Essays
Each essay in the series has an episode.
Most firms still have around nine layers between a family and its assets. With agents, a firm can build with four today. Taken to its end, two are left: the experts, and one provider for service, the home office and custody. Read →
Most of what this industry has built should be scrapped and started again, around agents, with superintelligence at the core. What becomes obsolete, what should exist, and why Salesforce opened the door to agents while Orion chose to charge for it. Read →
AI lowered the cost of building software. It also changed what the software should be, and what the company around it should look like. The system and the firm built on it have to be designed at the same time. Watch or listen →
Agents carry three jobs on the back end of an advisory business. Only the first one runs on data that arrived overnight, and it is the only one the industry's current direction is pushing towards. Read →
LPL told 6,000 advisors it has put nearly $2 billion into technology, and the industry read a receipt as a commitment. At a firm with 32,000 advisors, most of a number that size never reaches anything new — and the agent it bought has to run on the rails it already had. Read →
A purchase price allocation is the one document where a buyer has to be specific, under rules with consequences. Robinhood put thirteen years next to TradePMR's client relationships and five next to its software — and seventeen months of shipping has agreed with it. Read →
Overhead in an advisory firm rises with size, and doubling revenue has historically bought one point of it. Every technology this profession has purchased was priced beside the labor — which is why the income statement never moved. Read →
The ceiling is on how well a firm can know a household, not on how many it can hold. Watch or listen →
The industry is short about a hundred thousand advisors. The shortage closes by reimagining the way systems and people support the advisor: the three jobs agents carry, why only one runs on overnight data, and what the rails are for. Watch or listen →
The industry is short about 100,000 advisors. One complexity tax is paid in advisor time; a second, older one is paid by clients who can't tell a fiduciary from a salesperson wearing the same title. Read →
Every layer between a client's money and where it needs to go is a place a conflict of interest can hide — and a place that boxes in the advisor's own judgment too. Agentic AI is what finally makes removing those layers possible. Read →
How a state lowers its complexity tax and invites builders — the first-principles case for prosperity, jobs, and opportunity, with seven supporting analyses. Constructive and non-partisan. Read →
The accredited-investor rule decides who can invest by wealth, not understanding. The fix is rails where transparency is native, so access and accountability rise together. Read →
What is wealth, what is money, and which corporatism we should accept. A trillion-dollar week is the occasion; the questions are older than any founder. Read →
One person designed the rails for a wealth team, in nine weeks, without writing code. Where the work went, the rules that came out of it, and why the barrier is lower than you think. Watch or listen →
Complex households have complex facts, and they change. An elite advisor ends up tracking them, or managing the people who do. What I decided to build, and why in the open. Watch or listen →