A non-technical technophile who loves understanding the problem, then having a crack at building to it.

I studied law at the University of Bristol, then did the postgraduate Legal Practice course at UWE. I trained and qualified at King & Wood Mallesons in London and Munich, where I ended up leading the payments work, then set up the crypto and distributed ledger group at Norton Rose Fulbright. At Burges Salmon I built the fintech practice from nothing to the inaugural Legal 500 fintech ranking in 2017.

Some of that was alongside the regulators rather than across the table. I advised the FCA on its RegTech Call for Input, and worked with the FCA and the Bank of England on making regulation machine executable. Regulatory, corporate and commercial law are still part of what I do. But I've always been more interested in what a business is trying to achieve than in the rules on their own.

From 2019 to 2023 I co-founded Lumio, a money app for couples and families, and ran its operations, governance, fundraising, legal and compliance. Startups teach you operational reality in a way that advisory work never can. We raised more than £2.5m, grew from 3 people to over 25 across nine countries, and then had to get lean: we cut burn by 60% and doubled revenue per employee. The hardest weeks were the human ones, and I'm proudest that when we made redundancies, we found roles for everyone before their notice ended.

Alongside that I sat on the Moneyhub Enterprise advisory board from 2018 to 2025, covering legal, risk and compliance for an open banking scale-up.

In 2025 I went back to operations as a consultant, setting up and running operations for high-impact non-profits working on AI, existential risk and biosecurity. Entities, grants, hiring, payroll, policies and the workflows that hold it all together. Small teams, very big missions: a crash course in why good operations matter.

In October 2025 I made the leap from using AI casually to running my own operations on it. The gap between “using AI for tasks” and “running your business on AI” is what AI Ops is about: one human, teams of AI agents, and the difference between a calculator and an accountant.

How I work

So I start with where you're trying to get to. Then I'll tell you what I really think: challenging directly, because I care deeply about you getting there. Early in my career my peers elected me to represent them on King & Wood Mallesons' partnership board, through a merger and a redundancy programme. It worked because I was prepared to ask difficult questions of people far more senior, and keep working with them afterwards. I still work that way.

Understand the destination before building. I champion individuality, because the best systems are shaped to the people who use them, not the other way round. I believe in inspiring growth over imposing structure, and in an honest conversation early rather than a polite one that wastes your money. You are the domain expert; everything I build is meant to leave you more capable, not more dependent on me.