Paul Wan

I've founded twice in finance — one of the hardest industries in which to start anything. After a decade on the sell side and a PM seat, I stepped off the institutional track and spent the next 5+ years as Founder, CIO, and Head of Alternative Investments. First came a hedge-fund allocation practice serving family offices; then an asset management firm I co-founded and took through SFC licensing as its Responsible Officer, building compliance, operations, and a team from a blank page. What began as a Private Equity and Real Estate shop grew into a Multi-strategy Alternative Investments platform as I brought my own hedge-fund business onto it and onboarded a fixed-income team — zero to one, then one to many. No accelerator, no playbook; just the unglamorous work of turning ideas into firms that regulators would license and sophisticated clients would trust. And I'm building still, though not a company this time: armed with undergraduate C++ and a beginner's Python course, I've taught myself agentic-AI development and now run an investment platform of my own design. Just as valuable to founders: I've spent years as the capital on the other side of the table. As an allocator for family offices, I ran due diligence on 100+ fund managers — and a fund pitch is a business pitch: I was underwriting the team, the edge, the operational spine, and whether the firm itself would survive, before allocating capital I could pull the moment execution slipped. Money with a redemption right is the most impatient money in finance, and learning what keeps it in the room teaches you exactly how professional capital separates a fundable operation from a good story. Add a 15+ year with institutions — ten as a sell-side analyst, five inside hedge funds as analyst and PM — spent dissecting why businesses win or fail, and you get what investors think but rarely say out loud: where your model breaks, what your numbers really signal, which narrative raises money and which quietly kills the meeting. If you're building in fintech or asset management, raising from family offices or LPs, or leaving a corporate career to found something of your own, I've walked that road — and sat across the table from a hundred-plus teams pitching for capital.