Before I ever published fiction, I built a career in the technology world doing one thing exceptionally well: putting two organizations together that had every reason to distrust each other, and making the partnership hold. My clients ranged across thirty-five industries. The companies were household names — Microsoft, IBM, HBO, Amazon — and the work was featured in Fortune, Inc., Entrepreneur, and the Economist.
I founded Business Marketing Group at twenty-seven. No business degree, no roadmap, a single parent in my background and a great deal to prove. Over the years that followed, the firm helped raise over three hundred million dollars for clients. People assume the lesson there is about negotiation tactics. It is not. The lesson is that an alliance is a moral structure before it is a financial one. The terms only hold if the character underneath them holds.
In 2021 I co-founded Incluud, a software firm with an intentionally outsized goal — to change FinTech by reaching every customer in the world. Starting a company in my fifties, after everything else, surprises people. It does not surprise me. The same instinct that made me good at partnerships at twenty-seven is the one driving Incluud now: find the overlooked party, build something that includes them, and refuse to accept that the way things are is the way they must stay.
If there is one thing three decades across that many industries taught me, it is that expertise travels. The specifics of FinTech are not the specifics of enterprise software or government economic summits. But the underlying work — earn trust, structure it honestly, deliver more than you promised — is the same in every room I have ever walked into.