Presently, I am the CIO and owner of independent investment firm SC Capital Management LLC. My side project is Selflet.ai
I have over 20 years of media, finance and early-stage investing experience on the frontiers of emerging trends, starting with oil & gas finance in Russia in the 1990s. I publish niche media sites as a way to test theories and explore themes I feel are important. These include Synthetic.com (emerging synthetic biology industry) CubaJournal.co and High.co (cannabis industry). Previously, I was the CEO of Instra Corp. (New Zealand), a digital marketing company, and CEO of dotRIP Ltd, a digital memorial startup and Instra holding company that was sold to Demand Media. LiquidStaking.com is a research-and-tools site for crypto investors that explains staking and liquid staking (and the fast-moving ETF/regulatory context around it) in a practical, decision-oriented way.
I am perpetually finalizing Earth Tycoon, an autobiographical novel. The novel is set in a variety of countries but focuses on the human side of my experience running a mining company in the Jordanian desert that was financed by the late Forbes-list industrialist, Jerry Zucker. I created a narrative video of one chapter of my novel.
Research interests: "Homeostatic Drive as Policy Precision: Understanding Biological Motivation Through Large Language Model Inference Architecture" This paper proposes that biological motivation works like LLM inference: thirst doesn't encode "drink water"—it narrows your behavioral distribution toward water-seeking, like a system prompt constraining output. Homeostatic equilibrium = high temperature (broad sampling); disruption = low temperature (focused). Reward is a separate training signal, not part of the drive. The framework extends transformer-brain alignment findings from language to embodied cognition and generates testable predictions.
I'm also a rum judge.
I studied developing country economics in graduate school (MA Economics) and I have BA in English.