Beautiful things

I was 13 when I first learned about the beauty of money.

I camped overnight on the concrete sidewalks of Sydney for my first pair of Air Jordan 1s. Bought them for $230. Sold them for double. Then I did it again, and again, until it became a six-figure business while I was in high school. What began as a love of the design and story behind each shoe became a deeper appreciation: that demand, manifested through the flow of money, is what enables beautiful things to exist in the world. I can still feel the heart-thumping rush of running home to find a brown cardboard box at the door - ripping it open with my small hands and sitting there for several minutes, just taking in its intricately carved textures, colours, and curves.

Yuval Noah Harari argues in Sapiens that money is the most successful story humanity has ever told. It is the only belief system that has crossed every cultural, linguistic, and religious boundary in history. Columbus didn't sail because of faith or ideology. He sailed because the Spanish crown funded him—a high-stakes investment to bypass their Portuguese rivals and secure direct access to the Asian spice and silk trades. The discovery of America, like most of the ambitious and world-changing things humans have ever done, was made possible by money moving in the right direction.

We tend to treat money as something vaguely embarrassing—a capitalistic trap that corrupts the purer things in life. I think that gets it backwards. Money is what enables not just the beautiful things but the consequential too. It's what lets a designer spend years obsessing over a single shoe silhouette that brings joy to millions of kids like me. It's what funds rockets, medical research, and every trailblazing new company. It is the invisible infrastructure underneath almost every human decision ever made.

Before joining Natural, I co-founded Mark with my best mate Eason—an AI bookmark designed to help readers gain the full experience of physical reading. After our viral announcement on X, Kahlil reached out. "Would love to chat and help in any way." We hopped on a call and stayed in touch.

A few months later I joined Superpower, a company Kahlil had invested in, though I had no idea at the time. My friend Eric Jubber from Superpower ended up joining Natural. Then I found myself in San Francisco for a school trip and reached out to Kahlil with no particular motive, just to catch up. He invited me to the office.

We caught up on the past year before diving into Natural. Kahlil walked me through how the idea was born, the speed at which things had moved over the past seven months, and the gravity of the problem itself. The future of the internet is one run by agents—software that acts, decides, and transacts autonomously on your behalf. But every payment rail, compliance framework, and piece of financial infrastructure in existence was designed for humans. So where are the rails for a future where the entity spending money isn't a person? I think Kahlil could tell he had me by the size of my smile.

After hearing stories about the team and finally meeting them, I felt equally challenged as I did at home. CLI was the first compliance and regulatory hire at Square, Stripe, and Ramp. Krish led payments at Ramp. Gabby led social at Rhode and Alo. These are people who have shaped the frontier of their fields, now pointed at one of the most important problems in tech. On the last day of my work trial, whether this is good looks or not, I played basketball with a few of the Natural boys before heading out for our team dinner. Despite their accolades, it felt like hanging out with my good mates from high school—cheery, easy to be around, a team you’d want to have dinner with, if you will. This is a kind of culture that's hard to manufacture and easy to feel.

There was an oddly specific moment when I was in the office that felt like magic to me. I sat at my desk in front of Devan's intricately crafted Figma files on a sharp, pixel-perfect Studio Display. Olivia Dean drifted in from a row of Sonos speakers. Rich morning light flooded the room through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Beside me, Devan and Gabby dressed with effortless elegance. Even the smooth hand soap with jojoba beads and rosehip oil felt “Natural”. Every colour, sound, and texture was meant to be there. Clean and raw and strong. Powerful but gentle. Like individually beautiful notes placed together to form a symphony. I felt inspired to do my best work.

Currently, I'm leading a campaign at Natural in collaboration with one of the hottest wearable companies (more on that very soon). But the work I'm most excited about is the longer problem that sits underneath it: what does it look like to bring beautiful design to financial infrastructure? Fintech has historically been cold, dark, and sterile. But design in technology still has so much room to grow—not just tasteful, but culturally resonant world building, the way it's been achieved in hip-hop, sports, and fashion. We're in a unique position to change how a category of technology that will power every layer of our future lives is designed and communicated. That gets me out of bed every morning.

The kid who once camped overnight on the concrete sidewalks of Sydney for a pair of Jordans is now helping build the rails that let money move at the speed of the future.

The right infrastructure doesn't just power transactions—it powers everything that transactions make possible. The next frontier innovation. The next thing that makes a kid sit on his bedroom floor smiling for several minutes.

If this sounds like your kind of challenge, come hang out with us /careers.