What I learnt this week
Gold hits record volumes, a crisis as a catalyst, the 50/1 rule, community beats vanity, suppliers are partners, and friends of Sarwa in the broader investing ecosystem.
Founder to Founder talk: Crisis as a Catalyst
It’s always valuable to talk to founders, but it’s particularly powerful when they have experience and share mistakes and high stakes moments that went wrong. I connected with a founder leading a $20m+ ARR business. What stood out:
Production failures forge teams: A day-long outage and a regulatory fine became a defining moment. “We were a bunch of people, then we became a team that day.”
Ownership mindset: The founder took full accountability even without a tech background, transforming how he engaged with infrastructure going forward.
Paranoia as fuel: Post-crisis paranoia, though exhausting, raised standards and instilled urgency and accountability.
Speed and pain tolerance as advantages: Every constraint, whether from macroeconomics, regulation, or tech failure, was used as a forcing function to adapt, learn faster, and build profitable businesses.
Founder-to-founder depth: Real value in this chat comes from honesty, shared scars. Not posturing, but pattern recognition.
This is something I’ve felt since we started Sarwa. In fintech, it’s never just about growth and we’re very grounded in creating a robust stable platform in parallel.
Sarwa is part of a much greater toolkit
I’ve been talking to more customers to get to know them better and get honest feedback on what’s working and what’s clunky. One surprising thing that came up is also how many other tools and content pieces they are consuming and using as part of their trading and investing activity. Here are some that often come up outside Sarwa:
Technicals & Charting:
TradingView - Core platform for multi-asset charting with custom alerts
Research & fundamentals:
Morningstar - Deep valuation, moat analysis, dividend strength.
Seeking Alpha - Bull/bear takes, earnings previews, dividend portfolios.
Podcasts / YouTube
All-In Podcast – Broad investor view on tech, markets, and geopolitics.
Diaries of A CEO – Founder stories + life/business lessons. For example Cathie Wood’s top 10 holdings picks were covered recently and drew inspiration.
We win by coexisting with and not replacing those workflows.
Don’t play the customer
Most people treat suppliers backwards. They play the customer role and expect to be courted. Luckily, that’s created a low bar and an opportunity for us.
I had lunch with John, Zubair, and Raj from the Alpaca team in Lisbon this week. We exchanged notes, top requests, market trends. London Stock Exchange is coming to Sarwa this year as part of global expansion (UAE stock trading to follow, one of the most requested features). Fully paid securities lending is also on the way.
But the key insight is this:
Treat your partners like allies, not vendors. Build long-term, win-win relationships and they’ll go further for you than any contract ever could.
We’ve also learned that Sarwa is now the partner with the most feature requests delivered.
We bet on Alpaca early, when others went with larger incumbents, because we saw innovation, speed, and a global mindset. They’re remote too. That bet has paid off tremendously.
Market trend I’m watching: Gold is surging
People are buying gold in bulk since the geopolitical escalation in the Middle East. Stocks, crypto, options trading are active but commodities driven by gold are on another level, reaching unprecedented levels of activity on our platform.
Wow Moments
Creating wow moments: we launched a slack channel #project-wow. A client experience initiative focused on small, personal gestures that leave a lasting impact. Every client-facing team member has a budget to surprise clients with experiences they’ll remember.
80/20 (or really, 64/4… 50/1)
Wealth is heavily concentrated. Every time we dig into segmentation, the pattern holds. The top 1% of clients drive 50% of assets.The bottom 50% bring in just 1%. These groups need very different levels of service, communication, and product thinking. More work to be done there.
Community > Vanity
It’s easy to chase views, followers, and surface-level engagement. But what actually moves the needle is depth. The right hundred people paying attention is worth more than a million impressions from people who will never act on it (“100 true fans”).
Offline also matters more than people think - webinars, events, 1:1s. That’s where we build trust and turn followers into allies.
Content, when done right, isn’t about virality. It’s giving people something useful to think about. That’s the mindset behind our work.
On Linkedin
Interesting take from a great respected VC Hasan Haidar on the case behind taking VC money. The comment section reinforces & debates this concept. There is so much room to better understand the economics of VC, and more founders are speaking up on alternatives than the classic Seed > Series A > Series B path.
