“Web3 founder and trained writer. Salford council estate to a $100m Gulf joint venture, via philosophy and a literary journal.”
I've co-founded two Web3 companies and closed a $100m joint venture with an ADX-listed company in the Gulf. Before that I ran content and retail investor acquisition through a $65m token sale to 63,000 investors at a Frankfurt-listed platform.
I got there from Little Hulton, a working-class part of Salford, raised by my mother and grandmother and working from the age of twelve. In that environment you learn early how to spot the gap between performance and reality — which turned out to be useful in an industry largely built inside that gap.
I never intended a commercial life. I read philosophy and English, took a masters in creative writing, and published fiction internationally as Simon Friel. I was a writer, columnist and editor at BCN Week, Barcelona's alternative newsweekly, where I interviewed the counter-culture icon Lydia Lunch. She became a close friend, and eventually told me plainly that writing was not a world where money flowed freely for people like us. She was right. I took the craft somewhere it would pay instead.
I'm good on: why crypto marketing fails at the sentence rather than the campaign; what a token sale to 63,000 strangers teaches you about trust; the compliance rules quietly redesigning crypto funnels; why most people at the top aren't exceptional, they're just on the inside; and what a creative writing masters is actually worth in a boardroom.
