We will likely look back and realize that 2025 was a meaningful inflection year for venture building, investing, and the future of finance.

Not because one technology won, but because the pace of change crossed a threshold.

I did not set out to build a public point of view as for most of my career as I’ve privately worked helping institutions navigate growth and innovation before it became obvious or comfortable.

What changed is speed.

AI, programmable finance, and new infrastructure are moving faster than traditional institutional decision making can absorb. So I’ve decided to share how I’m thinking while applying these learnings in real time.

Sharing in public, while the thinking is still evolving, is what BETA means.

Let’s dive in.

The future of finance is being shaped by two forces: AI compressing decisions and Ethereum programming capital.

AI is collapsing decision cycles from quarters to minutes.
Ethereum is turning finance into software.

Together, they are reshaping how capital is:

This is not incremental change.

It is a new financial operating system emerging in real time.

Traditional institutions were built for a world where:

That order has inverted.

Today:

AI compresses execution timelines.
Ethereum enables programmable settlement, embedded compliance, and institutional coordination at the protocol layer.

Recently, I co-created Highline Beta ETH AI with Dima Buterin, focused on the future of finance at the intersection of traditional finance, AI, and Ethereum.

This work does not sit outside the system.
It sits inside institutional reality, where CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, and boards are already being forced to adapt.

Takeaway: The opportunity is not speculation. The opportunity is redesigning how capital is deployed, governed, and compounded through venture building and growth innovation.

I’ve spent over 26 years as a serial tech entrepreneur, venture investor, and corporate-startup innovation expert.

I’ve made over 80 early stage investments, largely at the pre-seed stage, with 12 meaningful exits. But more importantly, I’ve spent decades close to execution, learning how capital and venture building behaves when theory meets reality.

My journey started in the late 1990s at McGill University, where I studied behavioural economics, finance, money and banking. What fascinated me early was not just markets, but how people and institutions behave around money, incentives, and risk.

At the time, there were no accelerators or incubators. I was deeply involved in building early entrepreneurial ecosystems, which shaped how I think about zero to one venture creation.

Over time, I learned that the most durable outcomes happen when early capital, venture building, and institutional distribution align.

That belief led me to found Highline VC and later co-found Highline Beta with Benjamin Yoskovitz, built around a non consensus idea: institutions learn faster when they build, not just invest beyond the core.

Since 2016, Highline Beta has operated as a corporate venture studio and institutionally backed pre-seed investor, working closely with leading enterprises to build, fund, and scale new ventures.

Takeaway: I sit at the intersection of capital allocation, venture building, and institutional execution, where the future of finance is now being designed, tested, and scaled.

Most financial insight is shared after outcomes are known.

Investment memos are cleaned up.
Uncertainty is removed.
Narratives are retrofitted.

That is not how CIOs actually operate.

In practice, especially heading into 2026 and beyond:

Family offices and financial institutions are not asking for more exposure to “crypto” or “AI.”

They are asking:

Increasingly, corporate venturing is no longer about optionality or experimentation. It is becoming the primary way institutions learn, adapt, and place informed bets while the infrastructure is still forming. Venture studios, not traditional committees, are where strategy meets execution under uncertainty.

Takeaway: Capital allocation is becoming a learning system. Corporate venturing is a key interface between uncertainty and execution.

Ethereum is not interesting because of price.

It matters because it is becoming financial middleware.

Ethereum is shifting finance from static systems to programmable infrastructure, where capital, policy, and execution increasingly live in software.

It enables:

This is infrastructure quietly replacing legacy rails.

From a CIO lens, the significance is not exposure.
It is learning velocity.

Ethereum allows institutions to:

This is why Ethereum increasingly shows up inside venture studios, innovation programs, and institutional pilots, not just portfolios.

It is where institutions learn by building, not theorizing.

Takeaway: The common mistake is treating ETH purely as an asset. The real opportunity is using Ethereum as infrastructure for venture building, adaptive capital allocation, and institutional learning before consensus forms.

The next phase is execution.

We’re preparing to launch our Future of Finance 2026 report, bring together CIOs and investors at an upcoming VNTR investor roundtable, and host a private dinner series across several global ecosystems where institutional finance is already evolving.

I’ll share what I’m learning as it happens.