After nearly a decade spent managing narrative on behalf of some of the most prominent venture-backed companies of their generation, in 2025 I left the corporate world behind to build something of my own.
My core thesis was that narrative is capital.
The zeitgeist was starting to coalesce around the idea that narrative is as important to creating value in venture-backed companies as product innovation or operational excellence. The most talented market participants, whether at the founder or investor level, increasingly share a common core competency: the ability to build consensus out of words.
The function I spent my career in, typically labeled on the org chart as "communications," was starting to occupy a space much more nuanced than public relations, but the current set of practitioners were too entrenched in their traditional tradecraft to see the bigger picture of how their work could create the kind of value that can be measured on a balance sheet.
I had never really fit into the neat boxes of a comms IC role, and saw an opportunity to take advantage of this market shift.
I founded Dimes Square Advisory, paying homage to a place that was more narrative than neighborhood while reappropriating the acronym of NYC's ascendant political class for my own deeply capitalistic purposes.
My goal was to serve as an angel advisor to early-stage founders in fintech and crypto, accepting a small cash retainer and equity stake in return for being their ultimate generalist.
Over the course of a year, and after speaking to more than a hundred founders over thousands of hours of Zoom calls and coffee chats, I learned something about my own product. Advice priced by the hour is worth less than advice priced by conviction. I started my career in politics, and when I see a mission or a leader that's irresistible to be close to, it goes against every fiber of my being to charge a toll for ideas that flow so freely in my head. The only way to prove an idea is good is to share it — and once you share one, there are immediate diminishing returns on the next.
So DSA evolved. Not away from advising — toward a higher bar for it.
Today the practice runs on one engine with three outputs. I develop a first-principles view of where finance and commerce are going. I test it with my own capital in the public markets, where the feedback loop is immediate and unforgiving. I publish the reasoning openly. And I work directly with a small number of companies I believe are going to define the next era of finance — not as a vendor selling deliverables, but as the operator in their corner when they face the institutions that decide their future: investors, banks, regulators, press.
The consulting funds the conviction. The conviction sharpens the research. The research proves the judgment that makes the consulting worth paying for. Each output is a different way of putting the same ideas at risk.
I don't know yet what DSA will fully become. But the reasoning lives on the ideas page, in public, before it's ready for the world — and if you're one of the founders or investors it's written for, the door is open.