New York taught me the language of capital. The first language I learned was operational, in the 82nd Airborne. This one was about how risk gets priced, how conviction gets underwritten, and how an idea about the future of defense technology becomes a firm with clients and obligations.
It’s the base in the literal sense. The other three cities are run from here and reported back to here.
The formative chapter was threat intelligence: analytical work at Recorded Future in Boston, writing about state actors and infrastructure for readers who acted on the conclusions. That set a permanent standard. A claim is worth what it costs the reader to act on it, so it had better be right, sourced, and shorn of adjectives.
Then the firm. I co-founded Forward Horizon Group here, a veteran-led advisory practice built for clients working across the gap this site is about: investors doing diligence on dual-use technology, companies reading their geopolitical exposure, institutions that needed the field in decision-grade terms. Building it meant everything founders mean by the word: the entity, the network, the standards, the payroll.
The problems I work from New York are the capital-side problems. What’s a wartime proof point worth in a peacetime market? Which dual-use claims survive contact with procurement reality? Where should conviction concentrate when the evidence is three time zones away? The answers came from the field. The questions were always asked here first, by people with money at stake.
And the city convenes. The investor and national-security communities overlap in New York in a way they do nowhere else in America; the same week can hold a fund’s investment committee, a veterans’ network dinner, and an off-record briefing. Keeping that network alive is most of the job.