Dear Friends and Partners,

When my first daughter was born in 2023, on the same day as my birthday, everything changed. I began thinking less in quarters and more in generations, and about what it takes to build something durable in a world of increasing financial, geopolitical, and professional uncertainty.

The more I thought about it, the more I came back to a simple question: if so much in life is uncertain, why should the foundations we build carry the same risks?

The answer, I came to believe, was not to eliminate risk. It was to build something more durable around it.

Earlier in my career, I worked inside two of the world’s largest family-owned commodities trading houses. Established in the mid-1800s, they had survived wars, political upheaval, financial crises, and generations of technological change. Nearly two centuries later, they still move the food and energy that sustain the global economy.

That experience changed how I thought about wealth. Enduring value isn’t created only through financial assets on a balance sheet. It’s created by owning, financing, and controlling the physical flows that people and economies depend on: physical goods, productive assets, ‘boring’ businesses, and trusted relationships.

The architecture Melqart is pursuing has appeared across different eras and geographies, often following the same sequence: commerce creates knowledge and trust; capital compounds it.

The Medici began as wool merchants in Florence before building the financial infrastructure that made the Medici Bank one of the most powerful institutions of 15th-century Europe.

Edmond Safra, considered the 20th century’s greatest banker, began his career in his father’s bank in Lebanon, but his early success came as a merchant: trading gold between the Middle East and Europe and, later, coffee in Brazil. He turned that knowledge of physical commerce, trade finance, and arbitrage into the capital and relationships from which he built three successful banks. The institutions came later. The merchant came first.

Lehman Brothers traces its origins to 1844 in Montgomery, Alabama, where it grew into a cotton merchant and factoring business, financing the physical movement of agricultural commodities before evolving into one of the defining financial institutions of the 20th century.

The Wonderful Company built a privately held agricultural enterprise by controlling production assets before developing consumer brands such as Wonderful Pistachios, POM, and Halos that capture the retail margin those assets produce.

In each case, the financial institution or brand empire emerged from physical commerce mastered first. The institution was the consequence of the commerce, not the starting point.

I later moved to the other end of the system, bringing new science and innovations to market. I helped spin out the first commercial application of AI and geospatial technology from Los Alamos National Laboratory, helped lead the commercialization of the first gene-edited fresh produce product to reach U.S. consumers, and helped structure some of the largest agri-biotech deals in the industry.

Again and again, I watched remarkable breakthroughs stall not in the lab, but in the midstream: the sourcing, financing, regulatory pathways, and market access required to turn a discovery into a product people buy.

That is the philosophy behind Melqart.

Melqart is a private merchant house built at the intersection of technology commercialization, physical commodity trade, and permanent capital. We help pioneers bring innovation to market, and we are building the supply chains and capital structures required to finance them.

The ambition is broader than any single venture. It is to build something with substance: a private institution that can own, finance, commercialize, and compound real value over time.

I am not interested in building something quickly for its own sake. I want to build something enduring, with the standards, discretion, and long-term orientation of the great private houses, but designed for the world ahead.

Thank you for being here at the beginning.