Silos

Maybe it’s just the way my mind works, but I have always been obsessed with silos.

Not the sheet-metal towers that punctuate a Midwestern skyline—the mental walls we build to make sense of a complicated world. They feel comfortable. They give specialists a sandbox with clear edges, a spreadsheet with walls.

Financial markets turned that instinct into an operating philosophy. To manage complexity, we sliced the world ever finer: a fund for New York pre-seed healthcare start-ups, a macro hedge fund that never touches private equity, an oil trader focused on a single grade of crude, an algorithmic market maker concerned only with spreads. In an era when relationships between categories were predictable and stable, that approach worked. You could isolate risk and model the future with yesterday’s correlations.

The world no longer behaves that way.

Volatility now bubbles up from every node at once. Energy shocks ripple into semiconductor supply chains. Advances in AI shift the price of capital for utilities. Conflict in the Red Sea reshapes freight routes and unmoors agricultural hedges. Droughts squeeze insurers’ balance sheets. These forces ignore asset-class boundaries, yet our financial plumbing still treats them as if they exist.

That gap produces mis-priced risk.

For the past year I have been obsessed with closing it. I have worked on breaking the walls between public and private markets, between energy and software, between policy and pricing. I am building systems that track spillovers, flag missed signals, and surface the arbitrage created when the world acts like a web while the market sees a grid.

To pressure-test the idea, I have spoken with market makers on Wall Street, quants who write code that sets prices in nanoseconds, asset managers chasing yield in private markets, bankers structuring cross-border deals, policymakers drafting incentives, and CEOs just trying to keep the lights on. They all sense the same problem: the walls that once helped us manage complexity now blind us to it. In private markets the signal is murkiest, because illiquidity already hides stress fractures. Value is lost not because fundamentals are weak, but because they are read in isolation.

This is more than a thought experiment. It is a design challenge: can we build a financial institution from the ground up that sees across silos? One that models what happens when information crosses domains that are not supposed to talk to each other?

The real world is not siloed.

Our institutions should not be either.

If you are working on the same puzzle—or feel those walls closing in around your own models—I would like to compare notes.