HELIOTROPE

Helping founders turn toward what matters

Heliotrope is an advisory and investment firm.

We work with a small number of founders, sometimes before they've even decided to start a company.

The work looks different for everyone. We can't promise to give you the right answers. But we can promise to ask you the right questions.

The categories are artificial. We don't separate personal from professional. It's all the same system.

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In 2017, a team at Google published a paper that would reshape how the world thought about intelligence.

They called it "Attention Is All You Need."

Within a few years, the phrase became the implicit thesis of an entire economy. Capture attention. Monetize attention. Attention is the scarce resource.

But magicians have always known something the attention economy missed:

You can look directly at something and still not see it.

Attention is a mechanism. It can be directed, captured, hijacked.

Perception is a medium. It's not a tool you use — it's the water you swim in.

The greatest misdirection isn't getting someone to look left while you move right. It's getting someone to look directly at the truth and construct a fiction around it.

I became the youngest member of the Magic Castle at thirteen. For a decade, I studied how to make people look one place while the real move happened somewhere else.

What I didn't understand until later:
The hardest audience to perform for is yourself.

The most sophisticated misdirection I ever witnessed wasn't on stage. It was watching a brilliant founder explain, with total conviction, why their company was on track — while every signal said otherwise. It was seeing an investor articulate a thesis that perfectly justified a position they'd already taken. It was noticing an otherwise smiley person believe their relationship was healthy when they knew it wasn't.

I've been each of these people.

We are all performing a magic show for an audience of one.

When I work with a founder, I'm not listening to the story. I'm watching for the thing underneath — the pattern that's actually running the show.

Everyone's genius is right next to their dysfunction. To see this in another person is useful. To see it in yourself is transformative.

My work is helping founders see the trick they're playing on themselves.

I believe the climate in your skull determines what you see.

What you see determines what you do.

What you do, compounded over decades, determines your life.

The intervention point is perception. Everything else is downstream.

If this resonates, I'm here to help.

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