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When I moved from investing in AI startups to co-founding Promenaut, I expected the product, the hiring, and the fundraising to fill my week – and they do. But what surprised me was how much of the job comes down to people: the customers we work alongside, the partners who help us reach them, a team split across London and New York, and the co-founder I’m building it all with.
At Salesforce Ventures we backed AI companies including Writer AI, Sixfold and Anthropic. It was clear that although the models are remarkably capable, there was a gap: AI was making individuals faster, but large organisations were still struggling to convert that raw performance into measurable returns. This problem sat right between people and technology. I originally studied theology, and I’ve always been drawn to the places where different worlds meet. I could see what was missing, and I wanted to build it.
That’s where Promenaut comes in. It unites people and AI agents as one governed hybrid workforce, so that the gains from AI add up across the whole organisation instead of staying with individuals. The technology matters, but much of the challenge is human, because it asks teams to rethink how they work together.
Personally, the shift from investor to operator has been bigger than I expected. As an investor you observe and advise; as an operator you push. Every day is about forward momentum: decisions made, things moving, nothing stalling.
Much of my day focuses on turning early conversations into something concrete. It starts at around 6am in New York, catching up with our London team, who are already well into their day. We try to sync as a team once a day, so everyone is on the same page and knows what everyone else has been working on.
From there it might be a complex contract negotiation, a deal with a partner or a customer call. I keep afternoons for meeting people in person wherever I can: customers, investors, potential hires.
Those customer conversations are the part of the job I find most exciting: the moment it clicks that they can reinvent how work gets done, rather than simply automating it faster.
Promenaut is built for regulated enterprises, starting with financial services, an industry where change depends on trust, and trust takes time to earn. Our relationship with HSBC grew into a design partnership and an investment, and Promenaut is now in production at the bank in selected, specialised workflows. It’s early, but it shows the approach holds up in one of the most demanding environments there is.
Banks need to be able to stand behind every decision that’s made, which is why, with Promenaut, every action, choice and output an agent produces is visible and accountable, with permissions, audit trails and human oversight built in.
I’m building all of this with Stephen, Promenaut’s CEO and co-founder, and our strengths fit together well.
Stephen has been solving hard technology problems for banks since long before AI was part of the conversation, first at firms like Goldman Sachs and then as the founder of Genesis Global. That history shows up in every customer meeting: he understands what keeps a bank’s leadership up at night and he knows how to solve hard technical problems in regulated environments.
We also run Promenaut the way we’d want our customers to run theirs. Every customer conversation, partner meeting and internal decision feeds back into our knowledge graph, sales and product work hand in hand, and we’re always thinking about how we can build our own processes agentically.
Outside work I’m drawn to people just as much. Most mornings start with Pilates, spin or tennis, then coffee from a local spot. In the evenings it’s industry dinners, or theatre and live music when I can get there.
I used to be on the other side of the table, backing founders as they built their teams. Now I’m doing it myself, and every week brings new people into the story: a bank seeing what’s possible for the first time, a partner coming on board, someone new joining the team. As an investor I’d have watched all of that from a distance. Now my job is to keep it moving.