Seven months, four continents, five hundred conversations.

The last piece I published here was written in the closing days of last year. Then this page went quiet. Not because I ran out of things to say - rather the opposite. I want to explain the silence, because the reason for it is the story behind most of what I will write next.

‍

On 2 January I got on a plane, and in a sense never really got off. Over the past seven months I have been constantly on the road, meeting more than five hundred family offices, family conglomerates and the entrepreneurs behind them. Singapore, Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, Zurich, Geneva, London, Milan, Mexico City. Different time zones, different languages, and yet, remarkably, the same conversation - one I am still turning over.

‍

The reason for it all: launching Ittikar, the private capital network we have been building within Mondevo Group - a place where families can see each other’s opportunities and invest alongside one another. After twenty years at the head of my own family office and merchant bank, I am convinced that the way families analyse opportunities, invest together and raise capital deserves to be rebuilt from first principles. None of it could be done from behind a desk. Trust in this world is not established over video calls or glossy decks; it is established across a table, over coffee, over dinner, over time. So, I went to the table. Five hundred times.

‍

What I heard in those rooms tells you more about where capital is going than most of what is written about it. We say families think in generations while markets think in quarters. What is less often said is what that costs them - the deals passed on, the fashions ignored, the decades of looking wrong. A patriarch in Jakarta told me he was working on a decision his grandfather had started and his grandson would finish. I met conglomerates in Asia and Latin America whose discipline and patience would humble most institutional investors, and a younger generation, from Jeddah to Guadalajara, asking sharper questions about technology, data and control than most bankers. I filled notebooks. Some of what is in them will end up here.

‍

To those of you who kept checking back and found nothing new - thank you for your patience. The writing resumes now, and it comes back richer for the silence. What I write about will follow what I keep thinking about: private capital and what those conversations taught me, the quiet revolution artificial intelligence is bringing to how families invest, and - because some passions do not pause for any launch - craftsmanship, luxury and the beautiful things that make the journey worthwhile.

‍

It is good to be back.