Founder. Investor. Advisor. Builder.

The sequence

Four chapters. Each one earned before it was offered.

1. 01

   Founder.

   Four companies started. Two acquired, one still trading, one that failed instructively. The scars are load-bearing.

   The first company was a services business that should have been a product. The second was a product that should have been priced twice as high. The third worked. The fourth is the one we still run part of, because it turned out to be the one that mattered.

   Nothing we now say about strategy, pricing, hiring, or fundraising is theoretical. All of it has been paid for.

2. 02

   Investor.

   Partner in a small early-stage fund. Sixty-plus first cheques. A handful of exits. A larger number of honest failures.

   Investing changed how we think about companies. It forces you to look at the shape of a business from outside — at the market, the moat, the sequencing — in a way founders rarely have the time to do. That is the lens we now bring back to the companies we advise.

3. 03

   Advisor.

   Cantillon Advisory was formed to do this work properly — as a practice, not a side of the desk.

   We work across three practices: with governments engineering ecosystems, with founders trying to build companies inside them, and with the boards of the companies that scale. The three inform each other. It is the same problem seen from three altitudes.

   We are a small practice by design. Every engagement is delivered by the principal. Nothing is subcontracted. Nothing is hidden behind a junior team.

4. 04

   Builder.

   The fourth thread runs through all of it. We are an AI-native practice — not because it is fashionable, but because the work now demands it.

   We build the platforms, tools, and growth systems our clients need — with AI as native infrastructure, not a feature added at the end. It is why our government diagnostics ship as working intelligence platforms, why our founder programme includes real systems and not just decks, and why our board work is grounded in the operational reality of shipping software today.

   Advisory firms that do not build lose the right to have an opinion on what should be built. We build.