Oh the early days of Future Works.

2023: B is not for Bankruptcy. S is for…

“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

2023 started for us in Cape Town. Just after completing the challenge to have both of our families for a week (over 15 people!) together for Christmas in Poland (see 2022 ) we flew out to Dubai — watched Avatar: Way of Water there to see if it’s true that she looks like the n’avi (yes) — and then we flew to Cape Town and went almost straight from the airport to hike.

2023 started for us in Cape Town.

We took the hard path up and the hard one down. It was windy, pretty brutal in the high wind even — but we made it just fine. In other words, it was very much like my 2023.

Following the “sins” I committed in 2021 (2021 ARTICLE), and the year that started reshuffling my priorities and focus ( 2022 ARTCILE), I was only just about to start feeling the effects of crossing currents. The next parts will go like so:

• epic travels
• bad news
• incredible moment of life building
• bad news
• bad news
• bad news
• incredible moment of life building
• bad news
• bad news
• and, see below…

This is a story of two of me: the Tech Matt and the Nature Matt. And how they try to come together. A story of continued redefinition of my priorities. A story of huge amounts of pain and difficulty, mixed with some of the most incredible moments of my life — including my elopement wedding.

As with all my prior updates, I’ll make sure to share some things I learned — some that perhaps will be also useful for you, my friend.

Let’s get to it.

First, we had one epic NYE with a group of dear friends from all the continents.

The NYE in Cape Town was a great time, can’t blame all the friends who go every year.

Together with one of those friends we got to DJ an epic night for a couple hundred of us at a large villa till near the morning — my recorded set from the night is here.

Then from South Africa we went to Namibia and drove 4x4s (and partly flew Cessna airplanes) across the country. An absolutely epic trip.

Namibia is special.

I worked all along — as I do when traveling. I developed this skill well through the 80+ countries and multiple revolutions around the planet I shared in my past posts, but this time news started coming in with each painting a worse picture of the nearest future, increasingly creating a rift between lighthearted world exploration and the need to become really really focused to tackle the times ahead of us.

The GenAI wave which started just a few months ago was coming with full force, and one could argue I was now in a far worse position to ride this wave well than in the years prior. I needed to think.

I worked all along — as I do when traveling. I developed this skill well through the 80+ countries and multiple revolutions around the planet.

From Namibia we went to Tanzania — and primarily the Zanzibar island. To catch up with work from a stationary place, to kitesurf a bit — and to think a lot.

Zanzibar was an important decision time — and some breaks to learn to kitefoil.

My primary focus of the time in Zanzibar was to make a difficult decision: will I continue with Future Quest, merge it with another project in the Regeneration Finance space (merger talks were advanced at the time) or do I pause it entirely to see where market goes, to try and save my main company, HOO KOO E KOO.

See all along, as I do, I balanced a set of life obligations already planned such as the travels and a set of news I was receiving. The company I thought I can just oversee and manage from a high level at this point started looking very shaky — safe to say, I will never just delegate an entire company and hope for the best again.

But first — how we got here.

Q1 2023 delivered a number of news:

1. Several clients got severely affected by the shaky markets and couldn’t pay us large sums despite months of attempts, some still dragged it out and some simply said they don’t have the money and/or need to shut down
2. Despite my company reaching highest revenue ever in 2022, we found for the first time we had no profit that year
3. In fact, on closer inspection, later we learned we had a massive untracked loss and debt and a year of missed and unpaid taxes in our UK entity — but more on this later
4. Web3 seemed to be going into much harsher crypto winter than we anticipated. We focused on funding our portfolio startups to help them make it through this period, but quite rapidly it seemed the entire Regeneration Finance movement is losing traction and collapsing.

At the same time, at that point 6 or so years of experience implementing AI and Machine Learning systems of all kind, from market prediction systems, to shipping and supply chain, asset management, to even eye scanning and game world generation.

The end of 2022 brought a true eye-opener: an actually usable version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT arrived (GPT 3.5) and took the world by storm. This was different to the older versions we’ve used in our projects. It felt like it would bring a total change to how we do anything, and the question was not if, but rather when.

After plenty of pondering, conversations with investors, advisors and partners — I decided to pause Future Quest entirely. This was incredibly hard as the fund and matchmaking system were so important for my own purpose — and obviously, the investors, many of them friends, hated the idea. The decision had to be made though. I decided to still organize Future Horizon events for the community, but otherwise we’d freeze our remaining assets and wait.

I decided to go back to professional services and see how I can bring HOO KOO E KOO, the main company, out of its newly found trouble, as it has been the “engine” of all my work, investment and adventures over past years.

Was it a good idea? Yes and no.

As I started refocusing on HOO KOO E KOO, I realized something: as much as when I started the company 8 years earlier we had a big and interesting edge by mastering fully remote work, today, after covid this was no longer a differentiator.

It was clear as day to me: something HUGE was coming with GenAI. And the new company cannot be following the old model. Everything would change.

My meditations and notes in Tanzania gave birth to a very deep dive I’ve increasingly embarked on: to understand what GenAI will mean for innovation, digital transformation and professional services overall.

Miami

First, we needed to find a stable base to focus. Poorer now than in many years, we packed our NYC apartment into a van and drove to Miami ourselves to move there. We got very lucky and we found a beautiful place right on the beach — right on a kite beach even, which was useful as next months would become full of hard work, with brief moments to jump in on the board and refresh my mind.

I really loved our Miami home base, even though I spent little time there traveling on Business and

Why Miami?

She was opening a new chapter of her non profit there and I was really curious to experience having both a great kitesurfing Caribbean beach and a huge modern US city at the same time.

The last HOO KOO E KOO retreat

Soon after I flew out to co-host something we had planned for many months: an annual retreat for our team at the main company. Around 30 people flew in to Colombia and we had our usual set of connection & culture building activity, some sports, some party and a whole lot of co-working, workshops and jamming.

Primary focus: how do we win at this AI thing?

Team retreast in the Rosario Islands, Colombia.

We didn’t know this at the time, but with what started with HOO KOO E KOO Retreat #1 was going to end here.

Just over a year later HOO KOO E KOO… would not even exist anymore.

I treat the whole period building a company with Happiness First and Freedom First as a period of my own learning, growth, sharing some incredible time with the kindest, smartest, wonderful people. The [culture building I described here] remains my deep focus, but I have since found that I want to run things very differently.

In any case — the retreat was great, no one got hurt and the team got stronger — even if despite our full push to try and get everyone to deeply switch to AI-driven work right away, it would take us another while to arrive there. Two more things happened soon:

• I was delivered the scariest message I’ve yet received from any of my leadership teams
• Future Works was born!

But first…

She Said Yes

Within first days of meeting (in 2022 How I met your mother) we discussed plans, life, kids, how we can drive impact in the world and more. Then we gave each other a set of challenges to complete ( for example for our families to vibe during an extended Christmas or to spend time together in a very remote place for extended while. The rest of the challenges I won’t mention here — sufficient to say, ALL of them worked out better than we’d dreamed for.

Now coming up to a year since I met her and I was certain this is the one — so I bought the biggest baddest most beautiful diamond ring with pretty much all the money I had left at the time — and organized something very special, under the excuse that we’re going away for my birthday trip.

We flew to the Fernando de Noronha islands off the coast of Brazil — the country we met in. An incredible person who I once met on Necker Island, who has since helped us organize great many events, helped me orchestrate something incredible: we had a private top of a mountain above the island, with a full romantic setup…

When we landed I simply said, let’s go on a hike — she said yes.

I said why don’t we bring our velvet onesies we got in Cape Town — she said yes.

Once on top of the mountain, I said why don’t we put those onesies on for a photo — she said yes.

Then I proposed — and she also said yes.

I chose Fernando de Noronha, because it’s just teaming with life: spinner dolphins, sharks, turtles, all sorts of fish, crabs, birds, mammals. It’s like the Eden garden where you can also surf — what better place to start building a new life itself.

A bit of a gamble, but worked out! Best birthday ever.

From the island we went to a private land of our dear friends who became an important part of our Future Horizon community. They bought over 6,000 acres of land (nearly the size of Manhattan… with 8 miles of waterfront!) in Brazil and invited us to co-create regeneration projects, events and more. This trip was one of our many to the land and in near future we will likely have a home on the land.

During this trip we co-started a regeneration project that has led to reforestation of an initial area of about 600 acres within next 2 years — with more to come.

The land is right next to the biggest preservation of Atlantic Rainforest in existence, a great source of inspiration and comparison of what true restored nature has to offer, including various species of monkeys, sloth and more.

Fun fact: there are massive Cashew trees on the land, so big that we ended up planning to use some as venues for events — here are 3D scans I made of some of those.

As much as the sustainability and regeneration practices were still active (and forever would be at least partly the outcome of my work), the decisions I made in Zanzibar needed execution.

I chose two areas of focus:

1. I started Future Works as a 30 days solo-preneurship challenge with AI as my partner
2. I started deep executive coaching with an excellent expert from LA, who kindly offered to do it for me as a mutual back scratch (thank you AZ!)

Let’s start with Future Works.

The birth of Future Works

I was staring down the barrel of the classic Innovator’s Dilemma. I realized the agency model — the very machine I had spent a decade perfecting with HOO KOO E KOO — was to become obsolete. And I had just decided to double down on it!

Selling ‘human hours’ in an age of infinite intelligence is a race to the bottom. I knew I couldn’t just patch the hull of the old ship; I had to be willing to scuttle it before the market did it for me. I needed to prove that once again I can find a new model, sufficiently ahead of time and thrive.

Someone online threw out the idea of a “HustleGPT” challenge on Twitter — use AI as your boss, perform its actions in the real world and see if you can create a business in 30 days.

I thought his was brilliant. Except I knew the AI too well to make it my boss (not yet quite there even in 2026) so I made it a “partner” and started… as it turned out perhaps the first truly AI-native professional services company.

I used the challenge as a live-fire stress test for a new operating system:

Can a tiny, AI-native team out-execute a traditional agency 50x its size?

The results were terrifyingly good. We built the brand, generated pipeline, and delivered revenue in 30 days. But the real win was the data. Future Works wasn’t born from a game; it was the solution to my dilemma.

All documented daily within the thread on X (back then Twitter) — take a look into the thread!

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Click here: “Read the full conversation on Twitter” for the full day-by-day.

Lessons: I wrapped a lot of my learnings from my time here. When you read it, in some ways you will see how much has changed since. And some ways you will notice how little has changed.

It’s good to look at the exponentials from up close and from a distance.

It was my AI partner that suggested the name “Future Works” and overall all decisions have been made between “us”. Future Works has later grown to become a 7 figure revenue company, pioneering a true Service-as-Software model and retains AI at its core and today (except it’s far less off the shelf and — I believe — it’s on its way to become a 1–5 billion dollar business.

Zero investors, all bootstrapped (Remember my lessons from 2022), started with $100 capital and a lot of perspiration. The path was a meandering journey but has allows us to create something very very special.

1. To see its current state, simply come to https://future.works
2. To learn about its future which is going far beyond its current state, check out my incoming masterplan post (follow my Medium, LinkedIn or subscribe to the newsletter)
3. To learn how I got to the current state and to the master plan, simply follow my further recap posts here on Medium (2024 coming next!)

And truly, I invite you to take a scroll through the X thread above, to both realize how far we’ve come — AND to realize how many of us don’t yet use AI like it was possible already 3 years ago... Every time I revisit those posts it resets my perception of timelines.

Lesson: Observe, adjust, start over.

Anyway.

Coaching. Finally.

The second thing that I focused on was neuroplasticity-focused executive coaching with a world-class expert, whom I will also not name here (to follow the rule I established here LINK), but happy to share their contact directly.

You see, during the whole collapse of my net worth from 8 figures to below zero, I noticed something: I did it myself. And it was not the first time.

In my 20s I also built a valuable business, and then, from perspective of time I can say I subconsciously undermined the great situation I was in at the same time, eventually had a hostile takeover and had to exit on their terms.

In my 20s my net worth was somewhere in 7 figures, then collapsed to zero. In my 30s my net worth hit 8 figures and then collapsed again.

Who did it all? I was sure it was me.

But why?

That I didn’t know and needed help figuring out.

This work couldn’t come at a better time.

I can say the practice was quite a wild journey of ups and downs. At first meandering, difficult, digging deeper and deeper into shadows of moments of my childhood, meeting many previous versions of myself still alive with me, peeling the onion piece by piece.

Incredibly visual, more so than Ayahuasca and many similar experiences I would say, despite done entirely sober, simply in a conversation and mostly via Zoom.

This work — which ended lasting more than a year — has had a profound effect on me. On my values, my sense of direction and ability to manage my own reactions — and myself as a whole really.

The coaching would unfold as a series and eventually led me to a truly incredible experience called “Heart Protocol” which has truly installed a rudder in my life and work. My marriage, my books, a lot of my work would not have happened, was it not for those deep experiences helping me tackle… myself.

Most importantly, the coaching came right in time.

May

End of April and May were incredible as I got to — finally! — convince my parents to let me bring them to us (first time in 20 years). They came to visit Miami.

I might be boring you with my family pics…

I might be boring you with my family pics my friend, but these notes are as important for me as these learnings hopefully enrich your life too— and this visit was very significant for me, as they loved this trip so much they talked about it for 2 years+ after.

Ultimately, when cancer won, this picture was even chosen to be on my dad’s tomb.

Ultimately, when cancer won, this picture was even chosen to be on my dad’s tomb.

After that it was back to work. I started a series of talks on the journey, and my learnings — eg. this one at Future of Cities in Miami a day before Summit at Sea.

With special thanks to dear friends who enabled these.

Money was tight so I sold my Summit at Sea ticket last minute and instead focused on even deeper work. I had one chance….

B is not for Bankruptcy

Soon after I finished the #PartnerGPT challenge… A call came from leaders at HOO KOO E KOO — the main company — the audit they had started earlier in the year concluded with brutal news:

Our financial control team had indeed miscalculated our financial position, and beyond the bad news I already noted above (unpaying clients, losses on high revenue) a new realization came: finance was also mis-filed in the UK, we faced a number of unforeseen taxes to pay and the hole of losses is much higher than expected.

The call didn’t come from a lawyer. It came from my own leadership team.

They had finished the audit. The numbers were clear, and they were catastrophic. Between the unpaying clients, the tax gaps from the UK entity, and the market crash, we were underwater. Far deeper underwater than we thought. My leadership team — people I trust with my life — gave me the only logical recommendation: ‘Matt, we have to file. It’s over. This is a bankruptcy.’

They were right on paper. The ‘smart’ CEO move was to file for bankruptcy (we didn’t even have a CEO role btw), wipe the slate, and start fresh. It’s legal. It’s what you do.

My immediate reaction was, “Got it, but I really don’t want to have a bankruptcy in my CV, so what do we do here…”

But I looked at the list of people we owed. Partners. Freelancers. Friends.

I couldn’t do it. I realized that if I killed the company to save my bank account, I would be killing the version of myself I wanted to be.

Things have already been getting worse and worse financially for about 1.5 years for me, multiple companies I had shares in failed, I lost pretty much all my money with FTX and Luna crashes in crypto, I even paused Future Quest to focus on the professional services and now… We had such a massive gap it was basically unsurmountable — between unpaying clients, taxes and this gap the hole was a third of our annual revenue at peak. Beyond saving.

But, I thought, we do now have Future Works.

And I have an ability to really really hustle when needed. I mean work 100h weeks back to back and just hustle out of trouble. I’ve been there before as an entrepreneur, so this would be just another extended sprint. And so this is what we did.

We used max AI to increase our profitability, closed more and more business and carried both brands forward. A dear friend and advisor left Google as their Head of Brand and we partnered up to drive AI consulting for some firms (with mixed results commercially). Meanwhile at HOO KOO E KOO we trimmed the team to the max and focused on work delivery.

It soon turned out we cannot continue as is and the UK company had to enter liquidation, which caused legal action against some of our former unpaying clients which really complicated some of our relationships…

But in the US things were going better and better.

We swore that despite the UK company going out of business, we will repay all its debtors from our new revenues and profits and just hustle our assess off for 1–2 years to make it happen. We didn’t need to do it legally… but we really wanted to makes sure that as much as we can we make everyone whole.

Definitely the hard way.

It cost us a fortune, but it bought me a feeling that I can walk through walls if I want to. Bouncing from zero is hard; bouncing from below zero, without the legal shield, parachute, plan B, under my own mind judging me every day… was an exercise in juggling building a life, and truly chewing on glass and starting into the void, as they say.

Brutal.

Here I was, at the very bottom of my finances, newly engaged to a supermodel-looking successful entrepreneur who dated a billionaire prior to being with me… I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to “make it back”.

She didn’t want me to “make it back”.

In what world does this make sense?

Her whole thing was that she doesn’t really want me to try to get back to millions, rather do good work, stop gambling and build a family step by step.

It made so much sense.

And it worked out. Worked out so so well.

It was so deeply aligned with what I had wanted deep within, and so I juggled: my ultimate priority of building a happy family (foundation level: happy life) and the layers above it, including rebuilding my business life.

Lesson: B is not for Bankruptcy. B is for Birth.

That time birthed the man who is writing this today.

The decision to hustle and pay off people with new profits had another effect: as we went on and grew I realized we can also fund our technology spend this way, to delay raising money before we really have proof and remove all external pressures from simply building a solid business. So Future Works started building its own AI infrastructure. But more on this later…

Portugal

Left for the summer to Lisbon. The goal was to work in focus, spend less than in the expensive Miami, see if we can perhaps find something we really wanted to find for our future — a land to buy near Lisbon as a footing for community, and to host a Future Horizon gathering which has already been planned since the previous year.

It was in Portugal that friends convinced me to undertake the incredible “Heart Protocol” experience, which I will not share details on here, but will just say it has greatly contributed to my life direction after.

Future Horizon & the A-HA!

With each event Future Horizon became more beautiful and powerful for its attendees and me. This one was less insane to organize than the 6-venue one we did in Rio the previous year, much easier to manage than Sharm el Sheikh and it was the first bigger one that did not lose a lot of money. Optimistic given the overall times.

It was during this event that one of the speakers (renowned UN advisor) shared the idea of Symbiocene — a period we should strive to have after Anthropocene.

For me it was a huge a-ha!

Finally! I knew the future I want. Not just sustainable. Not just regenerative. The Future I want is Symbiotic.

For years, I felt a split. There was ‘Tech Matt’ (Growth, AI, Scale) and ‘Nature Matt’ (Conservation, Retreats, Oceans and travel).

I thought I had to choose: do I build the future, or do I protect the past?

Then, under the Portuguese sun, the conflict vanished. I found a higher ground.

It was at Future Horizon in Sintra I found the the future I want… Symbiotic.

The Symbiocene.

Coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, it describes the era that must follow the Anthropocene — a state where human civilization and biological systems don’t just coexist, but integrate.

Finally a complete enough, long-lasting and energizing end-to-end vision to fill our purpose.

While by all means simply well-intentioned, it came with entire stack of economic backing as a durable enough idea, beyond what Regeneration Finance in crypto could carry.

Far beyond that.

The World Economic Forum estimates the ‘Nature Positive Economy’ creates a $10.1 Trillion annual business opportunity. Financial economists like the IMF’s Ralph Chami have proven that a single whale is worth over $2 million in carbon services alone — not because it’s ‘cute,’ but because it is a biological machine providing critical infrastructure.

Digital transformation alone, a $1Tn/year and fast growing market meant increasing optimization, and optimization means less resources, less resources are more sustainable. Sustainable integration of humanity, nature and thinking machines is Symbiocene.

I understood making life symbiotic would be my own life’s purpose.

Purpose isn’t a luxury, it is the high-octane fuel you need to survive the 100-hour weeks and build something truly impactful.

Future Works exists to bridge this gap. We use AI (Silicon Intelligence) to help companies operate with the efficiency of Biology (Carbon Intelligence). We aren’t just building software and optimizing processes; we are architecting the Symbiocene.

Future Works 2.0: AI Strategy Consulting

Future Works born as an experiment. In theory we’d just shut it down and integrate any learnings from this Innovator’s Dilemma solving run back into the main company. But everything was changing its initial success bode well for the future.

But the model was not great — we quickly learned that people and businesses simply don’t yet understand AI, AI services and just have a lot of questions about what is coming.

A dear friend and advisor of many years was leaving Google after leading their brand — and having led brand transformations of companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Champions League etc. He was hungry for a new challenge — deeply exploring what the upcoming AI transformation will mean for businesses.

We partnered up (more here) to turn Future Works into more of a firm that helps navigate AI strategy, than. Before long we had our first Fortune500 client — before the new company was 6 months old, and before it was even “officially” launched.

We announced the new initiative with my talk to YPO community and went on to experiment further.

The sales were going OK. We ran initial workshops etc. but clients we worked on such as JLL, or Cisco would not want to move past initial strategies and workshops initially. The market was not mature enough. While we clearly had some fit and offered even -90% on costs for climate companies (to test fully AI-powered delivery savings), we mostly just delivered a lot of tiny engagements. I knew I needed to find ways to make some more noise about what we do. I planted a simple note next to my desk:

“Not enough people know and realize they need us.”

And it became my sort of daily mantra for quite some time, until 1 deal per month turned to 10 deals per day.

Land Found

The Europe time was mainly focused on work, I was pushing to increase sales, ramp up marketing — simply let people know what we do, and that we do it, but as my “lower levels” of the stack (personal, main business) were taken care of, I’d also advance some other projects.

While in Portugal through a mix of search by friends, short weekend journeys flying a drone, some private investigations and a bunch of luck we found a land to buy. Now, of course, we did not really have the money — but it seemed very aligned. I’ll come back to this topic again in my 2025 post.

Beyond the land, great many moments happened during our time in Lisbon and Europe.

I’ll spare you all those, here are just some highlights. Sufficient to say this was a great time of a switch over — some things were crashing, some were growing. I was building new foundations.

A few moments from the time in Europe, of ups and downs. Sharing the ups mostly!

Reverse honeymoon leads to…

Tanyella needed to go to the Philippines to launch a new chapter of her non-profit there. I needed to go to Brazil to the land there and help in a shooting of a film titled “Finding my way to paradise” (as a kitesurfing extra mainly!) and wanted to introduce some more people to the land in Brazil.

The lease for our place in Lisbon was ending and I think we were just tired of the pretty much non-stop work.

A pretty complex idea emerged: We’d travel a bunch, take a break from the 4 month sprint with work to recharge a bit and…

Elope and get married.

Yes.

And so we went to the Philippines, then via Ethiopia to Brazil, from there to Mexico.

And there, at a small festival called Ondalinda we eloped and got married. An epic ceremony, once more organized by the same love deity helping us be together so many times (thank you S. ).

And from then on we are known as Leta.

Tanyella’s childhood nickname is Lela. Mine is Tolo.

Leta is a portmanteau of those with a Latin root word laeta, meaning “joy”. Wiktionary also lists meanings of “happy”, “glad”, “lucky”, “successful”, “prosperous”, “luxurious”, “lush”, and “abounding”.

We decided to create our own lineage of joy.

And here are some pictures from tho “reverse honeymoon” and travels (reverse, as it ended with the elopement and right after that we went straight back to work).

Something to be truly grateful for.

And incredible time. Straight from there we went on to focus on work, which brings less pictures and stories for the rest of that year — but one moment worth highlighting was an incredible annual Thanksgiving my business partner organizes for over 100 people.

Something to be truly grateful for.

But was I really feeling grateful?

B is not for Bullshit

The “foundation” of my personal life was getting better and better, but things in business were entirely different. The further I went, the more I noticed that my business has operated on a lot of bullshit. On stories, perception. Vibes but not essence.

Don’t get me wrong, it would be easy to say that most businesses operate on stories.

However, I started craving creating something real. Very real. Not a smart hack, nor a chill way to make margins while chilling on a beach. I no more wanted to belong to the “new rich” as gurus like Tim Ferriss would define the nomadic approach of my previous years.

I started wanting a business that doesn’t create a perception of value. One that creates real, absolute, measurable change for better.

I started feeling such a business, with its clarity, search for inner truth and a solid model, the right focus and enough agility can not only navigate the times of change, but simple become immune to luck.

Now I myself needed to be immune to luck. Anyone can build a business that makes some money. But if you go to zero, even below zero like I was now — can you build from there again, and stronger?

Bouncing from a low point is hard. Bouncing from below zero without debt or investment, turns out incredibly hard. It would have taken us another 2 years of mad adventures, and sometimes insane push but we did make everyone whole (skipping only those who went straight to threatening us with legal/collections without legal grounds to actually do so.. which is something we unfortunately just passed down from our clients who did the same to us).

All of this, however, amounted to quite a lot of experience and research which I could now deeply review and share. I started posting online about some of it.

The Book

At one point, a friend who after a 9 figure exit from his company shifted to personal development and hosting leadership coaching retreats said I must write a book.

He event sent me a book on writing books — asked me to read it and write all this knowledge in such a format.

You must understand that I’m the most “digital” person I can be. Ever since I sold and gave away my things when leaving Silicon Valley back in 2015, I never liked having objects I don’t need. Electronics for work, instruments for music, some furniture, that’s all.

All my notes, media, books, everything has been digital — allowing me to freely move around the world.

This is to say, not only did I not ready physical books (I read Kindle mostly), I thought no one really reads them anymore.

But the idea was compelling.

So I read a book on writing books… and challenged myself to write my own.

Except, I wanted to do it my own style: write it in just one month and finish first draft before Davos next year. I had plenty of learnings, notes, hands on experience building AI and ML systems for years and at that time, for quite a few months, I had been interviewing people asking them how are they thinking about innovation, transformation and the coming Age of AI.

I had the material — just not organized.

Our friends offered their incredible lake house (in winter, so perfect quiet and nobody around) for the writing.

She soon had to leave to NYC to take care of her business, but I stayed in the lake house, working and writing.

I generally find it easy to write, I just flow. But this was different. I had enough material for 10 books perhaps. I started by simply learning that many many leaders would simply say “Innovation is… bullshit”. And here I was, on a quest to go very real, wrestling with corporate language and ambiguous terms. The journey ahead was daunting.

Did I make it to finish the book manuscript in 30 days?

More on this in my next post — 2024: Sticking the landing

Meanwhile:

We went to Poland… and got a horse.

My parents had a special way to say they want to see us more — they were gifted a beautiful competition jumping horse (they’re known for being great with animals and this one’s owner had just sadly passed, so a new home was needed). They decided it would make a great wedding gift for us.

Also a hint to get a place close enough to them I’m sure.

Larrisa AKA Lara, an incredibly beautiful gift.

We got a horse to culminate 2023.

Which later gave us a baby… so we now have two horses.

And my parent’s plan did work out — we spent more and more time with them, not just for the horses, but the horses do connect. This was real.

But more on this, also, later.

B is for Birth. S is for Symbiosis.

All in all. Despite the bad news, an EPIC year.

I realized something though — there is a dualism in how I had been perceiving the world.

As I was reviewing the photo gallery on my phone I found many memes that would comment on the year in negative light.

Despite the engagement, eloped wedding, many great travels, finding land for the future, even receiving a gift of horse… I think my mind was still very anxious not noticing all the amazing moments.

Despite the engagement, eloped wedding, many great travels, finding land for the future, even receiving a gift of horse… I think my mind was still very anxious not noticing all the amazing moments.

Life needs zooming out. I took a note of that.

While I did need to liquidate the UK firm under immense pressure, I did manage to navigate the times and escape full bankruptcy — while a new life was being built step by step. And out of the “death” of my 2021, a new me was being born.

At the core of my focus was now the increasing realization of my new purpose: symbiosis. And that my new company Future Works is the perfect accelerant for such symbiosis to happen — both in my life, and the inner workings of our clients and eventually, perhaps in the world.

Lesson (enhanced): B is for Birth. S is for Symbiosis… And BS is there to be managed.

Did it all work out? Sometimes sticking the landing after a long jump is not easy…

Next up: 2024: Sticking the landing.

In this series:

• 2024: Sticking the landing. — coming next
• 2023: B is not for Bankruptcy. S is for… — this one.
• 2022: How I met your mother.
• 2021 Almanac: 7 Sins and my own Death.
• 2020 Almanac: Hard reset.
• 2019 Almanac: Surface of the wind.
• 2018 Almanac: States of Flow. (Three lessons!)
• 2017 Almanac: 30 Wonders of The Modern World & On 600,000 dollars, 200,000 miles, 5 startups, 3 hacks, 2 shamans and one future — which doesn’t exist.
• 2016 Almanac: Microdosing acid, launching startups, moonlighting for the future, overthinking the past. Finding a hack to happiness.