Andreas Afeldt

About

I help people make large, irreversible decisions — about where to put their money, where to put their family, and how to build something that survives contact with reality.

I am Swedish and British, I live in Athens, and I have worked in twenty-four countries. I am not a lawyer and I am not a management consultant by training. I am someone who has built businesses, run them, lost one and rebuilt it, and who now spends his time helping people make large and largely irreversible decisions.

What I actually did

I started dealing at ten, placing advertisements in a local newspaper to buy scrap silver coins, with my mother driving me to strangers' houses so I could make offers with my own money. On my eighteenth birthday I put ten years of savings into a single concentrated bet and lost all of it inside three months. That is still the most useful thing anyone has ever taught me about risk, and it cost me only money.

I spent most of the following decade making a living from games of skill and chance, which paid for a great deal and built nothing. What it did leave me was a collection, assembled slowly out of the winnings, and that collection became a business — one I grew over nearly a decade into a serious operation, and then very nearly lost.

The recovery is the part I would want to be judged on. I got the creditors paid, persuaded the people we owed to keep backing the team rather than call in what they were due, and handed the company to the people running it rather than extracting anything for myself. It is still trading. I walked away with very little, and I would do it the same way again.

What I am doing now

I live in Athens, which I chose deliberately and without any prior connection to the place. I work in investment migration — helping families buy options, mobility and room to breathe — and I advise businesses on operations, deal structure and the unglamorous machinery that decides whether a good idea survives contact with reality.

What I write about

Read the writing