📸 Ancient Sumer (modern-day Iraq) around ~3000 BCE celebrated ‘gala priests’, people assigned male at birth who lived as women… seen as sacred in rituals.

Before the parades, there was resistance. Before rights, there was erasure (which continues). And this matters today more than ever.

🌎 Sexual & gender minorities existed - and were celebrated - long before the West entered our story. But often empire rewrote our past. Colonialism tried to erase entire cosmologies of queerness.

🧱 Queer history is world history - it has always been about civil disobedience, joy, uprising… about refusing to disappear.

🔊 To paraphrase a quote echoed by Marsha P. Johnson, Nelson Mandela, and Maya Angelou:

“None of us are free until all of us are free”

We celebrate movements after the fact - once they’re safe enough to sell. But every liberation is entangled. From Palestine to the Congo, from Sudan to our streets.

Queerness can’t be just about individual visibility, it must be about solidarity too. 🏳️‍⚧️ P.S. Londoners better be at Trans Pride this weekend.

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👑 As a reminder of what empire took, and what migration has given back in return. Last year a UK immigration white paper, marketed as “control”, was really a desperate attempt by a faltering Labour Party to lure voters drifting towards tech-enabled fascism.

🦅 Then we have the US… saying upfront for the confused at the back, “no one is illegal on stolen land.” Colonialism is an interesting thought experiment for those who try to justify it. ICE is being empowered to dictate “who looks native” by ironically arresting, killing, and deporting people of colour (many of which are US citizens). Native Americans were the first people, European colonisation opened up global migration without local acknowledgement, conservation, or discussion.

🌏 So why, is migration now bad, or considered detrimental, if not from white-majority nations? In a sophisticated nutshell, it is because of racism. I was fortunate to be an economic migrant living in Hong Kong for the first part of my career… many “white” or “westerners” were considered expats, whereas, domestic workers, and other service workers were “migrants”.

😕 As an ethnically ambigious person, therefore the UN/university brochure face and Benetton first-choice model, I often was confused between the two. “You speak British and sound western”, but “you look like a brown migrant”. Chewing gum and walking, understand migrant diaspora histories… too much for some folk.

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Meanwhile… here’s what the data - and my own life - makes undeniable:

🪬 My migrant grandmother worked in a factory on Warren Street. Two generations later, I studied for my Master’s at UCL, just minutes away. That story isn’t rare, it’s pretty bloody foundational to the UK and many western countries, their economy is dependent on it.

✅ Over 90% of the founders I’ve invested in are migrants or from migrant diaspora communities.

✅ My latest client? A migrant.

✅ The one I’m about to sign? Also migrant.

✅ Several VC funds and family offices I’ve been in discussions with? Led by migrants.

✅ Want harder data? £3.3B annual revenue boost from migrants (CEBR), and higher net migration reduces government borrowing and debt over time (OBR).

✅ The NHS? Held up by migrant hands.

✅ The UK? Built, maintained, and still innovating because of migrants.

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🧿 Then you have incredible folk by Ramzi who runs No Label Ventures. He spoke with me on stage last year: ~50% of US and ~40% of UK unicorns are immigrants. Constraint breeds creativity. Displacement sparks determination. Survival requires innovation.

⛅️ The real threat to the UK, US, and other countries frazzled by families seeking to contribute… isn’t migration. It’s forgetting. Forgetting that empire created the conditions for movement. Forgetting that migration powers our systems, our startups, our futures.

🤗 Forgetting that when those of us with migrant heritage do rise to power, we must remember how we got here… and who is still being shut out (insert all sellout politicians).

📬 If you’re a migrant founder building something bold, know this: I work with and bet on people like you.

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2️⃣ AI is already being deployed in warfare and surveillance - not hypothetically, but now. In places like Palestine, automated systems are used to track civilians and drive military decisions - technologies that are being exported to other regimes globally. (If this is new to you, I recommend “The Palestine Laboratory” by Antony Loewenstein).

💭 This isn’t just a policy issue. It’s a power issue. AI without ethics becomes automation of injustice.

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I invest and advise founders in “AI for Liberation”

And yet... I still believe in AI, I use it everyday, not because it is inevitable... but because it is powerful. And power must be reclaimed.

🛠️ That’s why I invest & advise in what I call “AI for Liberation”:

🧠 Incredible tools like NX10.ME LTD, built by Aidyn Kussainov, using neurometrics to detect early signs of cognitive decline.

🍑 Amazing platforms like Linq, founded by Toby Bradshaw, protecting intimate content and combating revenge porn.

❤️‍🔥 AI is neither saviour nor villain. It is a mirror. Let’s make sure we like what it reflects.

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Systemic questions we should be asking about AI:

• Ownership - are we building tools owned by extractive monopolies, or public / cooperative / mission-locked structured?

• Data rights - are people just raw material, or do they have agency, consent, and economic participation in the value created?

• Labour - does AI concentrate wealth further, or reduce drudgery and expand human freedom?

• Governance - are decisions about AI deployment made in boardrooms, or with democratic oversight?

• Military crossover - is civilian tech quietly (or loudly) feeding warfare and surveillance supply chains?

Because without systemic redesign, “AI for good” just becomes a nice interface on top of the same of power structures.

AI doesn’t just automate tasks. It automates the value of the system(s) it’s embedded in.

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📬 If you’re building, or investing, in AI for healing, justice, or futures we can be proud of - I want in. Let’s build systems worth scaling.

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“🤘🏽I’m now a solo agent, who left Bain to help f*ck up the system… but I’ve got a mortgage, and two cats - who demand high-quality meals & luxury toys.

Since coming back from a wild, grounding trip through South America, one contradiction’s been ringing loud:

1️⃣ How do I stay aligned with purpose — while making good money to tie me over?

🫂 I know I’m not alone in this. Most founders I work with are building something meaningful - but behind the pitch decks and investor calls is a real question:

“Can I make this work without selling my soul?”

❤️‍🔥 This month, I’ve started working with two incredible founders to align their spiritual purpose with strategic power - and tackle real structural pain points (like go-to-market chaos and investor tension).

🧠 This is the first in a new weekly series:
Contradictions: Capital, Chaos, & Culture.
Raw. Unresolved. Useful. (I hope).

📬 Curious about working together?
~ I’ve got space for a couple more aligned founders this quarter.
~ No fluffy mass coaching.
~ No poachy advisory-for-equity games.
~ Just practical, powerful Coaching & Consulting for the Curious.
~ 🛝 in those DMs.”

8 months later? Of the back of this post I started working with a founder tackling the real contradictions of health data, wellness, and mental clarity… 8 months later we’ve renewed our contract, and another renewal is imminent.

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SO, how do we balance purpose and payment?

In our current system, wages for time and skillset is the grounding nature for the majority of the working population.

Do alternatives exist? Sure, but implementing them is a different story.

1. Solidarity Logic ~ commons-based / gift economy

Core claim: value isn’t primarily a commmodity. It’s a relationship.

• People contribute because they belong, care, and share responsiblity.

• Distribution happens through mutual aid, reciprocity, and communal norms, not price.

Community kitchens? Open-source? Community land trusts? Cooperative care?

✅ Creates belonging, resilience, anti-market society based ethics.
⚠️ Creates informal coercion, “who contributes more” dynamics.


2. Citizenship Logic ~ universal basic income

Core claim: existence entitles you to survival - income is a right, not earned.

• Detached survival from labour entirely.

• Markets can exist, but the concept of work-to-live is removed.

✅ Creates freedom, experimentation, bargaining power.
⚠️ Creates a patch for capitalism, not true transformation of systems.

3. Post-Scarcity Logic ~ post-work / automation divident

Core claim: the wage system is historically specific, it is not sacred.

• If machines produce most value, labour should stop being central.

• This means…

  • a shorter working week,

  • public ownership of automation,

  • large-scale leisure/culture/care as the “real economy”,

  • income via automation dividend, not jobs.

✅ Creates long-term horizon, an AI future, dignity beyond productivity.
⚠️ Creates need for massive redistribution, cultural shift: “no work = worth”.


There are a few more classic ones I could get into… e.g. market socialism and cooperatives (democracy logic), or collective ownership (property logic)… but I will pause for now.

Is purpose vs. paycheck a contradiction resolvable in our current economic system?

How can we test alternatives?

Thriving while Burning (TWB) is the opposite of perfection, what’s your approach to TWB with #1 contradiction?

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