I have spent more than a decade building web applications with Ruby on Rails. In the interests of adding value to a community, which has given so much to me, I would like to share some guiding principles, which I have come to live by. 1. Prioritise customer experience Whatever you build and however you build it, if your product fails t...

Way back in October 2020, I was both excited and proud to launch a brand new property investment platform called Stacked. Since launching the platform, I have been privileged to meet and work with some incredible people. For the all the challenges involved with launching and running a tech startup, of which there are a great many, perh...

We're living in very uncertain and turbulent times. We're also living in age, where it's easier than ever for people to be either uninformed, misinformed or deliberately misled. This, on account of a number of factors, which combine to form a dangerous cocktail. Firstly, content propagates like wildfire across digital and social media,...

The primary objective of any business, is to generate a profit. In order to do so, businesses need to produce and deliver sufficient amounts of value, to a sufficient number of paying customers, such that their annual revenue exceeds their annual expenditure, by a margin big enough to turn a profit and adequately incentivise it's key p...

Tomorrow I will board a flight back to London, after having spent 3 of the most magical weeks of my life, enjoying my honeymoon in Bali. To describe this island and it's people as beautiful, would be accurate, but not nearly adequate, to describe how truly special both are. Perhaps a better and more appropriate phrase would be other-wo...

Let's imagine that we are tasked with chopping down a very large and imposing tree. Attempting to do so, with a blunt axe, would not only be difficult, but futile. We would expend infinite amounts of time and energy, in return for nothing but disappointment and failure. Our interests would be better served, by getting back to first pri...

As someone who is guilty of having a set of portfolios, which are not sufficiently well balanced, I'm keen to share my key learnings from the past few weeks, in the hope that you may be inspired, to review and improve the diversification of your own portfolios. For sake of clarity, by portfolios, I am referring to my personal and corpo...

As human beings, we have an innate desire to feel safe and secure. As such, we are naturally attracted to environments, which are characterised by certainty and predictability. We instinctively gravitate towards situations, in which we feel comfortable and seek to put distance between ourselves and anything which threatens our sense of...

I recently downloaded and started using a new daily habit tracker, in order to remain accountable to some new habits, which I'm keen to form. On Tuesday, when I started tracking my habits, I decide to set a daily task of sharing a wealth creation tip across my social media accounts. My first post got a reasonable amount of engagement. ...

It strikes me, that this fundamental principle, like so many others, is routinely overlooked, on account of how obvious we consider it to be. This feeds into the broader issue, of paying insufficient attention, to our subconscious habits. Habits do not simply spring into existence and lodge themselves in the depths of our subconscious ...

A by-product of being an entrepreneur, is a deep-rooted belief that anything is possible. On account of this relentlessly positive 'can-do' attitude, we light up when people suggest that something can't be done. We kick into a higher gear of resourcefulness and creativity, in order to prove the naysayers wrong. The desire to say YES wh...

I'm currently devouring Atomic Habits by James Clear and I'm struck by the awesome power of compound growth. This is a concept, which I have been intimately familiar with for many years, primarily in the context of wealth creation. Albert Einstein famously remarked that “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who under...

It is often said that comparison is the thief of joy. I think this same principle can be applied to the pursuit of attention, especially in the context of social media. As highlighted superbly by Cal Newport in his 2019 book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focussed Life in a Noisy World, the social media giants have invested and continu...

One of my key learnings from Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, is the concept of reasoning from first principles, rather than by analogy. The concept of reasoning from first principles, is a core tenet of physics and indeed philosophy, which essentially states that we should strip out everything, about which we are not complete...

I am currently reading and greatly enjoying Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk. I'm a big fan of Walter Isaacson's work, having previously devoured his biographies of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and others. At the time of writing this article, I have read just 17 of the 95 chapters but I feel compelled to start sharing my thought...

The cycle of constantly refactoring things, to fuel the engines of continuous improvement, is one of my favourite aspects of engineering. The idea is to build something, as quickly and pragmatically as possible, so it can be shipped out into the real world, to start attracting feedback. The lessons, which this feedback produces, are li...

I have just deactivated my personal and Stacked profiles on Threads, in favour of the premium version of X, which was formerly Twitter. Having opted to create Threads profiles, when Twitter was engaged in a downward spiral and Meta introduced their shiny new equivalent, I was shocked to see how flagrantly they had ripped off their comp...

I am currently re-reading and absolutely loving Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs' eternal mantra of 'Think Different' is as profound today, as it was when he embarked on his exploratory journey in the 1970's. As someone, who spends the majority of my time developing products, it is perhaps unsurprising, that I shou...

We live in an attention economy, in which social media giants spend billions of dollars, to capture and retain our attention. Instagram, Facebook, X and the rest, are all competing for our time and mental energy. Time is the most precious and valuable asset we have. This is followed very closely, by our mental energy. Both are finite. ...

Throwback to this summer's inaugural Stacked event, which we held at WeWork's flagship location in Central London. It was amazing to bring members of the community together, so that we could share knowledge and support each other's wealth building efforts. Howard Bowes delivered a fabulous keynote presentation, in which he talked about...

Stacked is a FREE platform, which helps you raise the funding you need, to grow your property investment business. Stacked also empowers you, to manage your team and portfolio, along with all the associated information and communication, in a centralised, systemised and highly scalable manner. This forms a virtuous cycle, as when you r...

I'm delighted to announce that Stacked is now a FREE platform, which property developers can use, to raise the funding they need, to grow their portfolios. Not only that, it can also be used to manage your entire team and portfolio. Yes, you read that right. No trial. No subscription. No limits. When we first launched Stacked back in O...

What an extraordinary human being Albert Einstein was! Not only was he a genius, he was someone with a strong moral compass, who, in spite of sustained persecution, always fought for what he believed was right. After watching the highly acclaimed 10 part National Geographic series, which draws inspiration from Walter Isaacson's biograp...

I had an incredibly valuable meeting with Zee Razaq from Certax Accounting earlier this week. I want to share some of the key insights, so that others may start to think differently about their own tax affairs. I have spent the last 15 years building a property investment business, which has now reached a size that necessitates very ca...

With Q3 having recently drawn to a close, I have been working through the retrospective process of considering: • What has been going well? • What has not been going well? • What opportunities are there for improvement during Q4 and beyond? To support with this process, I have been reading extensively and searching for inspiration, on ...