Taste, trust, and teleology
The chase
I never thought I would find myself living in San Francisco as a working adult. But if there’s anything I’ve learned these past few years, it’s that almost nothing in life happens quite as you planned. Having now spent a few months here full-time, I’ve learned innumerable amounts about the city, its peculiar ethos, and myself.
Living in San Francisco teaches you strange things about ambition. It is a city of zeitgeists, a place where everyone is gunning to be an exception with everything in a perpetual state of being disrupted. Inordinate amounts of wealth are bestowed on people practically overnight yet the time and bandwidth to spend it never quite arrives.
The city is designed to make everyone feel behind. Nobody feels fully secure; material accomplishment is never the final destination but merely another lap. Like an ouroboros, every seemingly unfathomable summit reached quickly becomes the base for the subsequent ascent. There is no final destination on the other side, no choice but to keep on sprinting forward. While the energy is invigorating and infectious, it leaves little room for reflection: what is it that we are running towards? Day by day, whether we acknowledge it or not, we are building our collective future: are we creating a world we want to inhabit? Riding in a Waymo trailing behind another Waymo whilst driving past the countless AI billboards speaking an esoteric tech language only a select few understand, the city can feel eerily unhuman at times.
When you hear the term agentic payments, you likely imagine a world where humans have been written out of the equation. Yet surprisingly, Natural’s core mission is profoundly human, with an impact that stretches far beyond Silicon Valley.
A history of trust
I have always been fascinated by history, anthropology, and the peculiarities of human behavior. When you zoom out, everything that happens can be traced back to underlying patterns; social infrastructure does not emerge from a vacuum.
The exchange of money has always been predicated on trust. Early in human history, people maintained physical tallies of what was paid and owed. As transactions grew, individual memory stopped scaling. In response, we adopted objects as tradeable tokens, then coins, then paper backed by metal, with each abstraction trading intimacy for scale and demanding more trust than the last. Payments infrastructure has always been social infrastructure. It encodes who we are willing to trust, on what terms, and what happens when that trust breaks. The next abstraction is already here: trusting agents to transact on our behalf.
Building infrastructure for how value moves between agents is a deeply human project. Kahlil's latest memo makes this clear: as barriers to trade fall, comparative advantage gives way to absolute advantage. For most of history, the absolute best was inaccessible to most, gated by cost, geography, language, knowledge, and currency; agents remove these barriers. In a world where the best service provider might be an agent, publicly accessible to anyone, everyone can have the best. That is the radical humanism at the heart of Natural: democratizing excellence.
For businesses, payments infrastructure has always meant fragmentation, with different rails, settlement behaviors, workflows, and compliance environments each demanding their own bespoke integration. Natural collapses that fragmentation into a single unified layer, empowering businesses to grow and expand their impact without having to re-architect every time they scale. When that complexity dissipates, ambition is no longer bottlenecked by infrastructure and growth becomes natural. Like the electrical circuits behind switching the lights on, the best payments product is the one that you don’t have to think about twice.
This same fascination with human behavior is what originally drew me to marketing, a discipline built upon the profound ability to shape collective belief. Luxury marketing figured this out long ago: a suitcase is just a suitcase until enough people have been sold on the belief that it represents something more, at which point the belief, the identity it is associated with, becomes more real and palpable than the suitcase itself. Most people don’t watch the Olympics to study athletic technique and biomechanics. Rather, billions tune in to marvel at the frontiers of what the human body is capable of, to feel the deep viscerality of witnessing years of blood, sweat, and tears distilled into a single performance. The same is true of technology: humans are not moved by lines of code or raw technical precision but by the immense gravitas of what frontier technologies can unlock in our own lives. Storytelling is fundamentally an act of translating abstract capability to human stakes, and possibility to belief. Marketing is, in a sense, building the teleological rails that belief moves on.
Seeing myself seeing
Long before my foray into the world of business and tech marketing, I have always had a strong penchant for music and art. I spent many years as a classical harpist. Getting to witness classical performances from both inside the ensemble and out, I was reminded time and again how miraculous it is for a room of strangers to unite for a shared experience with an emotional resonance that outlasts the final note for years thereafter. I am drawn to modern art for the same reason. It privileges evocation over correctness, the magic of each work living in the subtleties each viewer deliberately chooses to notice. Recently, while sitting inside James Turrell's sixteen-meter skyspace in Aarhus, Denmark, I stared up at the oculus, watching as the sky appeared to change shade as the colored lights shifted along the interior walls. During that hour of pure meditative stillness, I felt connected not only to the hundreds of strangers around me fixated on this same spectacle, but to human beings across millennia who gazed up at the star-studded skies and marveled. Turrell describes perception as his real medium; the real subject is you, seeing yourself seeing.
I believe the best marketing should aim to captivate people in a similar fashion. People consume hundreds of brand messages and pieces of content every day but few make a lasting impression meaningful enough to inspire behavioral action. When marketing works, it doesn’t feel like persuasion: it feels natural.
I want to feel that way at work, too: attuned to those around me, inspired, swept up in something much larger than myself. More than anything, I have been seeking a place where I could express my truest thoughts and ideas without fear. I've been described by many of my past managers as unapologetically myself, for better or for worse. There have been times I wished I could conceal my convictions, do exactly as I was told, collect the gold star, and carry on. Unfortunately, that is simply not who I am or want to be.
Like many others now in the startup scene, I was a high school debater, traveling around the country with a portable table, arguing questions of real societal consequence at lightning speeds before I was even old enough to be touched by the implications. Beyond building immense mental fortitude, debate teaches you to hold two opposing stances at once and defend either with full confidence, to embrace incomplete information and uncertainty as the norm. It also teaches fierce prioritization: you learn the importance of being able to kill your darlings in the middle of a round and how to choose between imperfect options well enough and fast enough, with unwavering conviction. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it trains you to fall repeatedly with grace, but to come back stronger each time. As AI increasingly absorbs technical work, the more valuable these skills become: reading a room quickly, thinking on your feet even as the world shifts overnight, and articulating a bold vision of the future before anyone else can see it.
Many people are overwhelmingly driven by a desire for consensus, outsourcing intuition to others and to chatbots, widening the distance between what they actually think and what they are willing to stake their name on. I have met enough people to see that this is the complete opposite of the type of person that Natural attracts. At Natural, there is a culture of truth-seeking, alongside the understanding that sometimes the truth has nothing to do with the facts. On the first day of my work trial, I told Walt that I don’t think the assignment I was given should be my priority. Instead of pushback, I was met with curiosity and challenged to sharpen my thinking. Everyone here operates with admirable humility. In a space that is still so new, no one pretends to know all the answers but chases after them with tenacity.
I vividly remember reading what Chika wrote in his blog post about wanting to be surrounded by people who carry a winner's mentality whilst being kind and having fun. Even during my short work trial, every member of the team reached out to get to know me personally. People offered me hours out of their busy days to teach me new concepts or help riff on my half-baked ideas. It’s clear that we’re all in this together— every win is a shared win. Humility, reflexivity, and kindness are my deepest values, and I want to work somewhere that would never ask me to compromise them.
On the last day of my work trial, I asked Kahlil how he thinks about evaluating the work people do. He told me that everyone here treats their work with the care they would if it were their life's work. At Natural, it is easy to see that quality is fractal, and every person is indispensable.
That same conversation, I told him about my dream of founding a company one day. Funny enough, I never once imagined being associated with the archetypical founder trope that’s become so deeply entrenched in the narrative of this city. Yet there is an undeniable allure to having that level of ownership, about being able to will your private vision into existence, detail by detail. My own thing might not be B2B SaaS; it might well be a consumer brand, or the small plates farm-to-table restaurant I have always dreamed of. Whatever it is, nothing fulfills me more than bringing something to life that delights real people, changing the way they work, live, and think. Building at Natural is the closest I can get to that feeling while getting the opportunity to learn an enormous amount from the people around me. I am excited to take full ownership of every process and its outcomes; here, nothing gets done purely for the sake of it, and every little thing matters.
Function and form
In a place and industry that overwhelmingly values function over form, I believe beauty is deeply underrated. Beauty not only widens the ambit of human appreciation but encourages cooperation. The creation and preservation of beauty derives from accumulated lived experience, taste, and skill, along with the willingness of individuals to devote themselves to something greater. From the moment I discovered the company on my X feed, Natural struck me as a place that deeply understands the importance of both: every surface is thoughtfully and beautifully constructed, from the light-filled office to the visual system to the product interface itself. That level of care and attention is representative of the company’s ethos; the belief that how something feels inextricably shapes how it’s used, and that details compound.
As for what I am actually building: agent marketing is largely uncharted territory, which is precisely what excites me. Marketing influences action by inspiring an affective, human reaction. What happens when the audience is no longer entirely human? Can we teach agents the values, taste, and instincts that humans have spent millennia evolving? Is it possible for an agent to be overwhelmed by emotion, and to act on it? I recently came across an interview with one of my favourite filmmakers Wong Kar Wai. When asked about the role of AI in filmmaking, he asks, "AI can replicate, but can it yearn? Can an algorithm understand the weight of a glance between two people who can't express their feelings? Can code capture the way memory distorts and reshapes our past?" While I don't think we have the answers yet, I think tackling these inquiries will be one of the greatest pedagogical projects of our time.
The practical shape of my work feels daunting but invigorating: build a compelling narrative around a category many people do not fully understand yet, attract the right audiences, both agent and human, and ensure such an incredible product reaches the businesses and people that will benefit from it most.
Agentic commerce is not an if but a when. The economy as we know it is growing at the edges and changing by orders of magnitude, every single second. Moving value between financial actors is the infrastructure civilizations have always been built on and an everyday phenomenon that touches every single person. I am exhilarated by the opportunity to help write this next chapter; it all feels like divine timing.
The writing is on the wall, it is my greatest honor to be here. Onwards and upwards!
If this sounds like your kind of challenge, we're hiring. You can also find me on LinkedIn.
