Last month, I made a classic mistake. I went to a book launch in London expecting a quick 20-minute catch-up before heading home. 

Instead, I ended up having a fascinating chat with the authors, picked up a copy of Assetization (as you do on a casual Monday), and spent my entire week glued to it. 

The authors - Philippe A. Naegeli, Patrick Loepfe and Tom Lyons from Swiss fintech GenTwo - lay out a concept that completely rewired how I look at commercial finance. 

It centres on a 1950s American trucker named Malcolm McLean. 

Back then, shipping goods overseas was an absolute nightmare. McLean watched dockworkers spend days manually hauling individual barrels, crates and sacks off his truck and onto ships item by item. It was agonisingly slow, wildly expensive and constantly broken by human error. 

So McLean had a stroke of genius: stop focusing on what’s inside the cargo, and standardise the wrapper instead. 

He invented the modern steel shipping container. 

Once you put goods inside a standardised wrapper, the actual cargo stops mattering to the crane operator or the ship's captain. Microchips, grain, car tyres, coffee beans - it doesn't matter. It snaps onto any truck, fits any crane and stacks onto any vessel in any port on earth. Standardising the wrapper unlocked global trade overnight. 

Now, apply that exact same logic to capital. 

Trillions of pounds in real-world value - from industrial machinery and invoice ledgers to small business loans - are locked up simply because they are "awkward" financial assets. But technology is now building standardised "financial containers" (or tokenisation wrappers).

Wrap any business asset in the right digital structure, and suddenly it flows freely to a whole new world of investors. 

We are watching the total democratisation, commoditisation and acceleration of finance happen in real time. It got my brain spinning about FundOnion - because if you can standardise how small business risk is packaged and matched, you strip out every last drop of friction in business lending. 

(If you’re anywhere near fintech or capital markets, go get a copy of Assetization. Genuinely brilliant stuff.)

Anyway, enough nerding out on market structure. 

As much as I love big ideas about where finance is heading, grand visions don't build a company. Day-to-day execution does. To actually pull off big ambitious stuff, there are a few core rules I hammer home. 

Effort is great, but completion is the only thing that actually creates value. 

In business, an unreleased feature, an un-sent proposal or a project sitting at 90% completion delivers zero impact to our customers. It’s the final 10% - getting it across the finish line - where all the value is. 

Finish what you start.

People love the corporate platitude "there are no stupid questions". The truth is, there are stupid questions, usually because we haven't thought something through or we're afraid of sounding uneducated.

But my rule is simple: ask them anyway. Don't let the fear of asking a basic or silly question hold you back from getting the clarity you need. I'd rather you ask a "stupid" question today than make an expensive mistake tomorrow.

I have always believed that there is a massive difference between wanting to build a quick, profitable transaction and wanting to build a business that dominates for decades. 

Whenever I think about this, I look back to Gus Levy, the legendary former head of Goldman Sachs, who used to tell his partners to be "long-term greedy". 

Short-term greed tempts you to take cheap shortcuts, burn client relationships, and squeeze margins at the expense of trust. 

Long-term greed aligns profit with reputation - building value that compounds over time because your customers actually win with you.

If we build a service that’s only 5% faster or slightly cheaper than what’s already out there, nobody cares. Switching suppliers is painful, so nobody changes their habits for a tiny upgrade.

If what we’re building doesn’t make our customers’ lives radically easier or save them a significant amount of money, we're just wasting time on minor tweaks.

In a world obsessed with 15-second trends and instant gratification, it’s easy to feel like you’re always behind. I try to steer my team away from that panic. 

Speed matters, but the quality of the foundation you build matters more. Some things simply take time to engineer properly, and I won't sacrifice long-term quality just to satisfy an artificial clock. 

6. Don't have a solution for a problem that doesn't exist

This is easily the line I repeat the most around the office. Teams naturally love to spend weeks over-engineering complex systems for hypothetical cases that might happen two years down the line. 

Solve the real, burning problem sitting on your desk today. We'll deal with tomorrow's problems when they actually show up.

Every founder has at least one mantra their team can quote in their sleep.

What’s yours?

Till next time, 

James