.

I have learned to treat sleep as infrastructure. Not a reward for finishing work. Not something to sacrifice to get more done. It is the thing that makes everything else possible.

21. Eat Well

This one is straightforward. Eat good food. Cut out the processed stuff. Do not overeat - that is one I still struggle with.

And do not eat within four hours of bed. That has been massive for me. Eating late wrecks sleep quality, and then everything cascades from there.

I am not extreme about diet. I do not follow any particular plan. I just try to eat real food, eat reasonable amounts, and give my body time to digest before sleeping. It is simple, but the impact on how I feel day to day has been enormous.

22. Train Every Day

I try to train at least five days per week. Weights. Ideally I would do something every single day, even if it is just a lighter session.

I am not perfect at this. Travel disrupts my routine. Bad sleep undermines my motivation. But I am working on making it non-negotiable. Because when I am consistent with training, everything else improves - my energy, my focus, my resilience, my mood and my sleep.

Your body is the engine for everything else. If the engine is not looked after, nothing else runs properly.

23. Ditch the Alcohol Trap

Alcohol is a trap. And I say that from experience.

A few years ago I read a book called This Naked Mind and it made me think about something simple. We were all happy as kids. No alcohol. Perfectly content. So why do we believe we need it as adults? We do not. We are habituated to it.

I stopped drinking for over a year. I felt amazing. Then on holiday, my wife suggested I have a beer. And I thought, well, I will just have one. Within a few months I was back to drinking almost daily.

January of this year I stopped again. Currently just over two months in. I feel great. No plans to go back.

Not drinking has improved my sleep, my clarity, my productivity, my mood - everything. If there is one thing on this list that has made the biggest difference for me recently, it is probably this one.

24. Practise Gratitude

I have a lot already. More than I sometimes realise. More than I ever imagined as a kid. And I take it for granted more than I should.

But when I actually stop and remind myself of what I have - where I am, who I am with, what I have built - I feel genuinely happy. Not in a forced way. In a real way.

It is easy to always be chasing the next thing. Gratitude is the counterbalance. It is what stops ambition from becoming a treadmill.

25. Embrace Being Different and Stop Caring What Others Think

Last one.

Everyone is different. Embrace what makes you different. There is nobody out there like you, or like me. Which makes it pointless to compare your life to someone else's.

I think we have fallen into this trap because of social media. We see other people's highlight reels and believe we are falling behind. But you are not behind. You are on your own path.

And the freedom that comes with genuinely accepting this is enormous. Stop caring so much about what other people think. We are only here for a short amount of time. Everyone is busy with their own lives. They are not thinking about you anywhere near as much as you imagine.

I used to care a lot more than I do now. And that freedom has changed how I make decisions, how I work, and how I live.

Final Thought

Those are my guiding principles. Twenty-five things I come back to, especially when I need to make a decision or when things get complicated.

I am not perfect at all of them. Some I have followed for years. Some I am still working on. But having them clear in my head helps. And I hope putting them into words helps someone else too.

If you want to go deeper into how I structure my days and my decision-making, I have put together something called the CEO Operating System. You can find it at axelmolist.com/ceo-os.

Last week I attended the Cavell Summit Europe in central London - a one-day conference that brings together the major telecoms providers, carriers, and product builders across the UK and Europe. The room was full of founders, CEOs, and market analysts. The day was packed with talks, panel discussions, and live audience polling.

I went in expecting a conversation about the state of the telecoms industry. I came out thinking about something much bigger. Five themes kept surfacing throughout the day - and they tell you a lot about where this industry is heading.

1. Data Sovereignty is No Longer Optional

Sovereignty was one of the headline topics of the conference, and rightly so.

The concept is straightforward: data should stay within the country or region it originates from. But in practice, particularly in telecoms, it gets complicated quickly.

If you are running a voice service and your session border controllers sit in the public cloud - Amazon Web Services in the US, for example - it is entirely possible that a phone call made by your customer in London traverses the Atlantic before coming back. The call itself may be encrypted, so eavesdropping is unlikely. But the moment you introduce AI into the equation - transcription, call analysis, sentiment scoring - the data starts moving. A call recording might be sent to OpenAI for transcription. That transcription might then be processed by another service for analysis. Each hop is a potential sovereignty issue.

And the risk is not just theoretical. A US-based AI provider could receive a subpoena from the Department of Justice, and suddenly the contents of a business phone call are in the public domain. That is not a far-fetched scenario - it is a legal reality of hosting data in another jurisdiction.

The large carriers are responding by establishing physical data centres in every country they operate in. They guarantee to customers that their data does not leave that geography. When it does, the customer is told explicitly. Google announced a partnership with Mistral, a French AI company, to deliver a sovereign AI product for the European market. If a company the size of Google is partnering with a French company specifically to address European sovereignty concerns, something significant is happening. There is regulation being implemented over the coming months that will make this even more prominent.

For anyone running voice services to businesses - enterprise or SME - the question "where does my data go?" is no longer theoretical. Customers are asking it. They understand enough about the cloud to know that "the cloud" is not one place. They want specifics. And they are right to ask.

We self-host our infrastructure at We UC. Our servers sit in the UK. We run data centres in London and on the South Coast, and we even run our own AI service on our own infrastructure. All the call recording transcription, analysis, and summarisation happens locally. You do not need the most powerful models in the world to do transcription and summarisation - that is a common misnomer. We have managed to do this on our own infrastructure, keeping all data within the UK. It is one of the decisions we made early on, and watching this conversation unfold at the conference reinforced that it was the right one.

2. AI is Not a Feature - It is the New Electricity

There was a lot of talk at the conference about how AI is going to disrupt the workplace. How AI will impact telecoms. How businesses should plan for AI.

It struck me that the conversation is framed incorrectly.

AI is not a feature you bolt on. It is not a module you activate. It is closer to electricity - so fundamental, so omnipresent, that discussing "how electricity will impact our business" would sound absurd. Yet that is essentially how parts of the telecoms industry are still treating AI. As something new. Something to plan for. Something to discuss at conferences.

The reality is that AI has already changed how most knowledge workers operate. It has already rewritten the economics of software development, customer service, content production, and data analysis. Treating it as an upcoming disruption misses the point. It is the new baseline.

I think this reflects a divide that has been growing for years - between traditional telecoms companies and modern software companies.

Traditional telecoms providers are, by nature, infrastructure businesses. They operate on BSS and OSS systems that were built decades ago. Their software development practices prioritise stability and basic functionality over innovation. The interfaces are over-complicated. The architecture is legacy. The appetite for rapid change is low - not because the people are not smart, but because the systems and culture were built for a different era.

On the other side, you have companies like ElevenLabs. Born in the modern era. Running on Kubernetes. Advanced CI/CD workflows. AI woven into every part of how they build and ship. They care about design, about user experience, about craft. They do not have twenty years of technical debt weighing them down. They move at a completely different speed.

The telecoms industry is full of companies operating like it is still 2010. Meanwhile, modern software companies are building products that interact with the same customers, solve the same problems, and move ten times faster. That creates a gap - and it is widening.

3. Voice AI Was the Real Story

The conference organisers positioned sovereignty as the main theme. And it was well covered. But the topic the audience actually wanted to discuss - overwhelmingly, based on a live poll at the start of the day - was voice AI.

It is not hard to see why.

One of the demonstrations came from Bandwidth, an international carrier with a strong presence in Europe. They partnered with a hotel chain and implemented a voice AI solution that handles the front desk. Guest calls about room service orders, booking modifications, general enquiries - all handled by AI with access to the hotel's booking system. The problem it solved was simple: during busy periods, the hotel did not have enough staff to answer every call. Guests were left waiting. With voice AI, the constraint disappears. You can have thousands of agents handling calls simultaneously, freeing human staff to focus on face-to-face interactions.

Another example: a restaurant chain facing the same problem. At peak hours, waiters cannot answer the phone. Customers calling to book a table, modify a reservation, or ask about the menu are left on hold or unanswered. A voice AI solution with access to the restaurant's systems solves this immediately.

These are not theoretical use cases. They are live deployments.

The interesting tension in this space is between two camps. On one side, tech startups are building voice AI solutions rapidly but often know nothing about telecoms. They do not understand session border controllers, call switches, or quality of service at the network level. They route calls through an API to something like Twilio so they can make and receive phone calls, and they ship the product. They know the customer. They win the deal. But the quality of service cannot be as good as if they owned the whole stack. If these startups understood how a soft switch works, how to route calls on-premise, how to run phone calls at scale on their own network - the call quality would be better, the troubleshooting faster, and the whole thing cheaper and more stable long-term.

On the other side, traditional telecoms providers understand the infrastructure deeply but are too slow to build these solutions themselves. They provide the telecom services but not the value-added solutions on top. Meanwhile, the startups are putting voice AI products in front of the telco solution and extracting margin from providers who should be delivering it themselves.

There is a gap between the two. And I believe We UC sits in that gap. We have the software skills and the pace of a modern company. We also have the telecoms experience - the soft switch experience, the network we are running ourselves. We are positioned at the intersection of a modern software company and a traditional telco. That middle ground is where the opportunity is. It is also where we are building Ringup, our voice AI product that will be built directly into We UC.

4. Voice is Going to Zero

A recurring message at the conference: the traditional telephony pricing model is dying.

The argument is straightforward. Services like WhatsApp have normalised free communication. A WhatsApp call costs nothing because it does not touch the public telephone network - both endpoints are controlled by the same company within a closed environment. But that creates a perception that all voice communication should be free. The ten or fifteen pounds per user per month model, with bundled minutes and a standard feature set, is gradually losing its value.

Businesses still have phone numbers. That is still the universal method for communicating with businesses through voice. But the pricing pressure is real.

So how do telecoms companies remain profitable?

The answer that emerged clearly from the conference: value-added services.

What does that mean in practice? Three things stood out.

First, data analytics and reporting. Connecting a customer's CRM, financial system, and phone platform so that data appears in one place - dashboards and scheduled reports that cover not just call activity but business performance.

Second, voice AI. Tools like Ringup, which we are building into We UC, that give businesses the ability to implement AI agents within their phone system. Not just agents that answer calls and take voicemails, but agents that can perform actions - booking appointments, modifying reservations, updating records - because they plug into the CRM integrations already in place.

Third, integrations themselves. Most businesses run a CRM or a financial system or some kind of platform to manage their operations. Integrating into these platforms allows a productivity boost, an efficiency boost, and allows customers to do their best work by having access to the best technology for their business.

The core voice licence becomes the entry point. The real margin lives in the solutions built on top of it.

For anyone building in the telecoms space, the message was clear: the commodity is the phone line. The value is everything you build around it.

5. Specialisation is the Only Way to Stand Out

The final theme that stayed with me is about focus.

We are preparing to sell We UC as a software-as-a-service product. In a crowded market - and unified communications is a very crowded market - having a product that solves many problems for many people is not a differentiation strategy. It is a path to invisibility.

I remember a marketing brochure from about ten years ago, when "cloud" was the buzzword. The headline was: "How do you stand out from the cloud?" It was a clever line then. It is even more relevant now, because the market is noisier than it has ever been.

The approach we are evaluating is straightforward: specialise.

In order to stand out, you need to understand the customer and understand their workflow. You need to know how they operate day to day and know what problems they have so well that you can create a solution that removes friction - so they can solve those problems faster and better with your product. The only way to do that at scale is to specialise.

Either you verticalise - specialise in a particular industry and solve a problem that industry has, because you understand it deeply enough to solve it well. Or you specialise in a particular solution that applies across multiple industries, but you solve the problem within that solution extremely well.

We are evaluating both paths right now. But the principle is clear: in a noisy market, the businesses that succeed are the ones that are laser-focused on solving one problem better than anyone else. Not something generic. Not "we do everything for everyone." Something specific for one specific type of customer - and being the best in the world at it.

That is what we are going to focus on with We UC. Once we have made the decision on which segment, every piece of marketing and every product decision will be shaped by it.

What I Took Away

The Cavell Summit condensed a lot of the themes I have been thinking about into a single day. Sovereignty is real and getting more urgent. AI is not a feature - it is the foundation. Voice AI is the most immediate disruption in telecoms. Traditional pricing models are eroding. And the only way to build something visible in a crowded market is to be specific about what you do and who you do it for.

None of these ideas exist in isolation. They overlap. The company that builds a communication platform with AI at its core, that handles data in a sovereign way, that is able to solve really specific problems better than anyone else, and that specialises in a particular vertical or solution - those are the companies that will win.

That is what we are building with We UC. And conferences like this one remind me that we are heading in the right direction.

If you want my operating framework for running at full capacity as a founder and CEO, it is free at axelmolist.com/ceo-os.

I have been fat. I have been thin. I have been somewhere in between. And the honest truth is that I have never stayed in one place for very long.

My weight has fluctuated my entire life - from childhood through my twenties, through building a business, through a wedding, through fatherhood - and it continues to fluctuate now. I am not writing this because I have solved it. I am writing this because I have not.

The Earliest Memory

The first time I remember being aware of my weight, I was about seven or eight years old. I did not feel fat. I only realised it when I compared myself to the other kids. Looking back, the explanation is straightforward: I was eating more than I was burning. That is always the explanation.

I do not believe genetics make weight loss impossible. Metabolism varies between people, and a smaller body burns fewer calories than a larger one - that is basic thermodynamics. But the principle is always the same. Calories in versus calories out.

The more interesting question is not why I was fat. It is why I was eating so much.

Food as Dopamine

Food is a dopamine release mechanism. Everyone knows this on some level, but not everyone experiences it the same way. For me, food has always been connected to pleasure in a way that goes beyond hunger. It is comfort, reward, and ritual.

As a child, I think I was chasing that dopamine without understanding what it was. My mother used to hide the biscuits around the house because I would find them and eat them all. She hid the mayonnaise for the same reason. At the same time, she would tell me to finish everything on my plate - food should not go to waste. That combination of abundance and obligation likely planted something deep.

This is not blame. It is observation. If my own son had the same tendencies, I would try to intervene, but I am not sure I could prevent it either.

The Obsessive Personality

I recognise something about myself that connects all of this: I am obsessive. When something gets into my head, I cannot shift it until I have either completed it, learned everything about it, or experienced everything I can about it. I am all in or not in at all.

This trait has served me well in business. It is the same quality that allowed me to build circle.cloud from nothing, working eighteen-hour days because I knew exactly what needed to be done.

But with food and weight management, it is more of a liability than an asset. The same intensity that drives productive obsession also drives destructive patterns. The dopamine chase that makes me relentless at work is the same one that makes me eat twelve hundred calories at half past ten at night when I know I do not need them.

The Alcohol Parallel

I stopped drinking alcohol a few months ago, and this is not the first time. A couple of years ago, I spent just over a year without drinking. It was a year of clarity - calm, collected, sharp thinking. I did not want or fancy alcohol in any form.

Then my wife suggested I have a beer with her at lunch on holiday. Just one. It would not hurt. And she was right - one beer did not hurt. But one beer became another, and another, and slowly I returned to the same patterns that made me want to stop in the first place.

Alcohol follows a predictable cycle. You have a drink and your mood lifts from baseline to somewhere above it. When the effect wears off, you do not return to where you started - you land slightly below baseline. So the next time you drink, you are starting from a lower point, and you need slightly more to reach the same feeling. Over time, the baseline keeps dropping.

I do not know anyone who has been drinking consistently for ten years and drinks the same amount today as they did at the start. The trajectory is always upward. Alcohol is a net negative to peace of mind, and I include it here because it operates on the exact same dopamine principle as food.

The Timeline

At fourteen, I decided I wanted to lose weight. I started skateboarding, running, swimming. I told my mother to give me less food. I made my own plates instead of having them served to me.

I remember walking downhill toward town one afternoon, probably around four o'clock, having skipped lunch. I was so hungry I felt like my body was consuming itself. That feeling has stayed with me. Every time I lose weight now, I remember it, and I think: this hunger means my body is burning fat. This is progress.

The problem is that this state is not sustainable. You cannot restrict yourself severely and expect the result to hold. Heavy restriction leads to heavy compensation later.

I fluctuated between sixty-five and seventy-five kilograms through my late teens and twenties - small ups and downs, nothing dramatic. Then I started my business, entered a long-term relationship, and stopped paying attention.

By 2017 or 2018, the weight started creeping up. Seventy-five. Eighty. Eighty-five. Ninety. At ninety, I essentially gave up. The business needed all my attention. I told myself I would deal with my body later.

Later arrived in late 2020 at a hundred and ten kilograms.

The Juicing Experiment

My son was two. My wedding celebration was coming up in October 2021. I watched a documentary about an Australian man who spent three months driving across America, consuming nothing but freshly juiced vegetables and fruit. He lost a tremendous amount of weight.

The approach appealed to my obsessive nature perfectly: extreme action, extreme results, clear rules, defined timeline. I bought a juicer and started.

After a couple of weeks, I found the process messy and time-consuming, so I discovered a London company called Prescription Juices that delivered freshly pressed juice frozen to my door each week. Their formulations were designed by dietitians and doctors - each day included juices with dates, nuts, celery, kale, oranges. Proteins, fats, carbohydrates, micronutrients. Around five hundred calories per day.

I juiced for ten weeks and went from a hundred and ten kilograms to sixty-seven. I felt on top of the world.

After the wedding, I hired a dietitian. That worked for three or four months. Then the old habits crept back in. Beer after work. Nuts with the beer. Wine with dinner. By 2023, I was back at eighty-five.

I hired a personal trainer, cut out most of the poor food choices, stopped drinking. Dropped to seventy-five. I have been fluctuating around that number since - down to seventy-two, up to seventy-eight, back to seventy-four.

Right now, I am at seventy-seven. My goal is sixty-five at around twelve percent body fat. I am currently at twenty-two percent. There is work to do.

Last Night

Here is where the self-awareness becomes both useful and frustrating.

Last night, I was at a boardroom event with a group of founders and CEOs. It ran from half six to half nine. I did not get back until half ten. I was not particularly hungry - I had eaten some snacks at the event - but I had not had dinner, and my brain decided that meant I deserved something.

I did not need a meal. I could have gone to bed. Instead, I walked to the shop and bought a wrap, peanuts, a yoghourt, a protein drink, and a chocolate bar. Instead of a hundred or two hundred calories, I consumed twelve hundred.

Why? Because my body wanted a small hit of dopamine before sleep. A comfort. A ritual to close the day. And I gave in.

This is the part that demoralises me. I am fully aware of what I am doing. I can describe the mechanism in detail. I know I am trading short-term pleasure for long-term progress. And I still do it.

Does this mean I do not care enough about the goal? Does it mean immediate gratification matters more to me than long-term results? I do not think so, not in the grand scheme. But something in the moment overrides what I know to be true.

I have not mastered this. I am still working on it.

The Types

One thing I have observed, and perhaps this is obvious but worth naming, is that people fall into distinct categories with weight:

1. You carry extra weight and struggle to lose it
2. You are thin and struggle to gain it
3. You fluctuate - a tendency toward one direction, interrupted by intense correction in the other

I am the third type. I have a tendency toward gaining weight because I have a tendency toward overeating. But I also have the capacity for extreme restriction - juicing for ten weeks, fasting for seven days, cutting out entire food groups overnight. The result is a life spent oscillating between states rather than settling into one.

Everybody is different. That is not a revelation. But naming the pattern you belong to is the first step toward working with it instead of against it.

Fasting as Clarity

The juicing journey introduced me to fasting, and fasting gave me something I did not expect. It was not the weight loss - although that helped. It was the mental clarity.

When I fast, I enter a state of enlightenment that I do not experience in normal life. There is peace in not having to think about food. There is a sharpness that arrives somewhere around the twenty-four-hour mark and intensifies at forty-eight hours.

This makes evolutionary sense. When our ancestors needed to hunt, they did so while hungry. The body adapted to be sharper when fasted - alertness was a survival advantage.

The longest fast I have done was seven days. Water and black coffee only, while working alone in Dubai. Physically, I felt incredible - like God, honestly. Mentally, every single day was harder than the last. Being surrounded by people eating in a hotel cafe while you are on day four of not eating takes a toll that is difficult to describe.

I broke the fast with a steak. It was probably the nicest tasting steak I have ever had, even though it was not a great steak. I followed it with a salted caramel iced coffee, which was so good I immediately had another one.

That experience was so intense it has actually put me off long fasts since. It was mentally draining in a way I was not expecting. But I will fast again. Fasting is no longer a weight loss tool for me - it is a reset. A way to achieve a temporary state of clarity and discipline that recalibrates everything.

If your doctor approves and you are healthy enough, I would recommend trying it. Start with a day. See how it feels. The sharpness alone is worth the discomfort.

Where I Am

I am at seventy-seven kilograms. I want to be at sixty-five. I have cut out alcohol again. I know what I need to do. I know the mechanisms that work against me. I know my obsessive personality will drive me to extreme measures and then pull me back toward excess.

I am closer to peace with this than I have ever been. Not because the battle is over, but because I finally understand the battlefield. The dopamine. The obsessiveness. The short-term override. The restriction-compensation cycle.

I do not have the answer yet. But I have the awareness. And I think awareness, honestly pursued, is the only foundation from which an answer can eventually come.

This is my journey. It is ongoing. And I suspect it always will be.

Everyone tells me the same thing. Just resell someone else's platform. It would be cheaper. It would be faster. It would make more business sense.

They are not wrong about any of that.

But they are wrong about what matters.

Selling Boxes Under Desks

My journey in telecoms started in 2012. I was working for a company that sold Siemens phone systems - physical boxes the size of three shoeboxes, plugged into walls underneath desks or shoved into corridors. On-premise PBXs for small businesses with five to ten users.

I could see that cloud was the future. It was obvious to me. I went to the owners and told them we needed to be selling cloud telephony. They disagreed - there was not enough money in it.

So I set up a company on the side. I got sacked for it. And that company became circle.cloud.

That decision - following my gut when the economics said otherwise - set a pattern I have repeated ever since.

The Search for the Right Platform

When I started circle.cloud, I needed a platform to resell. The obvious choice was Horizon by Gamma - solid, well-known, built on Broadsoft under the hood. But it was what everybody else was selling. I wanted something different.

I found a company called The Voice Factory, run by a man named Paul Harrison. Paul used to work at Broadsoft, and after he left he set up The Voice Factory and invested in his own Broadsoft platform. He believed in me at a time when I was just a person with a brand new company. Getting a reseller agreement with a telecoms carrier in 2015 was not as easy as it is today. You needed trading history, investment, industry connections. I had none of that. Paul took a chance on me anyway, and I have a tremendous amount of appreciation for that.

What drew me to Broadsoft was its architecture. The platform separated every service into its own cluster - one for the application layer, one for the database, one for media, and so on - all isolated, all horizontally scalable across multiple zones, meaning multiple data centres. You simply stack more servers in each zone when you need more capacity. It was the industry standard for good reason. Companies like Telefonica, Vodafone, and BT run their telephony on Broadsoft. You needed around four million pounds in capital to get a carrier-grade Broadsoft installation and licences, which was well beyond our reach at the time.

The initial years went well. We grew. But our billing costs grew too. We were spending around twenty thousand pounds a month on licence fees.

That made me start looking for alternatives.

The Outages That Changed Everything

I found a company called Bicom Systems that built their own cloud PBX on Asterisk. The licence fees were dramatically lower - charged per server rather than per user, with each server handling around 1,500 users. We made the switch.

At first, our software ran on Bicom's servers in their data centre. Then they had an outage in Milton Keynes. Two to three hours of no service for our customers. It made my blood boil. Their infrastructure standards were not where ours needed to be.

So we found our own data centre - a company called Netwise Hosting in central London, run by two founders who had built something remarkable. Small team, but the quality was extraordinary: diverse network paths, multiple carriers, Cisco routers in the core, multiple generators, multiple fuel contracts. We bought a quarter rack, installed our own servers, and ran the Bicom software on our hardware.

Then Netwise got hit with a DDoS attack. Not targeting us - targeting another customer. But because we shared the network, our service went down for three to four hours.

That was the moment I decided we would never again run our infrastructure on someone else's network. We invested in our own routers, our own switches, and established direct relationships with carriers for connectivity into our data centre.

Looking back, the evolution was a staircase:

1. First, we got our own software licences instead of paying per user per month
2. Then we hosted that software in a data centre we controlled
3. Then we ran it on our own network
4. Then we replaced the third-party software with our own

Step four is where the real story begins.

Finding Kazoo

I knew what I wanted: a platform with the scalability of Broadsoft but without the four-million-pound licence fee. Broadsoft had been acquired by Cisco by this point. I actually inquired heavily about obtaining a Broadworks platform, but the economics did not work.

The breakthrough came almost by accident. I was on a call with a telecoms consultancy from Argentina. Our requirements did not quite match what they could offer, but at the end of the conversation, one of them mentioned a small company in San Francisco called 2600 Hz that had built something called Kazoo. I had never heard of it. I made a note and moved on.

Months later, I hired a systems administrator named Konstantins - highly skilled, had built software products before. When I told him my goals, he said we could build something with one developer and have it in the market within six months. That turned out to be optimistic, to say the least.

What made Kazoo compelling was that it was architected as an open-source alternative to Broadsoft. Multiple application servers, multiple media servers, multiple SBCs, a distributed message bus - all capable of running across geographical zones. You could have a cluster in London and another in Amsterdam, failing over between them seamlessly. It was built for carriers and for scale. And it was open source, which meant no licence fees and full control.

We installed Kazoo, set it up in a distributed architecture, and started building.

Becoming a Software Company by Accident

The original plan was modest. Kazoo came with an open-source frontend called Monster UI, and we started by building a call recording application on top of it. That was meant to be the missing piece.

Within two months, Konstantins saw something bigger. Instead of bolting applications onto Monster UI, we should build our own platform from scratch - our own API, our own interface, our own product. One that talked to Kazoo for the PBX features but was entirely ours in terms of the user experience.

That decision changed everything.

We called it Circle UC at first. Then one day, the name We UC came to me. I was in the circle.cloud office and overheard Adam, one of the sales team, say, "I am just going to transfer this call to my director." Not our director. My director. We had grown fast - from ten employees to fifty or sixty in a few months - and somewhere in that growth, people had stopped thinking of the company as a team. It became "us and them."

The name "We" came from that realisation. It is inclusive. It promotes collaboration, not just communication. It makes people think of a company as a single force rather than separate departments. That is exactly what a unified communications platform should do. We paired it with UC - unified communications - and We UC was born.

What started as building a custom proposition for circle.cloud turned into something much bigger. We hired more developers. We set up sprints, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure, DevOps processes. We registered We UC Ltd. We built native iOS and Android apps, a desktop app, a web app. We now have a team of over twenty people.

We became a software company almost by accident. And I love it.

What We UC Is

We UC is a modern business phone system. A unified communications platform that handles calls to telephone numbers via audio, internal calls via audio or video, messaging, meetings, call reports, and analytics - all in one application.

The basics are now solid. We are on par with our previous platform in terms of features and stability, and we are onboarding customers. One recruitment business is already running on We UC, with more to follow.

But the basics are just the foundation. What excites me is what comes next.

We are building customisable dashboards that do not just display telephony data but pull in information from CRMs, support systems, and accounting platforms - a small business BI tool that gives founders a 360-degree view of their operation in a single screen. We are building voice AI agents that sound human, connect to business systems via MCP servers, and can handle tasks like restaurant bookings or appointment scheduling. We are building omnichannel messaging that brings WhatsApp, email, Facebook Messenger, and Google My Business conversations into a single interface alongside internal chat.

These are not features for the sake of features. They are tools that will genuinely impact small businesses' efficiency and profitability.

Enterprise companies have had this technology for years - data warehouses, Power BI, AI assistants, omnichannel support. Small businesses are still logging into six different platforms every morning and lack a centralised view of their data and operations. I want to change that.

That is the real answer to why I built this. Not because someone asked. Because someone should have. As Steve Jobs put it: "People don't know what they want until you show them."

What I Have Learned

Five years of building something nobody asked for has taught me a few things.

Follow your gut, even when the economics say otherwise. Every major decision I have made - leaving my first job to start circle.cloud, moving off Broadsoft, investing in our own infrastructure, choosing to build from scratch on Kazoo - looked questionable on a spreadsheet. Every single one turned out to be right.

Control your stack. When something goes wrong and your service runs on someone else's network, on someone else's software, on someone else's servers, you cannot fix it. You can only wait. That is an unacceptable position. The buck has to stop with us.

Building it yourself takes longer but lasts longer. We could have hired consultancies to build everything and moved faster. Instead, we learned Kazoo ourselves, hired expertise in-house, built the knowledge internally. It took more time. But now we own every layer of understanding, not just every layer of technology.

Craft is not a luxury. We care about details nobody will ever see. The architecture of the codebase, the elegance of the API, the precision of the UX. That care comes through in the final product, even when the customer cannot point to exactly why it feels different.

You do not need permission to build what you believe in. Nobody asked for We UC. The market did not demand it. A consultant would have told me to keep reselling. But the best products are built by people who see something that does not exist yet and refuse to accept that gap.

Kazoo itself is open-source software, and we are actively contributing back to it - working alongside carriers from all over the world, maintaining a shared codebase. That is the beauty of open source. You build on something great and make it greater. But for us, Kazoo is just the PBX engine. On top of it sits everything from messaging to video calling, online meetings, call recording transcription and summarisation, and much more - all wrapped around a user experience that is entirely ours.

The Road Ahead

I have no plans to sell We UC. I want to build it and keep building it. That is what I enjoy doing.

We are launching in the UK first, then the US, Europe, and potentially Australia. We are selling through circle.cloud's existing sales engine and, soon, via a self-service SaaS model - which is entirely new territory for me and genuinely exciting.

I want We UC to become a recognised name in unified communications. Not because it is the biggest, but because it is built with more care, more craft, and more attention to detail than anything else in the market.

That is what five years of building something nobody asked for has given me. Not just a product, but a conviction: the things worth building are rarely the things that make obvious sense at the start. They are the things you cannot stop thinking about. The things that keep you working not because you have to, but because you genuinely want to.

And I have never wanted anything more.

We are told that beauty is subjective. In the eye of the beholder. That there is no right or wrong.

But is it? Because nature does not seem to think so.

Look at a shell. Look at the spiral on it. Now look at the spiral of a galaxy. They are the same shape. That is not a coincidence. What makes a face beautiful? Symmetry - one side mirrors the other. What makes a flower beautiful? The geometry, the way the petals are arranged. What makes great architecture? The way the shapes and the sizes complement each other.

These are mathematical patterns. And they keep showing up across nature, across history, across everything we find beautiful.

Beauty has structure. It is not random. And two things arrived in the same week that gave me the language for something I have felt my entire life but never quite managed to put into words.

The first was Paul Graham - the founder of Y Combinator, one of the sharpest minds in technology - resharing an essay he wrote in 2002 called Taste for Makers. I read it and sat quietly for a minute afterwards, because someone had articulated the idea that taste is not preference. It is real, it is identifiable, and it is a skill that can be developed.

The second was the Steve Jobs Archive publishing a collection called Letters to a Young Creator. Over thirty letters from the people who knew Steve, worked alongside him, were shaped by him. Released on what would have been his 71st birthday. And Jony Ive - the man who designed the iPhone, the iMac, the iPad alongside Jobs for fifteen years - wrote a letter about what it actually means to care about making something beautiful.

Together, they point at something I think is the most important conversation happening in technology right now. Not about tools. Not about speed. About what we believe the people who use our work actually deserve.

The Comfortable Lie

We are told from childhood that taste is personal, subjective, that there is no right or wrong.

It sounds generous. It sounds democratic. But it is a comfortable lie we tell each other to avoid conflict.

Graham opens his essay with a question that sounds almost naive: is there such a thing as good taste, or is taste just personal preference? And then he answers it in a way that stopped me cold. He says if taste were just preference, then everyone's taste is already perfect. There would be no way to get better at designing things. No direction to improve towards. But we all know that is not true. We know when we are looking at something genuinely beautiful versus something that has just been assembled. We feel it. We just lack the confidence to trust that feeling.

And then he goes further. He identifies the principles that keep appearing across every field - mathematics, architecture, painting, writing, engineering. Simplicity. Symmetry. Resemblance to nature. As if beauty is not subjective at all. As if there is a deeper truth to it that transcends medium and era and culture.

Steve Jobs believed it too. He famously said that Microsoft had no taste. People thought that was arrogant. But I do not think he was being cruel. He was being precise. He was saying: they do not ask whether something is good - they ask whether it works and whether it sells. Those are not the same question.

Taste is the ability to know the difference.

The Bull

For me, Picasso is the most powerful illustration of what simplicity actually means.

In 1945, he made a series of eleven lithographs called The Bull. He starts with a detailed, realistic bull - muscular, anatomically complex. The kind of drawing that makes you think: this person can really draw.

But then - over eleven iterations - he strips it. Removes muscle. Removes shadow. Removes everything that is not essential. Until at the end he has five or six lines. And those lines contain the entire essence of a bull - the power, the weight, the character - more completely than the detailed version ever could.

That process - that brutal, disciplined act of subtraction - is what decades of mastery actually earns you. Not the ability to add more. The ability to know what to take away. The confidence to take it away. And the skill to make what remains feel not sparse, but complete.

Graham makes the same observation across fields. In mathematics, a shorter proof is a better proof. In writing, say what you mean and say it briefly. In architecture, beauty depends on a few structural elements, not a profusion of decoration. Good design uses symmetry. Good design resembles nature. And good design looks easy - even though getting there is incredibly hard.

Most people think simplicity is the easy option. That minimalism is about doing less. It is the opposite. Simplicity is the hardest version of the thing - the version where there is nowhere to hide. Where every single element has to earn its place.

That is what Jobs did to the phone. That is what Ive did to every product they made together. And it is no coincidence that Ive's greatest influence was Dieter Rams - the German designer whose philosophy fits in three words: less, but better.

Protecting What Is Fragile

Ive's letter from the archive is not what you might expect. He does not talk about products. He barely mentions the iPhone or the Mac. He talks about how Steve thought. He says: "The way he thought was profoundly beautiful." He describes Jobs's curiosity as "ferocious, energetic and restless" - not limited by his knowledge, not casual or passive, but practiced with intention and rigor.

And then he writes something I keep coming back to: "Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas - they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea."

We live in a world obsessed with shipping. Validate fast. Move fast. Get feedback fast. There is wisdom in that. But there is also a kind of violence in it if applied too early.

There is a moment in the creative process where an idea is alive but not yet strong enough to survive scrutiny. It exists as a feeling, a direction, an instinct - before it has the language or form to defend itself. Expose it to criticism too soon and you kill it. Not because the criticism is wrong, but because the idea has not had time to become what it could be.

Jobs and Ive understood this. They spent their afternoons in what Ive calls "the sanctuary of the design studio." Protected space where ideas could evolve before they were tested.

I think about this in my own work building We UC. There is constant pressure to ship, to show progress, to validate early. That pressure is mostly healthy. But I have also killed ideas by letting the committee into the room before the thing had legs. The skill is knowing when something needs protecting and when it needs testing. I am still learning that.

Graham says great design is redesign. Leonardo's drawings often show five or six attempts at a single line. The Porsche 911 only emerged from the redesign of an awkward prototype. First answers are almost never the best answers.

Taste as Love for the Craft

Tim Cook's letter describes the moment he decided to join Apple. The company was struggling. Most people thought it would not survive. Then he heard Steve speak.

Cook writes that when Jobs spoke, "any trepidation I harboured instantly dissolved." Not because Steve had a perfect plan. Because he had complete clarity of purpose. Cook says he had never met someone with so much passion and vision. And he says he traded a job for a purpose the day he joined.

That distinction matters. A job is a set of tasks. A purpose is a reason. People will do extraordinary things in service of a genuine reason in a way they never will for a task list.

And I think that is what taste really is. It is not snobbery. It is love for the craft. It is caring so deeply about what you are making that you refuse to accept anything less than beautiful. Not because you want to show off. But because you believe the person on the other end deserves it. And because you want to apply your own style to it - to make it not just functional but uniquely, thoughtfully yours.

Ive understood this. He closes his letter with something I think is the most important line in all of this. He writes: "He truly believed that by making something useful, empowering and beautiful, we express our love for humanity." And then: "My sincere hope for you and for me is that we demonstrate our appreciation of our species by making something beautiful."

That is not a design philosophy. That is an ethical position. When you choose the good-enough option - the it-works-so-why-bother option - you are making a choice about how much you value the person on the other end.

Why This Matters Now

I do not think this is just a conversation about Apple or Picasso or Dieter Rams. I think it is the most urgent conversation in technology right now.

Because we are drowning in output. AI can generate volume. It can generate competence. What it cannot generate is taste - the love for the craft that makes someone obsess over getting something right. The intolerance for ugliness that comes from a person who has stared at their work long enough to hear the voice that says: there must be a better way.

That voice is the thing. Not the tools. Not the frameworks. Not the ability to produce faster and cheaper. The voice. The one that looks at something functional and says: this is not good enough.

Graham wrote his essay twenty-three years ago. Before the iPhone. Before AI could write code or generate images. Every word is more relevant today than when he wrote it. Because the cheaper it becomes to produce things, the more valuable taste becomes. When anyone can generate output, the differentiator is whether someone cared enough to make it right.

Nature's ratios. Simplicity. Symmetry. These are not trends. They are truths. Picasso's five-line bull took a lifetime to earn. Jobs spent decades obsessing over details most people would never notice. Dieter Rams designed products in the 1960s that still look contemporary because the principles underneath them are true.

The world does not need more output. It needs more people who refuse to accept that good enough is good enough. People who understand that simplicity is not the absence of effort but the highest expression of it. People whose taste comes not from judgement but from genuine love for what they are making and genuine respect for the people experiencing it.

I still get this wrong. I still ship things I know could be better. But I never stop hearing that voice. And the message I take from all of this - from Graham, from Ive, from Jobs - is: do not explain it away. Cultivate it. It is the most valuable thing you have.

I get some version of this question almost every week from founders and business owners: "What AI tool should I actually be using?"

Two years ago the answer was simple. ChatGPT. That was it. Start there.

Today the honest answer is: it depends what you are trying to do. Because the landscape has fractured into something much more interesting - and much more useful - than a single chatbot. There are now distinct layers to the AI world, each built for a different kind of work. Once you understand how those layers map together, the noise disappears and you can start making smart choices about where AI fits into your business.

Here is my attempt at a clear-headed overview of where everything stands in early 2026.

The Thinking Layer: Chat Models

These are the tools most people mean when they say "AI". You type something in, they respond. They can answer questions, draft documents, summarise information, help you think through a problem, translate, analyse, and much more.

The main ones worth knowing:

ChatGPT (OpenAI) - The one that started it all. Now on GPT-5. Still the default starting point for most people and for good reason - it is capable, versatile, and has the widest range of integrations. If you only use one tool, this is still a reasonable choice.

Claude (Anthropic) - My preferred tool for anything involving nuance, long documents, or careful reasoning. It handles large amounts of text particularly well and the responses tend to feel more considered. It is also the model that powers Claude Code, which is what I use for building software.

Gemini (Google) - Google's model, and it is genuinely excellent. Deep integration with Google Workspace means if your business runs on Google Docs and Gmail, Gemini is worth paying serious attention to. It will shortly become the engine behind a revamped Siri, following Apple and Google's recently announced partnership.

Grok (xAI) - Elon Musk's model. Good for current events, strong on real-time information if you are on X (Twitter). Useful if you want a less filtered perspective on things.

Perplexity (Sonar) - Less of a chatbot, more of a research engine. It searches the web, cites its sources, and gives you factual answers with references. If you need to research a topic quickly and trust the results, Perplexity is excellent.

The honest truth about all of these: the gap between them is narrowing. Two years ago ChatGPT was clearly ahead. Today they are all capable. The differences come down to specific strengths, interface preferences, and integrations. Do not spend weeks agonising over which is "best". Pick one, use it daily, and your instinct for when to try a different one will develop naturally.

There are also a handful of others worth being aware of - Llama (Meta's open-source model, free to use), Mistral (French company, good for European data privacy requirements), and DeepSeek (Chinese model, impressive capability at low cost) - but for most founders these are secondary considerations.

The Enterprise Layer

Beyond the consumer chat tools, several models are built specifically for businesses and platforms.

Microsoft Copilot is built directly into Microsoft 365 - Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams. If your business runs on Microsoft, it is worth exploring. In terms of raw capability it is largely built on OpenAI's technology, so the intelligence is familiar. The value is the integration.

Amazon Nova integrates natively into AWS. If you run applications on Amazon's cloud infrastructure and want AI capability inside those applications, Nova removes the need to call external APIs. For developers building on AWS, this matters.

Cohere builds models for businesses that need AI embedded into their own products - think a company that wants to search through its own internal documents intelligently. Their technology converts text into numerical patterns that a computer can search through by meaning, not just keywords. Relevant if you are building a product that needs that kind of capability.

Apple: The Interesting Exception

Apple's situation deserves its own section because it says something important about where AI is heading.

Apple entered the AI race with "Apple Intelligence" - an on-device model focused on privacy. The pitch was that your data stays on your device rather than travelling to a server somewhere. A good idea in principle.

The problem is the delivery mechanism: Siri. And Siri is, to put it plainly, not good. Compared to what Google Assistant or ChatGPT can do, the gap is significant. Apple has lost ground here, and recently confirmed it by announcing a partnership with Google to power the next generation of Apple Intelligence with Gemini models.

There are two ways to read this. Either Apple has been left behind and is outsourcing the hard problem. Or - and this is the argument I find more convincing - Apple is doing what Apple has always done: waiting for the market to mature, then using its advantage (the device, the interface, the integration, the trust) to deliver a superior experience on top of a commoditised engine.

The second argument points to something true about where AI is heading. The model itself is becoming less important. The experience around the model is what will matter.

The Building Layer: Coding Tools

This is the area I have personal experience with and it has moved faster than almost anything else in AI.

I remember using GPT-3.5 for code. It was rough. Useful for small problems, unreliable for anything serious. GPT-4 was a meaningful step forward. Then something shifted.

When I switched to Claude Code - Anthropic's purpose-built coding tool - the quality of the code being generated was, in my experience, roughly five to ten times better. Not a small improvement. A fundamental change. The reasoning was more accurate. The code actually worked. The back-and-forth felt more like working with a capable developer than prompting a machine.

There are now two broad paths for founders who want to build something with AI:

Purpose-built tools (Bolt, Replit, Lovable, V0 and others): You go to a website, describe what you want, and start building immediately. No server setup. No technical knowledge required. These are excellent for getting an idea off the ground quickly. The limitation is cost - serious usage burns through credits fast - and control. If you want to build something substantial and scalable, you will hit ceilings.

Raw coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex): You write and edit code directly, with AI assisting the process. More setup required. You need to think about where your code lives and how it gets deployed. But the control is orders of magnitude greater and the long-term economics are much better.

OpenAI also has a tool called Codex worth knowing about. I ran an experiment: I gave the same detailed product specification to both Codex and Claude Code simultaneously. Claude Code came back within ten minutes with a base structure that needed significant further development. Codex spent three to four hours building - on its own, without any back-and-forth - and came back with something considerably more developed. I used Codex's output as the foundation and then continued building with Claude Code for day-to-day development.

If you are building a serious application, my recommendation is Claude Code or Cursor for ongoing work. Codex is worth knowing about for the initial heavy lift.

Tools like Devin and Manus operate at a higher level still - they are AI agents specifically built for engineering tasks. Devin is particularly good at structured, clearly defined work. Manus is more of a generalist agent that can handle a wider range of knowledge tasks beyond just coding. Both are impressive. Neither has yet achieved the mainstream adoption of Claude Code for day-to-day use.

The Doing Layer: Agents

This is where things get genuinely interesting - and where most founders are underestimating what is coming.

An AI agent is not a chatbot. A chatbot responds to questions. An agent does things. You give it a goal, it breaks that goal into smaller tasks, executes them - often in parallel, often across multiple tools - and delivers a finished output.

The clearest practical example: Claude Cowork, launched in January 2026, lets you give Claude access to a folder on your computer and describe an outcome in plain English. It then reads files, creates documents, organises folders, cross-references information, and delivers finished work. Not a draft. Actual finished work. In a test, it reorganised a 500-file Google Drive, created logical folder structures, renamed files consistently, and flagged duplicates in under ten minutes. A task that would have taken several hours manually.

ChatGPT's equivalent, Agent Mode, launched four days later. Its approach is different - rather than working with local files, it gives ChatGPT access to a virtual computer in the cloud where it can browse the web, fill in forms, book things, and execute tasks across multiple websites.

The practical distinction: if your work involves files and documents, Claude Cowork is ahead. If your work involves web-based tasks, ChatGPT Agent Mode is stronger.

Google's version, called Project Mariner, runs as a browser extension and can handle multiple tasks simultaneously. One distinctive feature - you can demonstrate a workflow to it once and it learns to repeat it. Useful for recurring tasks.

Underlying all of this is an open standard called MCP (Model Context Protocol), introduced by Anthropic in late 2024. Think of it as a universal connector - like USB-C, but for AI. It allows any AI model to connect to any external tool (your calendar, your CRM, your database, your files) without custom coding for every connection. This is the infrastructure layer that makes agents genuinely useful rather than isolated demos.

The shift from "AI answers questions" to "AI does work" is not incremental. It is a different category of tool.

The Creative Layer

A brief tour through the areas beyond text and code:

Images: Image generation has matured significantly. All the major chat models now generate images competently from a good prompt. Specialist tools like Midjourney remain strong for high-quality creative work, but the barrier to entry for business use cases is essentially gone.

Voice: This is moving quickly. Companies like ElevenLabs, Vapi, and Cartesia are building voice AI that sounds increasingly human. The combination of voice AI with tool connections (via MCP) means you can now have a spoken conversation with an AI that can take real actions - booking appointments, updating records, managing calls. This is why we are building Ringup into We UC: a voice AI layer that allows our customers to create call flows combining human agents and AI agents, without stitching together third-party systems.

Music: Suno has been the category leader for AI music generation. ElevenLabs, primarily a voice AI company, has entered the space and the quality of what they produce is genuinely impressive. AI-generated music is already appearing at scale on YouTube and Spotify. Artists are using AI to produce music in styles and genres they would not typically work in.

Video: Consumer video generation has arrived. Sora 2 (OpenAI) generates up to 20-second clips and can incorporate your own face and likeness. Google's Veo 3 is similarly capable. Tools like Kling and Pika do strong image-to-video animation. For more professional work, Runway offers editorial control and character consistency. For production-level work, tools like ComfyUI (used by VFX studios), Autodesk Flow Studio, and Topaz Video AI handle the complex tasks. About 70% of films now involve AI tools at some stage of production.

What This Means

The picture that emerges is not chaos. It is a stack.

At the base: thinking tools (chat models) for reasoning, drafting, analysis.
Above that: building tools (coding AI) for creating software and automations.
Above that: doing tools (agents) for executing multi-step work autonomously.
Alongside all of it: creative tools for images, voice, music, and video.

The question is not "which AI tool should I use?" The question is "which layer of work am I trying to accelerate?" Once you frame it that way, the right tool usually becomes obvious.

The founders who understand this map will make better decisions faster than those who are still treating AI as a single thing. That gap is widening every month.

If you want my framework for running a founder and CEO business at full capacity, it is free at axelmolist.com/ceo-os.

There is a question I keep circling back to as a parent. What kind of childhood produces a driven adult? Is it one where things are lacking - where the hunger to achieve is born from scarcity? Or is it one where everything is available - where the child can focus on meaning rather than survival?

I do not have the answer. But I have two data points. My childhood, and my son's.

Christmas in Spain

I was born in 1988 and grew up in Lloret de Mar. My childhood was the 90s - Cartoon Network, the children's channel on satellite, and a house where technology was something you admired from a distance.

I remember one Christmas - I must have been five or six. There was a big box under the tree. I had been asking my parents for months to get our satellite connection back. We had lost access to the children's channel when our borrowed Sky viewing card expired. A friend of my parents in the UK had lent them one, and it only worked for a few months.

I was certain this box was a satellite receiver. I kept saying it. "It's the children's channel. It's the children's channel."

It was not the children's channel.

It was a music system - one of those integrated units. Cassette deck at the bottom. Tuner in the middle. Vinyl record player on top. Two speakers at either side. A proper piece of equipment for a five-year-old to receive.

The initial disappointment lasted about ten minutes. Then something else took over.

The Speakers

I became obsessed with that music system. I wanted to understand how it worked. I wanted to connect more speakers to it. My parents had old speakers lying around the house - mismatched, dusty, left over from other devices. I grabbed them all and wired them up.

My logic was simple: more speakers, more volume. Double the speakers, double the sound.

My father told me it does not work like that. I asked why.

That question - why - sent me down a path that lasted years. By the time I was nine or ten, I had taught myself about resistance levels. 4 ohms versus 8 ohms. What happens when you chain speakers together. The fact that you need an amplifier to drive them. The wattage dictates the power. It does not matter how many speakers you connect to the same amplifier - the power stays the same.

I did not know it at the time, but that one gift was an early education in electronics, in power, in how things work. It opened a door that led to everything I built afterwards.

By twelve or thirteen, I had constructed a mini disco in my bedroom. Coloured light bulbs screwed onto a pole. A relay system that controlled the lights. I programmed the relay to accept audio input from an old Yamaha keyboard with a built-in drum machine. The frequency of the signal pulsated the lights. I had a light show running off a keyboard and a relay system.

I got electrocuted a few times. It was worth it.

Two Childhoods

My son turns eight next week. His childhood looks nothing like mine.

He got his first iPhone when he was two - not to watch YouTube, but to play games and learn how the device worked. It was an old phone of mine that happened to still have an active SIM card. That SIM is now his number.

He started on YouTube Kids, which provides safeguarded content for younger children. Around six, when he got into Roblox, he and his friends started watching gaming videos on the main YouTube app. He asked if he could switch. I agreed, with boundaries: mostly long-form content, and he should try to learn something from what he watches rather than consuming it purely for entertainment.

The problem I now face is that the YouTube algorithm pushes shorts relentlessly. You cannot use the app without being served short-form content. I have not found a way to disable it. And he is watching more shorts than I would like.

I am aware of what is coming. Instagram. TikTok. Platforms that make YouTube shorts look restrained. I cannot police what he watches every minute of the day. All I can do is hope that the framework I have given him - the ability to distinguish between content that teaches and content that numbs - holds when I am not in the room.

The Content Problem

When I was a child, brain rot was the children's channel. That was it. The internet did not exist. If I wanted to learn something, I had to open the physical encyclopaedia and hope the entry covered what I needed.

Now, brain rot is infinite. YouTube shorts. TikTok. Split-screen videos where one side shows facts and the other side shows someone cutting wood - two entirely separate topics designed to double the retention factor. The people creating these videos are not interested in providing value. They are interested in attention. Attention is the currency. YouTube pays for it. The incentive is retention, not education.

This means the content my son is exposed to is not vetted for quality. It is optimised for dopamine. And the quantity of it in production right now compared to what existed in the 90s is staggering.

The AI Question

And then there is AI. My son uses ChatGPT almost as much as I do. He asks it questions about everything. He gets answers immediately - articulate, confident, detailed answers.

This raises a question I think about often. If the answer to everything is a prompt away, what happens to the work ethic of learning? Is there a need to retain information? Is there a need to know what the capital of Uganda is when you can ask a machine and get the answer in a second?

I think there is. Knowing things - geography, history, how the world works - gives you a lens to view the world through. Your own lens. Not one filtered through an AI that assembles an answer from patterns in data. The danger is subtle: kids do not know that AI makes mistakes. The answers sound confident. Confident-sounding answers feel correct. But ask ChatGPT how many Rs are in "strawberry" and you will see that machines make errors humans do not.

On the other hand, if ChatGPT and YouTube had existed when I was a child, I cannot imagine what I would have done with it. The access to information. The ability to learn anything, immediately. The sheer volume of opportunity. I would have tried different things, explored different ideas, possibly built different things entirely. Or maybe I would have just asked the AI to build it for me, and never learned how anything worked. It is an interesting conundrum.

The Money Question

The final piece I keep turning over is money.

I grew up in an environment of slight scarcity. We were not in need, but we were not well off. I remember my father picking me up from school in a 1988 Volkswagen Golf when it was 2002 or 2003. A fifteen-year-old car. My friends at school called it a coffee machine. I was a little embarrassed, but my dad was proud of it. Deep down, I thought it was a good car. Old, but good.

When it was finally time to replace it, my father looked at an Audi A3. Too expensive. He went with a secondhand Seat Leon instead. He still has that car today, twenty years later.

My family never splashed money. We were conservative. Maybe it is the Catalan in him - there is a custom, rightly or wrongly attributed, of Catalans being careful with money. Or maybe it was simply that abundance was never available.

The one time my father did spend freely was in 2008, when his business had a strong year. I had always wanted a recording studio. We spent maybe fifteen or twenty thousand euros converting the top floor of our house - soundproofing, equipment, the lot. The timing was imperfect because I moved to the UK that same year. But the studio got built.

My parents never bought me a Game Boy. Never bought me a game console. I never asked twice because I was already occupied - connecting speakers, building light shows, experimenting with electronics.

And that brings me to the question that sits underneath all of this.

Hunger

If you are brought up in an environment where nothing is lacking, does it make you hungry? Does it drive you to achieve? Or does it make you comfortable - content with what is available because effort was never required to obtain it?

I have seen both outcomes. Friends whose parents had money but did not give enough attention. Those friends have not achieved much with their lives. They are not worried about it either. That is the part that concerns me.

We are here to make an impact. To leave something behind that mattered. If we do not achieve that - if we do not improve the lives of the people around us in some meaningful way - what was the point?

That is what gives me meaning. But will my son share it? Will the presence or absence of financial pressure shape whether he develops the drive to build something of his own?

I do not know. Nobody does.

What I know is that a five-year-old boy opened a music system on Christmas morning and spent the next decade learning how sound, electricity, and engineering worked - not because anyone told him to, but because the curiosity was there and the constraints forced him to figure it out.

The question I carry as a parent is whether curiosity still ignites in a world where the answers arrive before the questions are fully formed.

There is a theory that the cost of almost everything is heading toward zero. Energy. Goods. Services. Software. And I think there is truth to it.

Not that things will literally be free. But that we are entering a period of such abundance that the cost of creating, delivering, and consuming drops so dramatically it changes everything. We are already living in an abundant world. What is coming is excessive abundance - where anything you need is available to you at any moment.

And I have seen enough over the past few years to believe this is not far off.

The Energy Equation

Start with energy. If energy gets cheap enough, it changes the cost structure of everything downstream.

Nuclear fusion - the safer, cleaner version of nuclear power that does not produce long-lived radioactive waste - is making genuine progress. Unlike fission, which is what current nuclear power plants use and comes with the risks of chain reactions and waste storage, fusion is inherently safe. The reaction cannot run away. It simply stops when conditions are not right.

Combine that with solar. Not just panels on rooftops, but solar panels in space. Japan has already demonstrated the concept - generating electricity in orbit and beaming it back to Earth using lasers and microwaves. Companies like Aetherflux and StarCatcher are planning commercial demonstrations this year.

Space-based solar captures sunlight 24 hours a day with no weather interference. If you can transmit that power efficiently to ground stations, you unlock a fundamentally different energy equation.

When energy becomes cheap and abundant, the cost of manufacturing drops. The cost of transport drops. The cost of computing drops. Everything sits on top of energy.

The Physical World Catches Up

Think about where we are right now with delivery and convenience. If you live in a city and need something - a shaver, a phone charger, anything - you can open an app and have it at your door in under an hour. I have experienced this in Dubai, where the service is a step more evolved. Delivery comes to the door of your flat, through your apartment block, straight to you.

We consider this impressive now. But fast forward five years.

Drone deliveries. Self-driving vehicles. And robots - which sounds science fiction, but the technology is already here.

Physical AI is what this is called. Robots that use artificial intelligence to navigate the real world. They see through cameras. They process their environment in real time. They make decisions the way a human would, but faster and without fatigue.

I was recently in Miami and had my first experience in a self-driving car. The car was parked on a busy road. The driver - or rather the person in the driver's seat - entered the address. And the car manoeuvred out of the parking space, joined the main road, and navigated itself for twenty minutes through busy streets and highways.

It handled everything. A cyclist - moved around it smoothly. A bus pulling in - indicated and overtook. A car ahead going slowly with no indication of what they were doing - the self-driving car waited, assessed the situation, then safely changed lanes and continued.

It was impressive. Not in a gimmicky way. In a genuinely functional, this-is-the-future way.

The Camera Question

There is a debate in autonomous driving that I find fascinating. Tesla has bet everything on cameras and software - no lidar, no radar sensors. Their approach is to make the car see the way a human does, using neural networks to interpret visual data.

Other manufacturers like Waymo have gone with cameras plus sensors - lidar, radar, and other hardware. A belt and braces approach.

I understand the logic of the software-only bet. If you write great software with strong neural networks, you have an advantage. The cost of manufacturing is lower with cameras only. And in theory, if humans can drive with just vision, machines should be able to as well.

But there is a practical concern I keep coming back to. Visibility.

In rain, snow, or mud - what happens? Humans can wipe their eyes. We can put the windscreen wipers on. We maintain our own visibility. But a camera covered in water droplets or mud cannot do that by itself. Tesla has heat pads around cameras to melt snow, but heavy rainfall or mud is a different challenge.

Maybe nanotechnology solves this. Maybe self-cleaning coatings become standard. But until then, I suspect self-driving will require clean cameras to engage - and getting out to wipe your cameras down is not exactly the seamless future we are imagining.

These are solvable problems. But they need solving before autonomous driving becomes truly ubiquitous.

The AI Revolution I Have Lived

What excites me more than any single technology is artificial intelligence. Because I have experienced its impact firsthand.

In November 2022, when ChatGPT launched, something unlocked for me. I had always been the person who wanted to figure things out. When our phone system at circle.cloud lacked a built-in dashboard, I wanted to build one. I knew we had shell access to the MySQL database. I spent hours on Stack Overflow learning how to write queries to extract the data I needed.

But I did not have a tool where I could simply describe what I wanted and receive the exact query in response. That tool did not exist.

When GPT arrived, it gave me exactly that capability. I could describe what I needed in plain text and get back working code. It was a breakthrough.

That led to writing shell scripts - something I had always wanted to do but never properly learned. Which led to something bigger.

We had a longstanding problem in our business. Our telemarketing team books appointments for field sales people, and those appointments need to be logistically viable - no more than an hour's drive between meetings. With seven field sales people, managing this manually was becoming unworkable.

So I built The Scheduler. I started by writing a script that used the Google Maps API to calculate drive times between postcodes. When that worked, I thought: can I turn this into an actual application?

Using ChatGPT and later Claude, I built it into a fully fledged app. Tens of thousands of lines of code. User management. Appointment workflows. Stripe integration for payments. A self-service website at scheduler.so where customers can sign up, start a free trial, and be operational in minutes.

I did not write a single line of code myself. I cannot write code. I can read it, understand it, but my syntax would be wrong if I tried to write it from scratch.

The application was submitted to the Zoho CRM Marketplace. They spent two months reviewing it. They approved it. A fully vibe-coded application, built entirely with AI, accepted into a major CRM marketplace.

That is the moment I realised the scale of what is happening.

What This Means for Software

If a non-technical founder can build a production application from scratch using AI, others will do the same. People with ideas who previously lacked the funds or technical ability to implement them now have the capacity to create.

This is both exciting and disruptive.

I think the era of generic SaaS is ending. Software will become incredibly specific rather than broad. Purpose-built applications for precise use cases, rather than bloated platforms trying to serve everyone.

I was speaking to someone recently who wants to build a gym tracking app with a social network component. He did some market research before building anything and found someone had already built almost the exact same application with the exact same name he had planned to use.

That is not coincidence. It is a pattern. People who have carried ideas for years can now execute them. The flood of micro-applications is coming.

Tools like Salesforce will struggle in this new world. Not because they are bad, but because the economics of purpose-built software are fundamentally different when AI removes the development barrier.

And looking further ahead, I think applications could eventually be created on demand. Not immediately. But in the semi-near future, you might describe what you need and have a purpose-built tool generated for you.

The Convergence

What makes this moment unique is not any single technology in isolation. It is the convergence.

Cheap energy makes computing cheaper. Cheaper computing makes AI more powerful. More powerful AI makes software creation accessible. Accessible software creation drives an explosion of tools. Physical AI brings intelligence into the real world. Self-driving, robotics, and drone delivery reshape logistics.

Each of these feeds into the others. The compounding effect is what drives costs toward zero and abundance toward excess.

I am not claiming to have all the answers about where this leads. Nobody does. But I have built a production application without writing code. I have sat in a self-driving car that navigated city streets better than most human drivers. I have watched energy technology make progress that seemed impossible a decade ago.

The future is not something we are waiting for. It is something we are already living in.

The question is not whether these changes are coming. It is whether you are paying attention.

I went to a crypto conference in Miami and came back thinking about silver.

That was not the plan.

A friend from my Hampton group mentioned he was considering attending a gathering put together by Real Vision - a community and training programme run by Raoul Pal. I had been seeing Raoul's videos pop up on YouTube for years while researching Bitcoin. Long videos, but insightful commentary. I would put them on during workouts. When I learned he was behind this conference, I thought it was worth attending.

Miami was also somewhere I had wanted to visit for a long time. I had heard it was full of Latin culture, similar to Cuba - which I loved when I visited. When I arrived, everyone was speaking Spanish to me. It felt familiar in an unexpected way.

The conference ran for three days. Thursday afternoon through Saturday. Talks throughout about what is happening in the markets - crypto, macro trends, where things are heading.

I walked in interested in Bitcoin and alt-coins. I walked out thinking I need to invest in silver.

What I Expected to Hear

The conference started with what Raoul called the "drinks with Raoul Pal" session. He spoke about the state of crypto, interviewed people, discussed why alt-coins have underperformed this cycle.

The consensus was clear: Bitcoin is going up long-term. I believe that too. It is a store of value with limited supply. A hedge against inflation. The fact that it has no functionality beyond being a store of value used to concern me slightly - but then again, what functionality does gold have other than people wearing it around their necks?

But here is what caught my attention. Alt-coins have not had their peak this cycle. The money that normally flows from Bitcoin into alt-coins went somewhere else - into precious metals and tech stocks. That is unusual. Previous cycles saw that rotation happen like clockwork.

This year, Bitcoin peaked, crashed back to around $80,000, recovered to $90,000 - roughly where it started the year. The explosive alt-coin season everyone expected never arrived.

The question became: where did that money go instead?

The Silver Thesis

The biggest takeaway from the conference was not about crypto at all. It was about silver.

The argument is straightforward: the technologies shaping our future - solar energy, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, 5G networks - all require silver. Not as a nice-to-have, but as an essential component. And supply cannot keep up with demand.

Let me break this down in terms that made sense to me as someone who builds software, not someone who trades commodities.

The Supply Problem

Silver has been in deficit for five consecutive years. More silver is being consumed than produced. The total shortfall from 2021 to 2025 is approximately 820 million ounces - roughly equivalent to an entire year of global mine production.

Here is why this cannot be easily fixed:

Seventy percent of silver production is a byproduct. Silver mostly comes out of the ground alongside copper, lead, and zinc. Mining companies make decisions based on those metals, not silver. Even if silver prices double, copper mine operators do not suddenly produce more silver. It is like trying to increase your website's database capacity by buying more office chairs - the two are connected operationally but not causally.

New mines take seven to ten years to develop. From discovery to commercial production, assuming everything goes smoothly with regulations and financing. There is no quick fix. You cannot spin up silver production the way you would spin up more cloud servers.

Ore grades are declining. The easy silver has already been extracted. Mining companies now process larger volumes of rock to get the same amount of metal. Costs rise. Marginal deposits become uneconomical.

The Demand Explosion

Industrial demand reached a record 680 million ounces in 2024. That was the fourth consecutive annual high. And it is accelerating.

Solar panels consume approximately 197 million ounces annually. Each panel needs 15-20 grams of silver in conductive paste. Global installed solar capacity is projected to more than triple by 2030 - from 2.2 terawatts to over 7 terawatts. The maths is simple: more panels, more silver.

Electric vehicles use 25-50 grams of silver per car - roughly double what traditional vehicles require. Battery management systems, power electronics, sensors. EV adoption is still in early stages globally.

AI infrastructure requires data centres with 2-3 times the silver content of traditional facilities. Higher power density, more complex cooling, more interconnections. Every percentage point of growth in computing demand translates to more silver.

Your smartphone contains 200-300 milligrams of silver. A laptop has 750 milligrams. Billions of devices manufactured annually, each containing small amounts that add up to significant demand.

The critical point: silver represents such a small fraction of the total cost of these products - typically 0.5-2% of a solar panel, for example - that manufacturers will pay whatever it takes to secure supply. A doubling in silver price barely moves the needle on installed system cost. This is price inelasticity. Demand does not decrease meaningfully even when prices rise.

Why Not Gold or Bitcoin?

Gold is a store of value. Central banks buy it. Investors hold it during uncertainty. But gold lacks the industrial demand driver that silver has. There is no exponential growth curve for gold consumption tied to technological transformation.

Bitcoin is speculative. I believe in it long-term as a store of value, but it has no physical utility. Its value rests entirely on network effects and adoption - reflexive dynamics where price appreciation attracts capital which drives further appreciation. That is a different kind of bet.

Silver sits at the intersection: a store of value with monetary history, plus irreplaceable industrial applications in the technologies defining our future. That combination is what makes the thesis compelling.

The Honest Counterargument

I would not be giving you the full picture without addressing substitution. This is where I spent additional time researching after the conference, because the bullish case seemed almost too clean.

Copper is already replacing silver in solar cells. China's Longi, the world's largest solar manufacturer, announced plans to mass-produce copper-metallised cells in 2026. Copper-based paste can reduce silver content by 50-90% while maintaining performance. Australian researchers have developed copper plating with protective silver or tin caps that prevents the oxidation problems that previously made copper unreliable.

Carbon-based materials are emerging in electronics. Graphene can carry nearly 1,000 times more current than copper. Carbon nanotube films are already manufactured at scale. Conductive polymers combined with minimal metal content achieve comparable performance for certain applications.

Thrifting works. Between the 1990s and 2017, the electronics industry reduced silver content in capacitors from 7 million ounces annually to 0.5 million ounces - a 93% reduction - while device production exploded. Engineers find solutions when economic incentives align.

This creates what I think of as a ceiling on silver prices. Above $75-100 per ounce sustained, substitution accelerates dramatically. Manufacturers who were content to pay silver premiums suddenly have compelling economic reasons to switch. Research programmes get funded. Alternative materials reach commercial scale faster.

The realistic view, incorporating substitution pressure: silver likely appreciates 2-4x from current levels over the next five years. Not the 10-15x scenarios some bulls project. Those projections require assuming substitution is impossible - and the evidence suggests it is merely difficult and time-consuming.

My Position

I attended this conference without any interest in precious metals. I was there for crypto insights. I left thinking silver deserves a place in my portfolio before additional Bitcoin or gold.

The thesis is not about getting rich quickly. It is about a structural supply-demand imbalance that takes years to resolve. New mines cannot be developed fast enough. Substitution is real but slow. Industrial demand is locked in by technology adoption curves that are already in motion.

I am not a financial advisor. This is what I learned, what I found compelling, and what I am personally considering. Do your own research. Understand the risks.

But if you are looking at where to allocate capital for the next five to ten years, and you care about tangible assets with genuine utility in the technologies shaping our future - silver is worth understanding.

I went to Miami for a crypto conference. I came back thinking about the metal inside every solar panel, every electric vehicle, every smartphone, every data centre powering the AI applications we are all building toward.

Sometimes the most valuable insights come from where you least expect them.

I have put together a simplified research document covering the silver investment thesis - the supply constraints, demand drivers, substitution risks, and key data points. If you want to understand this deeper, you can download it free at axelmolist.com/silver-cheat-sheet.

There is a gap in business that nobody talks about. On one side, brilliant engineers who can build anything but cannot hold a meeting without interrupting everyone. On the other, business people who sell technology they do not understand. Very few people bridge both worlds. I have spent the last decade learning to stand in the middle.

My name is Axel Molist Cordina. I grew up in a small tourist town in Spain called Lloret de Mar. I built a recording studio as a teenager, sold suits to nightclub bouncers at sixteen, moved to the UK for university, and ended up building a telecoms company from nothing to over a hundred people and nearly twenty million in revenue. No outside investment. No playbook. No safety net for most of it.

This is who I am and what I am here to do.

The Break

In 2012, I was working at a telecoms company in Southampton. They sold on-premise phone systems - big boxes that plug into walls, hardware that needs a comms room. But their customers were dentist surgeries, car garages, small solicitor firms. These businesses did not have comms rooms. The phone system ended up under a desk or bolted to a wall on the way to the toilet.

The problem was simple. Leasing companies wanted hardware. More equipment meant more finance, more commission. So the company kept selling the wrong solution because it made the most money.

I believe in selling the right solution to the customer, even if it makes you less money.

I found the answer. Cloud-based phone systems. No hardware. No comms room. Just internet. In 2012, that was not mainstream, but the technology was clearly better for these small businesses.

I went to the owners and said we need to sell cloud. They said no. Cannot lease it. Will not make as much money.

So I started building my own company behind their backs. Website planning, supplier conversations, all while still employed. But one of the suppliers I approached told my employer. They called me on my way home. Come back to the office. We know about it. We are very hurt. You have to go.

I regret doing it that way. I should have been upfront. But if I had told them, they would have probably got me to run the new company with them as shareholders. And I needed to steer the ship myself.

So I was out. No job. No salary. No safety net.

But I had a DJ set on Tuesday night.

Building Between Tracks

I DJ'd three nights a week. Tuesday, Friday, Saturday. Eight till three in the morning. Four hundred and fifty quid a week. Enough for rent, food, and maybe a meal out once a month.

When the club was not busy, I had my laptop open behind the decks. Playing a track on Serato, switching to the browser to build the website, switching to Excel to build the quoting workbook, switching to Google Docs to write the terms and conditions. Then back to Serato to play the next song before anyone noticed.

During the day, I sat in my spare room. A desk, a laptop, and a phone. Two hundred cold calls a day. I am not a natural salesperson. I had to learn it. I downloaded every sales audiobook I could find and listened to them driving to appointments. I sold with enthusiasm and technical knowledge, and people responded to that more than any technique.

A friend called Dan Woodham let me use his office in exchange for consulting on his business. Having somewhere else to make calls from was valuable. Being in an office with other people dialling out, a busy environment - that is much better than cold-calling alone from your spare room every day.

Appointments turned into deals. I closed around two hundred in the first three and a half years. At the beginning, I did all the telemarketing, selling, installing, billing, and supporting. After some time, I started hiring people.

You Cannot Buy Talent. You Grow It.

The real challenge is scaling without a budget. Everyone says hire people better than you. That is great advice if you can afford them. People who are better than you normally come with a price tag you cannot afford when you are starting with scraps.

So here is what I learned. Hire people based on attitude. Determination. Intelligence. Willingness to learn. Can you work with them? Can they do a good job? If yes - hire them, train them, show them everything you know, and ask them to go learn further.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it does not. You identify when it does not and you move on. But sometimes you hit the jackpot.

Jordan, our Commercial Director, started with us as a telemarketer. He was meant to build a telemarketing team. Then he became a manager of managers. Now he is a board member. Katie started in customer service. Now she runs it and is right-hand to our Operations Director.

These people came in at entry level and grew with the company. That is the path when you are bootstrapped. You cannot buy talent. You grow it. And those early people - the ones who join because they believe in what you are trying to do - they are the ones who matter most. It becomes their business as much as yours.

The Gap Between Technology and Business

Through all of this, I started noticing something.

I have worked with brilliant engineers who cannot hold a meeting without interrupting everybody and not letting anyone finish their point. I have worked with business people who do not understand the technology they are selling - or do not know enough about technology to build a technology business. The owners of the company that sacked me would have kept selling the wrong solution forever if nobody technical had pushed back.

You also get founders who can build but cannot lead. Or founders who can lead but do not understand technology. The companies that succeed are the ones where someone in the founding team bridges that gap. Or somebody at a really senior level comes in early enough to be truly invested.

I sit at the intersection of technology and business. I can walk into a room of developers and understand exactly what they are telling me. I can also stand in front of a customer and explain why it matters. I have found that is not common. Most people are either on one side or the other.

That bridge is not a skill you acquire. It is a perspective you earn by doing every job in the company yourself. Telemarketing. Sales. Installations. Billing. Support. Hiring. Leading. Building software. Each one adds a layer of understanding that you cannot get from a book or a course.

What I Am Building Now

The company I built over the last decade is called circle.cloud. It is a telecoms solutions provider. We now employ over a hundred people. In 2019, I hired Graham - a great salesperson who pretty much single-handedly grew our turnover significantly that year. He is now circle.cloud's CEO. He runs the day-to-day.

I did that so I could focus on building software. We UC is a telecoms platform I am building with a team of twenty. From scratch. We are also building a suite of business productivity products around it. I believe in vertical integration - the more you control, the better the experience for the customer. I read the Steve Jobs biography, then Elon Musk's. Both obsessed with owning every part of the product. That really resonated with me.

But I will be honest. We UC is not where I want it to be yet. We have a long way to go. Is the product ready for market? Is it as good as I think it is, or is it just special to me? I do not have the answer yet.

But I keep building. Because the alternative is standing still or giving up. I do neither. My plan is not to sell these businesses. I want to make an impact over the long term with the technology and services we provide.

Why I Am Doing This

When we provide a solution to a customer and it genuinely improves their business - their efficiency, their bottom line, the way their team works - I get a feeling I find hard to describe. Something like satisfaction and determination and motivation all at once.

I want this content to create the same thing. If something I share helps you see a problem differently, or motivates you to take action, or helps your business run better - that is the whole point.

So why am I doing this personal brand thing? Same reason I am doing circle.cloud and We UC. To make an impact. Just in a different format. Through stories, through mistakes, through what I am working through right now.

This is for founders building from zero. Self-funded builders who chose the hard path. Technical people who can build but need to learn to lead. Business people who can sell but need to understand technology.

Creating software gives me the same feeling as when I used to make music as a kid. The same feeling as when we install a system that makes a customer's business run better. From making music to cold-calling contacts to building software to hiring a team of twenty to build more of it - the instinct has never changed.

See a problem. Create something to fix it.

That is the thread through everything I do. And that is what this content will be about.

My father once spent two years building a model of Barcelona's Estació de França train station. Not a kit. Not a simple hobby project. A 25-square-metre recreation that consumed two rooms of our garage.

He built mountains from cement and painted them green. He created a lake with epoxy resin. He constructed tunnels, added trees, bushes, even tiny animals on the mountainsides. The station itself was built entirely from wood - his own calculations, his own measurements, no instructions. It looked exactly like the real thing.

The tracks worked. Real model locomotives running on 12 volts. A control desk in the corner let him switch trains between tracks, operate signals, manage the entire system. He was obsessed.

When it was finished, it stayed in the house for a year or two. Eventually he sold it to someone from Madrid.

I tell this story because of what happened next.

The Den That Never Was

Another project my father started was building me a den in the forest behind our house. This was going to be something special - a proper structure with cement foundations, brick walls, electricity, and running water. A place I could actually live in.

He laid the foundations. Built up the walls. Installed the water pipes. Got to the point of putting the roof on.

Then stopped.

The motivation disappeared. Maybe summer ended and it got cold. Maybe something else demanded his attention. Maybe he simply waited too long to push through to completion.

That was thirty years ago. The den is still there in our forest. Half-built. Covered in foliage and trees now. A monument to motivation that faded before it could be fulfilled.

Same person. Same capability. Same creative drive. Completely different outcomes.

Le Da La Vena

In my family, we have a phrase for this: "le da la vena."

It translates literally as "he has the vein" - but it actually means "he has the urge." A spontaneous impulse to do something, often without much planning or clear reason. Acting on gut instinct in a way that seems irrational to others.

Maybe the name comes from that feeling when you want something so badly your veins are bulging. Or maybe it means the desire is in your blood, part of who you are. I am not entirely sure of the etymology. But I remember the saying being used frequently about my father.

And I have inherited it.

The Three Conditions

Over the years, I have come to understand that motivation is not a constant resource you can draw on whenever convenient. It is perishable. It expires. Strike while the iron is hot, as they say - but the iron cools faster than you think.

I have learned to recognise when three conditions align:

One: Capacity. You have the time and resources to carry out the idea. You are not in the middle of something else. You are not overcommitted. There is actual space in your life for this project.

Two: Motivation. You have a peak level of desire to bring the idea to life. Not mild interest. Not "that would be nice someday." Genuine, burning motivation that makes the project feel urgent.

Three: Timing. The idea feels right. It feels like the right moment to act. Something intangible but real tells you this is the time.

When these three align, you must act.

Not next week. Not when things calm down. Now.

Because as soon as one fades - as soon as another project demands your attention, or the burning desire cools, or the timing no longer feels right - you will struggle to ever complete it.

My father had all three when he started the train station. He maintained them for two years until it was finished.

He had all three when he started my den. But somewhere along the way, one or more slipped. And thirty years later, it remains unfinished.

What This Means in Practice

I think about this constantly in my own work.

When an idea grips me - when I feel that urge, that vena - I evaluate the three conditions immediately. Can I do this? Do I genuinely want to do this? Does it feel like the right time?

If all three are yes, I start. Even if the idea seems excessive to others. Even if the scope feels ambitious. Even if conventional wisdom says to wait and plan more carefully.

Because I have learned that waiting is the enemy of completion.

The projects I have finished are the ones I started when all three conditions aligned. The projects I never completed are the ones where I hesitated, waited for a better moment, or let one of the conditions fade before beginning.

Building circle.cloud happened because the conditions aligned and I acted. I did not wait for the perfect moment. I did not wait until I had more experience or more resources. The motivation was there, the capacity was there, the timing felt right. So I started.

The same pattern repeated with We UC. The same pattern repeats with every significant project I undertake.

The Dark Side

There is a difficult truth here. Sometimes you cannot act.

Sometimes you have the motivation but not the capacity. Sometimes the timing is wrong for reasons beyond your control. Sometimes life genuinely prevents you from pursuing the idea when the urge is strongest.

This is painful. Watching motivation fade while circumstances prevent action is one of the most frustrating experiences I know.

I have no perfect solution for this. But I have learned to be honest with myself about it. If I cannot act now, I acknowledge that the project may never happen - at least not in its current form. The motivation that exists today will not exist in the same way six months from now.

This honesty helps me prioritise ruthlessly. If something truly matters and the conditions align, it must take precedence. Because the alternative is not doing it later - the alternative is likely not doing it at all.

Respecting the Urge

My father's train station was a masterpiece. The scale, the detail, the craftsmanship - it represented two years of focused obsession channeled into something tangible and beautiful.

My den is a ruin in the forest.

Same person. Same creative capability. The only difference was whether he followed through on the motivation when it was at its peak, or let it fade before completion.

I think about that contrast often.

Motivation is not a renewable resource that replenishes on demand. It arrives unpredictably, peaks briefly, and fades whether you use it or not. The question is whether you act while it is there.

Le da la vena. The urge arrives.

The only question is what you do with it.

On 3 April 1973, Martin Cooper stood on a Manhattan sidewalk and made a phone call. Nothing unusual about that - except he was holding a brick-sized device weighing over a kilogram, and the person he called was his rival at Bell Labs.

"Joel, I'm calling you from a cell phone," Cooper said. "A real cell phone. A handheld, personal, portable cell phone."

Joel Engel, head of research at AT&T's legendary Bell Labs, was working on the same problem. But Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, had beaten him to it. That call - made from the middle of Sixth Avenue in New York - changed everything.

It took another decade before anyone could actually buy a mobile phone. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X went on sale in 1983 for around $4,000. It weighed nearly a kilogram and gave you 35 minutes of talk time before the battery died.

But something had shifted. A device that existed only in science fiction was now real.

My First Encounters

I was a child in Lloret de Mar when I first saw a mobile phone up close. A friend's mother had a Nokia 5110 through her work - this must have been around 1997 or 1998. It was a chunky thing with an antenna poking out the top, but I found it mesmerising.

When she upgraded to a Nokia 3210, my friend inherited the old 5110. We played with it together, and eventually I bought it from him. I could not afford a SIM card - my parents certainly were not going to pay for one - so I just explored the menus, learned how the system worked, and played countless hours of Snake.

At some point, I saved enough money from odd jobs to buy a prepaid SIM card. Maybe 1,000 pesetas - we had not converted to euros yet. Suddenly I could send SMS messages to friends who also had phones. We developed our own abbreviated language to fit everything into 160 characters. Every letter counted.

What strikes me now is how different those abbreviations were when I moved to the UK and started texting in English. The Spanish shortcuts I knew were completely useless. English teenagers had developed their own compressed language. It reminded me that language evolves constantly - shaped by the constraints we operate within.

A Journey Through Handsets

After the 5110, I bought an Alcatel One Touch DB from another friend. That phone had the strangest ringtones I have ever heard - almost duck-like. Alcatel merged with Lucent in 2006, then Nokia acquired them in 2016. The name has essentially vanished into the oblivion.

Then came the Nokia 3210 - probably my favourite phone of that era. It was sleek, thin, and had a feature that absolutely captivated me: the ringtone composer.

You could create your own ringtones using the phone's keypad. Seven notes - C, D, E, F, G, A, B - across three octaves, with controls for duration and rests. It sounds primitive now, but I spent hours composing melodies. There was something magical about creating music on this tiny device and then hearing it ring in your pocket.

The 3310 followed, with an upgraded Snake game that consumed far too much of my time. Then a blue Nokia 5210 with a rubber chassis - so durable I once threw it across a public square to a friend. If he had missed the catch, the phone would have been fine.

The 8210 was impossibly small for its time. I loved showing it off.

But then came a milestone. My first brand new phone.

The First Phone I Bought New

I worked with my father at a tourist venue in Spain. We photographed people, developed the images while they watched a flamenco show, then went table to table selling the photos. At the end of each night, we tallied our sales and earned commission.

From that money, I walked into a Movistar shop and bought a Nokia 7250. Purple and black, with a camera and a colour screen. Revolutionary features at the time.

I felt like an astronaut with the latest technology in my pocket. Everyone I showed it to was genuinely interested. For a moment, I was at the forefront of what was possible.

That feeling - being at the cutting edge, experiencing technology before most people - is something I have chased ever since.

After the 7250, I tried the Nokia 8910i with its titanium case, but it was not as capable. Then the Nokia N70, my first multimedia phone with a proper file system and the biggest screen I had owned. But its music functionality was terrible. I wanted to carry my music library with me, but the N70 could only store a few songs and required proprietary Nokia headphones.

So I bought a Sony Walkman phone. It had an adapter for regular headphones, and I spent hours listening to music - though I had to be mindful of storage and audio quality. Getting songs onto the device via Bluetooth was painfully slow, and anything above 64kbps felt like a luxury. Now we consider anything below 320kbps an abomination.

The iPhone Moment

In January 2007, I watched Steve Jobs walk onto a stage and announce the iPhone. I had been using Macs for a few years by then, but this was different. The presentation itself was a masterpiece - the most polished product announcement I had ever seen.

I bought an iPhone from eBay in early 2008, funded by money I earned DJing. Everyone around me was using BlackBerrys. They told me the BlackBerry was for business, the iPhone was for teenagers watching movies.

I disagreed. I thought the iPhone was the future.

That first iPhone did not even have copy-paste. You could not rearrange apps on the home screen. But the interface, the form factor, the attention to detail - Apple and Steve Jobs had taken tremendous care with every element.

Jony Ive under Steve Jobs was one of the best designers the world has ever seen. Steve pushed him to focus on what really mattered. The results spoke for themselves.

I tried a BlackBerry Curve around 2010, carried two phones for a while. The typing was faster, but I returned to the iPhone. The overall experience was simply better.

Exploring Android

The Google Pixel line caught my attention when it launched in 2016. Google partnered with HTC to build the hardware, but the key promise was pure Android - the operating system as Google intended it, without manufacturer bloatware.

I tried the Pixel 1, but compared to my iPhone X at the time, it felt unpolished. The Pixel 3 was different. I switched entirely and used Pixels for over two years.

The camera was the main draw. Google's computational photography produced images that outperformed the iPhone despite having inferior hardware. The software processing made the difference.

But I was deep in the Apple ecosystem - MacBook, Apple Watch, iPad. Using an Android phone meant constant friction. The Apple Watch worked only in standalone mode. File transfers between devices became complicated.

I even tried a Samsung Galaxy S20 for about a week. Samsung's bloatware reminded me of everything wrong with Windows. Applications nobody needed, bundled into the system. The camera, despite impressive specifications, produced worse photos than my Pixel. I sent it back immediately.

Eventually I returned to the iPhone 12 and have stayed with Apple since. The ecosystem integration is too valuable to sacrifice. My MacBook, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro all communicate seamlessly. Apple has built something genuinely difficult to compete with.

The Infrastructure Behind It All

What strikes me about the mobile phone story is not just the devices - it is the infrastructure that makes them work.

Every generation of mobile technology - 2G, 3G, 4G, now 5G - operates on different frequency spectrums. Each transition requires new equipment on the masts. Antennas need upgrading, replacing, or maintaining for the new frequencies.

5G represents the biggest step change. It uses much higher frequencies - millimetre waves that deliver incredible speeds but travel only 300 to 500 metres and struggle to penetrate buildings. The result is that carriers need far more antennas, placed much closer together.

I now see antennas appearing in places they never would have before. Small cells mounted on lamp posts and street corners, no bigger than the post itself. The old model of massive fenced-off masts is giving way to distributed networks of smaller, more numerous access points.

The engineering achievement behind global mobile coverage is remarkable. Billions of people can communicate from almost anywhere, and we barely think about the infrastructure making it possible.

Looking Forward

I do not know what comes next. Nobody does. But I have some thoughts.

Jony Ive and Sam Altman are building something together at OpenAI. Reports suggest a pocket-sized, screenless device - not a wearable, not glasses, not earbuds - that could launch as early as 2026. Altman describes it as bringing "peace and calm" rather than the constant notifications of current devices.

I am cautiously optimistic. Ive is a world-class designer, but Steve Jobs brought out his best work. Sam Altman understands AI deeply, but he is not a product visionary in the same mould. Whether they can produce something truly revolutionary remains to be seen.

The smartphone itself will likely persist for years. Apple and Google have built ecosystems that are extraordinarily difficult to displace - not just the hardware, but the app stores, the developer communities, the habits of billions of users.

But the interface is evolving. We will use voice more as AI systems understand natural language better. MCP servers - Model Context Protocol - can translate human intentions into API calls, bridging large language models and existing applications. This is happening now.

I see a future where we interact with computing through whatever method is most convenient at the moment. Sometimes text. Sometimes voice. Sometimes vision. Eventually, perhaps, direct neural interfaces - though that remains science fiction for the foreseeable future.

The devices themselves may become more ephemeral. Not one phone that does everything, but multiple specialised tools we reach for as needed. The interface will adapt to context rather than forcing us to adapt to it.

What This Means for What I Build

This matters to me personally because of We UC - the unified communications platform we are building.

Right now, We UC runs on mobile phones, tablets, desk phones, computers. These are the devices people use today. But as interaction methods evolve, we must evolve with them.

The underlying infrastructure we provide - voice, messaging, video - will remain valuable. But the interfaces through which people access that infrastructure will change. We need to be ready.

I want to maintain the feeling I had as a teenager with that Nokia 7250 - at the forefront of technology, showing people something genuinely new. I want We UC to be at that cutting edge, presenting technology in ways that are intuitive and frictionless.

Whatever devices people use to communicate in the future, I want We UC to be ready for them.

The mobile phone transformed how we connect with each other. The next transformation is already beginning. And I intend to be part of building it.

I’ve spent most of my life building with companies that share my values. Apple. Google. Companies that believe in craft, in attention to detail, in building things that are beautiful and functional. Microsoft has always felt like the opposite - dominant, but not inspiring. Built to shift boxes, not to be crafted.

Then last month, we decided at board level to migrate all 119 employees from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 over the next three to six months. And I can’t quite believe I’m saying this: it’s the right decision.

This is the story of why I fell out of love with Microsoft, how I became a Mac and Google devotee, and why - after a decade of running circle.cloud - I’m about to make peace with a company I once rejected entirely.

The Windows Years

I discovered computers around 1999, aged 10 or 11. My mum worked at an English school in Lloret de Mar that had computer labs. I learnt to touch-type using ancient software that displayed letters on screen whilst I hammered away without looking at the keyboard. I was obsessed.

By 12, I wasn’t just learning Word and PowerPoint. I was learning how Windows itself worked - where kernel files lived, what FAT32 and NTFS meant, how to format drives and reinstall operating systems from scratch. I built computers from components: RAM modules, hard drives, motherboards, chassis. I’d watch the BIOS boot up, configure it manually, then install Windows.

My goal wasn’t to become a computer enthusiast. It was to build powerful machines for my recording studio. Music production was the passion; computing was the tool.

But even then, Windows frustrated me. Pop-ups. Constant interruptions. Updates that derailed focus. Menus buried inside menus. It felt chaotic, like the product of a corporation optimising for market share rather than user experience.

The Mac Conversion

Then I used a Mac.

A family friend had one of those black PowerPC laptops. When I got my hands on it, everything changed. The operating system felt calm. Intentional. It didn’t interrupt you with nonsense. Applications stayed running even when you closed their windows - a design decision that made perfect sense but had never occurred to me on Windows.

The small choices felt right. The structure felt elegant. It just worked.

I asked my parents for a Mac. They found a secondhand white iBook on eBay. That machine remains one of my favourite laptops ever, not because of specs, but because of what it represented: a shift from fighting my tools to using them.

I heard later that the Mac startup sound - that iconic chime - was inspired by the final chord of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”. Jim Reekes, Apple’s sound designer, recorded it as a C-major chord in his living room. This is craft. This is attention to detail that Microsoft simply didn’t demonstrate.

I became a Mac person. I converted my entire home studio to Macs. Multi-track sessions with 20+ tracks and effects that would’ve made a PC collapse ran smoothly on old Intel-based Mac Pros. Those aluminium machines - the ones Steve Jobs unveiled before the cheese-grater design - were beautiful inside and out. Apple cared about how the internals looked, even though most users would never open them. Can you imagine Microsoft doing that?

Building a Business on Google

When I founded circle.cloud in 2015, I built it as a Mac house from day one. I bought 10 secondhand Mac Minis and old Cinema Display monitors off eBay. That’s all I could afford.

For productivity software, I chose Google Apps for Business (now Google Workspace). Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets. The entire suite. I also chose Slack for internal communications.

The decision was easy: it wasn’t Microsoft, and Apple didn’t offer an equivalent business suite. Google felt like the outlier. The innovator. The company that said “we’ll give you search results in under a second” when that was unheard of. They built with simplicity. They shared values I respected.

But there was a problem from the start.

I needed to build a quoting mechanism for our sales team. A workbook that allowed us to input customer details, generate quotes as PDFs, and create contracts - all offline, because field sales reps visiting customers often had no internet access.

I tried Google Sheets. The permissions system couldn’t restrict cells the way I needed. Offline functionality didn’t exist back then. The only tool that worked was Microsoft Excel.

So from day one, we ran both Google Workspace and Office 365. We had to buy Microsoft licences for the sales team whilst everyone else used Google. It was messy, but unavoidable.

The Chaos of Growth

Fast-forward to 2025. We’re now 119 people. I’ve hired a CEO to replace myself. We have an executive board, senior management, middle management. The company has grown beyond my ability to oversee every decision.

And our software ecosystem is a disaster.

We use:

• Xero for accounting
• Zoho Expenses and Zoho Books (also for accounting)
• Zoho CRM as our central database
• Zoho Analytics for reporting
• Plecto for analytics
• Geckoboard (previously, also for analytics)
• Power BI and Power Query (more Microsoft creep)
• Zoho Projects for project management
• Basecamp (which we barely use now, though I love the product and respect 37signals)
• Zoho Cliq (tried as a Slack alternative - glitchy and inferior)
• Slack for internal messaging
• Google Workspace for productivity
• Office 365 for sales and certain users
• SharePoint (some departments adopted it independently)
• Google Drive (other departments use this instead)

Information is siloed. When people leave, we discover drives and folders we didn’t know existed. Departments are using different tools for the same jobs. It’s fragmented, inefficient, and unsustainable.

This is what happens when you don’t enforce IT policy early. If you’re at 20 people, listen: decide now what tools your company uses. Stick to it. Make it non-negotiable. We should have done this at 30 people. We’re doing it now at 120, and it’s far more painful.

Why We’re Choosing Microsoft

We had to simplify. The decision came down to: go all-in on Google, or go all-in on Microsoft.

We’re choosing Microsoft. Here’s why.

1. Excel dependency We still rely on that sales quoting workbook. It runs on Excel. We’re building a bespoke offline application to replace it, but it won’t be ready for six to twelve months. We can’t wait.

2. SharePoint vs Google Sites We need a proper intranet. Google Sites doesn’t match SharePoint’s capabilities. SharePoint isn’t beautiful, but it’s more powerful for what we need.

3. Leadership familiarity Our operations director, Russ, comes from a Microsoft corporate background. He’s spearheading this simplification. It makes sense for him to lead with tools he knows deeply.

4. Customer alignment circle.cloud now provides IT support services to small businesses alongside telecoms. Over 90% of our customers use Microsoft 365. We’re also a Microsoft reseller. Our team needs to live in the ecosystem we support.

5. Device management We need mobile device management (MDM) across Windows, Mac, and soon Linux. Microsoft’s tooling integrates better with this multi-platform reality.

It isn’t about falling in love with Microsoft. It’s about pragmatism. Simplicity. Operational clarity.

We’ll be migrating everyone over the next three to six months. It’ll be painful. But it’s necessary.

What I Still Won’t Use

I’m making one exception for myself: I won’t use Outlook or Outlook Calendar once we migrate.

I use Hey Email (from 37signals) and Apple Calendar. They work perfectly with Office 365, and I’m not giving them up. Call it stubbornness, but when you find tools that feel right, you don’t abandon them for corporate alignment.

Everyone else in the company will use Microsoft once we complete the migration. That’s the policy. And I’m fine being the exception, partly because my operational role has reduced now that we have a full-time CEO.

The Microsoft Teams Question

Here’s where I’m genuinely curious: does anyone actually like Microsoft Teams?

Every person I’ve spoken to dislikes it. They find it slow to connect calls. Bulky. Laggy. Unintuitive. It lacks the craft and attention to detail I’d expect from a great unified communications platform.

This is one of the reasons we built We UC. We wanted something with the speed and simplicity of the best tools, but with deeper integration: telephony, video, messaging, file sharing, call analytics, business intelligence. All in one place, built with care.

If you love Teams, I’d genuinely like to hear why. Comment or message me. It’ll inform how we develop We UC going forward.

Check out www.weuc.com to learn more about We UC.

What This Taught Me

Taste matters. I still believe that. Microsoft still lacks the craft I see in Apple products or the simplicity I admire in Google’s best work.

But pragmatism also matters. At a certain scale, businesses need consolidation. They need systems that work across teams, that integrate with customer ecosystems, that reduce complexity rather than add to it.

I’ve learned that you can hold two truths at once: Microsoft’s products aren’t beautiful, but they might still be the right choice for your business.

And that’s where I am now. Not in love. But at peace.

If you’re building a company and facing similar decisions, here’s my advice: decide early what your IT stack will be. Enforce it. Don’t let teams adopt tools independently just because they’re familiar with them. Fragmentation costs you more than you realise.

Simplicity beats perfection. Even if the simpler choice isn’t the one you’d prefer personally.

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As a founder, you cannot escape work. Work is part of your life. Luckily I love my work and I would not really consider it work - I try to only do the things I love doing, so it becomes play rather than labour. I think that is the only way to be in work mode around the clock without burning out. You have to genuinely love what you are doing.

I sometimes think about what life was like when I had a normal job. When I worked for someone else. When I could finish at the end of the day and forget about work until the next morning. Weekends and holidays completely disconnected, focused on family and things I enjoyed.

But here is the thing - even when I worked for someone else, I was always thinking about work. Always thinking about how we could improve things, what else we could be doing to make the business better. I cared about those businesses as if they were my own, even though I had no ownership in them.

Maybe that is just how I am wired.

Burnout Is Not About Hours

Here is what I have come to understand about burnout: it is rarely about the number of hours you work. It is the result of patterns you do not interrupt.

Stress accumulates when you fail to notice what is building up. Overwhelm happens when problems remain unresolved in your mind, piling up without processing. That is what leads to burnout - not the work itself, but the mental loops that never close.

A few years ago, I often got stressed over smaller things. When things in the business were not going the way I wanted, or when I could foresee a challenge coming that I needed to act on, I would feel it in my stomach. That physical sensation of stress.

I have learned to manage that. I have learned to let things be and only act on the things I can control. And if I am not in a position to act on something I can control for whatever reason, I take it out of my mind and bring it back when it is time to focus on it.

Do Not Sweat the Small Stuff

I have always been able to let small things slide, and I have gotten much better at this with time. I genuinely do not sweat the small stuff anymore. That is probably one of the most important lessons I have learned over the years.

What do I mean by this? It is about zooming out.

If something happens in your business that you do not want, rather than stressing out or feeling uptight about it, zoom out and think: in the grand scheme of things, is this a big deal? Is it going to put us out of business? If yes, then zoom out further - am I going to be able to provide for my family? Keep zooming out until your problem has been reduced to the ridiculous.

I keep asking questions about the problem whilst looking at it with a wider lens each time. Once the problem seems small and simple at a wide angle, I mentally solve it and then zoom back in to see how I would solve it at the next level of detail.

Cloud-to-Ground Thinking

Zooming out is central to how I think. It allows me to avoid sweating the small stuff, but also to think critically about complex problems. Often in business, I need to look at things from a micro lens - the specific function, the particular bug, the individual customer issue - but then also from a wide angle lens.

I call this cloud-to-ground thinking.

I find it useful when building apps. I will be deep into making sure a function handles a request correctly, then have to zoom out to think as a user would think when using my app. Is the onboarding flow effective? Who is the target market? What does the whole experience feel like from above?

It defeats stress too. When I am stressed about a problem, I zoom out. I start thinking of the problem as if I was in the clouds looking down on it. Two things happen: the problem does not seem as serious anymore, and I can often see a solution - or at least a solution - when looking at it from up high.

I also use this practice with my own life. I zoom out to look at my life from when I was born to when I will die. I can see the progress of what I have achieved so far, then I try to envision what the rest of it looks like. It is a mental check to see if I am on track and if I am becoming the person I want to be when I am on my deathbed.

The person you think you want to be now may be different to the person you would like to be in five years time. And that is fine - that is evolution. The important thing is to keep evolving and avoid stagnation.

One Thing at a Time

My to-do list is massive. More gets added to it than gets ticked off, and that is fine. I am adding things myself - it is not like I have a boss loading tasks onto me. I treat my reminders app as a second brain.

Every few months, I go through all my reminders. I either tick them off because they are complete, or I categorise them into sections: apps I want to build, tasks on current projects, marketing ideas to explore, audiobooks to listen to, research to do. I have a collection called "Long standing tasks" where I dump items that I want to do but are not urgent. A long-term storage place for nice-to-haves.

But my active to-do list is busy. As CEO of We UC and a founder responsible for over 100 people across all my businesses, I deal with the worst problems in the company. Things that nobody else can deal with. Critical aspects of the business that others would find very stressful.

My policy for dealing with important matters is: one thing at a time.

If I stop and think about everything I need to do and try to process it all at once, I would probably have a panic attack. So my mental trick is to deal with one thing at a time. I prioritise based on three questions:

1. Delegation check - can I delegate this to someone else?
2. What is the urgency of the item?
3. How motivated am I to complete the item?

I prioritise all my tasks based on these three categories.

What Happens When I Get Overwhelmed

Unavoidably, I sometimes get overwhelmed. I feel the pressure of managing everything I am doing and what I am trying to achieve. A feeling of pressure hangs over me and I find it difficult to focus, difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I get swamped by self-doubt and I feel down.

I am now able to identify these moments quite well. Even though I feel this way, I recognise that I feel this way because of factors that have taken me to that place - normally triggered by something that has happened during the day, or news that I have received recently.

I know that ultimately, a good night of sleep and a good workout the next morning is the best medicine for this. I have not yet had an instance where I feel overwhelmed or stressed or in a mood of despair, where I have had a good night of sleep and a good workout the next morning and not felt at least a bit better.

Normally I gain clarity either during the night or the next morning. In more severe cases, I gain clarity within a few days - again, either at night, during a workout, or often in the sauna after a workout.

Being overwhelmed is manageable if you deal with it. That is how I avoid what I consider could lead to burnout - by not letting unresolved issues pile up in my mind.

The Spouse Check

Touching on family - my wife Danielle is very good at telling me when I am going a bit too deep into something. When my focus is becoming an obsession with a particular topic.

Recently she pointed this out with my obsession with building my content creation system and process. I took note and it was a mental cue to rebalance - spend more time with the family and be more present at home. Last time this came up was when I was building the Scheduler app, which I vibe coded in my free time, mostly meaning early mornings, evenings and weekends, sacrificing family time.

The thing is, when I am obsessed with something, it is all I can think about. As I go about my day, I get ideas constantly. It could be when I am working out, in the sauna, in the office, eating, showering, or even sleeping. When I get an idea, I have to write it down. If it is a good one, it resurfaces and I act on it later.

Having someone who can give you that external perspective - who can tell you when you are going too deep - is invaluable. It is a pattern interrupt from outside yourself.

The Real Secret

So how do I balance being in work mode constantly, acting on ideas when they feel right, being responsible for over 100 people, maintaining a happy family life, and keeping fit and healthy - all without burning out?

The answer is not complicated. It is about noticing the patterns that create stress and interrupting them before they compound.

Sleep well. Move your body. Deal with one thing at a time. Zoom out when problems feel overwhelming. Listen to the people around you when they tell you something is off. Let the small stuff slide.

Burnout happens when you let unresolved mental loops pile up. When you try to hold everything in your head at once. When you forget that most problems look smaller from a distance.

I design my life so work does not consume me. Not by working less, but by working differently. By recognising that the feeling of overwhelm is a signal, not a permanent state. By trusting that clarity comes - usually after rest, usually after movement, usually after giving the mind space to process.

That is how I stay in work mode without burning out. Not through discipline or willpower, but through patterns that keep me grounded.

I'm writing this at 37,000 feet, having just paid $19.99 for internet that doesn't work. The cabin crew member smiled apologetically when I mentioned it. "We refund these constantly," she admitted. "It never really works properly."

Starlink has existed for six years. Six years of reliable, high-speed satellite internet. Yet here I am on one of the world's premium airlines, experiencing 98.2% packet loss whilst trying to send a simple email. This isn't just bad service - it's a perfect example of why big companies can't innovate.

The Big Ship Problem: Why Size Kills Speed

The bigger the ship, the harder it is to turn. It's a simple principle that explains why established companies struggle whilst startups disrupt entire industries. When you're managing thousands of employees, multiple stakeholders, and layers of bureaucracy, a decision that takes a startup 30 minutes requires months of committees, approvals, and risk assessments.

Airlines are perhaps the worst offenders. They operate in one of the most regulated industries on earth. Every tiny change requires scrutiny from aviation authorities, safety boards, and internal compliance teams. By the time they've approved implementing new technology, that technology is often already obsolete.

But regulation isn't an excuse - it's a crutch. Ryanair proved this when they disrupted British Airways by moving fast as a smaller, nimble player. They didn't wait for perfect conditions. They identified what customers actually wanted (cheap flights) and delivered it whilst BA was still holding meetings about holding meetings.

The airline innovation drought extends beyond terrible internet. When did you last see a meaningful improvement in the flying experience? The seats are the same. The entertainment systems are the same. The food is somehow worse. Meanwhile, Tesla completely reimagined what a car could be in less time than it takes an airline to update their mobile app.

In our fast-changing AI world, this startup speed advantage becomes existential. Companies that take six months to approve a ChatGPT pilot programme will be disrupted by competitors who integrated AI into their core operations in week one.

Apple's Innovation Death: From Visionary to Operator

Apple provides a masterclass in what happens when big companies lose their innovative edge. During Steve Jobs' era from 1997 to 2011, they launched the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and conceptualised the Apple Watch. Every product redefined its category.

Tim Cook took over in 2011. He's an exceptional operator - perhaps one of the best number twos in corporate history. But he's not a visionary. Under his leadership, Apple became exactly what Jobs fought against: a big fucking ship (BFS) that prioritises incremental improvements over revolutionary leaps.

The Vision Pro epitomises this decline. Nobody uses it. The V2 barely addressed the core problems - it's still too heavy, the display hasn't meaningfully improved, and the field of vision remains limited. This is what happens when you replace gut feel with calculated analysis. When every decision goes through focus groups and market research instead of following a leader's instinct about what could be amazing.

During Jobs' era, Apple was one of only four large companies capable of maintaining startup-pace innovation at scale. Now they're just another tech giant, releasing marginally better versions of the same products year after year. Without that charismatic visionary leader willing to bet the company on crazy ideas, even Apple couldn't escape the gravitational pull of corporate inertia.

The Lean Startup Principle for Big Companies

Eric Ries got it right in 'The Lean Startup' - but most big companies completely misunderstand what he meant. A pivot isn't admitting failure and starting again. It's a structured course correction based on validated learning. It's the difference between a nimble speedboat adjusting course and a cruise ship that takes 10 miles to turn around.

Startups adapt, change, and flow with what they learn. They test hypotheses, gather data, and adjust - all within days or weeks. This isn't recklessness; it's intelligence. They recognise that in a rapidly changing world, the ability to adapt quickly is more valuable than having a perfect five-year plan.

Big companies should run like startups as much as possible. This isn't about installing a ping-pong table and calling it innovation. It's about building nimbleness into the company's DNA from the ground up. Amazon gets this. Despite their size, they operate as a collection of small, autonomous teams that can move fast. Tesla and SpaceX maintain this same ethos - they're willing to blow up rockets to learn faster than their competitors.

The uncomfortable truth is that gut feel and rapid changes in direction - the very things that make board members nervous - are the true factors of long-term success. Companies that make decisions based on intuition and lived experience make lasting impact. Those that rely solely on data and committee consensus fade into irrelevance.

I've built my companies with this principle at the core. When we spotted an opportunity or identified a problem, we didn't form a committee. We tested, learned, and adapted. Sometimes we were wrong, but we were wrong fast and cheap rather than wrong slow and expensive.

The Premium Tech-First Airline Opportunity

Here's what airlines are missing: there's a massive gap in the market between premium airlines and private jets. A whole generation of crypto-rich, tech-savvy travellers would pay substantially more for an airline that actually understood technology.

Forget the antiquated Economy, Business, First class structure. Think SaaS-style tiers: Standard, Premium, Ultimate. Each tier wouldn't just offer bigger seats - it would provide genuinely different technological experiences. Imagine boarding a plane where the internet actually works, where you can pay with crypto, where the entertainment system isn't running on Windows XP.

The tech-first approach would be the core differentiator. Not just functional internet, but genuinely excellent connectivity powered by Starlink or similar. Not just accepting crypto payments as a gimmick, but building the entire payment infrastructure around modern financial rails.

Starting an airline with new aircraft would take 15 years - the order books at Boeing and Airbus are that backed up. But refurbishing used aircraft? That's a different story. You could test this concept within 18 months using refurbished planes, validate the model, then scale.

This isn't fantasy. The technology exists. The market exists. The only thing missing is someone willing to challenge the big ship problem that defines modern aviation. Someone who understands that security protocols and regulations can coexist with genuine innovation.

The Dawn of the Startup

We're living in the greatest time to be a startup founder. Never before has the speed advantage been so pronounced. Whilst big companies are forming committees to discuss AI strategy, startups are already three iterations deep into their AI-powered products.

The packet loss on this flight isn't just an inconvenience - it's a symptom of a dying business model. Companies that can't innovate, that can't move fast, that can't trust their gut feel over their spreadsheets, are already dead. They just don't know it yet.

Big companies must become nimble like startups or phase out. There's no middle ground in the AI era. You either adapt quickly or get disrupted by someone who will. The choice isn't between moving fast or moving carefully - it's between moving fast or becoming irrelevant.

The lean startup methodology isn't just for startups anymore. It's for survival. Every company needs to rediscover their ability to pivot, to trust intuition, to move at startup speed. Because in a world where a small team can disrupt an entire industry in months, being a big ship isn't an advantage - it's a death sentence.

Corporate structures must adapt to survive. The companies that recognise this and restructure themselves for nimbleness will thrive. Those that don't will join the graveyard of former giants who thought size alone would protect them. The irony is that the bigger you are, the more you need to think small. The more successful you become, the more you need to remember what it felt like to be hungry, scrappy, and willing to pivot based on what you learn.

As this plane descends and my $19.99 internet continues to not work, I'm reminded that every frustration is an opportunity. Every big company failing is a startup's chance. We're witnessing the dawn of the startup era - where speed, adaptability, and gut feel matter more than size, resources, and committee consensus.

The future belongs to the nimble.