This is the first of what I hope will be an annual letter. Each January I’ll write one of these — the ventures that shipped, what moved, and the lessons I want to remember next year. Tone-wise, somewhere between a Berkshire Hathaway annual letter (clean, candid, accountable) and a personal essay (specific, willing to say what didn’t work).
Faktorist
We shipped Faktorist v3 — the credit module — in February. By year-end embedded trade credit was live across several markets. The credit module is now the fastest-growing line of the business; it took 18 months from spec to first dollar and most of the year to scale. Slower than I’d hoped, but faster than the previous module at the same stage.
The platform kept growing — more producers, more buyers, more markets — with the credit module pulling retention up. The bottleneck is hiring credit risk staff in Kyiv at the rate the product is demanding.
Made-in-Ukraine
Two more quarterly issues out (N°08 and the autumn issue). The podcast kept its weekly rhythm, and the listeners who come back week after week are the only podcast measure I actually care about. We did not hit the “launch a daily newsletter” goal from last year’s plan. We launched a weekly one instead, and I’m okay with that — daily is a commitment we couldn’t make to the editorial standard.
Notable feature: the agri-export cover story in N°08, which was picked up by European trade publications and opened new advertiser conversations.
FTR
Testnet through the whole year. Mainnet pushed to 2027. The reason is boring and right: we wanted three quarters of clean settlement data on testnet before committing to mainnet parameters. We got that data. We’ll launch on the back of it. Anyone who was hoping for a mainnet pump narrative is reading the wrong project.
The allowlist closed weighted heavily toward Faktorist counterparties (which is what we wanted). Whitepaper v2 dropped in November with revised tokenomics — specifically, a lower network fee, after modeling told us the smaller take rate would not materially change the rewards pool but would materially help adoption.
The book
#EverythingWillBeOK is in its final stretch, in three languages — Italian, English and Ukrainian. Each edition is adapted, not merely translated, because my life exists in three languages.
One thing the book won’t do is end: Chapter 16 will keep writing itself online, as the story keeps happening.
Refereeing
A full UPL season plus international assignments through Referee Abroad. One match I’d like to have back (a controversial late penalty call that the post-match review confirmed was correct, but I’d have read the build-up differently with two seconds more time). Knee held up. Still no plans to step away.
Three lessons I want to remember
One: the right pace for high-stakes infrastructure is slower than the market wants. We pushed FTR mainnet back a year and the world did not end; in fact, almost no one noticed. The people who would have been hurt by a rushed launch — counterparties with real receivables — were the ones who were most relieved by the delay. Build slow for the people you most want to serve.
Two: the second time you do a thing, the cycle time is shorter but the quality bar is higher. The credit module on Faktorist took far less time to ship than the original catalog did. But the bar customers held it to — uptime, reconciliation accuracy, dispute resolution — was much higher because catalog had already taught them what to expect. Re-up your quality target every time you ship a sequel.
Three: the team you trained in 2022 is the team that ships everything from 2024 onwards. We did not lose a single senior person to attrition again this year. The compounding of five years of the same team — same humor, same shorthand, same scar tissue — is the moat I’m proudest of. It’s also the moat I almost lost in March 2022 and didn’t, because we paid people for three months without expecting work. The dividend on that decision is now in its fifth year and shows no sign of slowing.
2027 commitments
Three commitments I’m putting on the record so I can be held to them next January:
FTR mainnet launches in Q3 2027 with at least two real counterparties live at launch. Faktorist credit keeps scaling on clean data. The second book’s draft one is complete by year-end. I do twelve more UPL matches and at least one signature UPL run. The magazine reaches issue N°12.
That’s the plan. Thanks for reading. See you in 2028 with the verdict.