Opening a firm is mostly listening. In the last eight weeks, three patterns from family-office conversations in Wan Chai stood out.
One — AI is a procurement problem, not an engineering problem. Most principals don’t need another model. They need to know which of their existing vendors will quietly bake AI into next year’s renewal, and what the dependency actually buys. Our advice has been the same each time: ask each vendor for a dated capability roadmap, and compare it against last year’s roadmap. The delta is the signal.
Two — APAC expansion plans are getting smaller and faster. A 12-country plan is now a two-country plan. Singapore plus one. Cost is part of it; capital allocators have shorter patience than they did in 2024. The two-country form factor is more honest, and it gets a board through faster.
Three — “advisory” is doing too much work. When a family office says “advisory,” they mean six different things. The unbundling work — pillar this, mandate that — is half of why we built the firm.
More notes will appear here as we operate. Plain notation, dated, attributable to the firm rather than to people.