Most Asian founders who list close to home leave 75 to 90 percent of their valuation behind. Same company. Same earnings. Different market doing the pricing.
That is the thesis Flywheel Financial Strategy runs on today. Getting to it took most of the decade.
We began in 2016 in a Hong Kong warehouse stacked with documents, doing asset allocation. The licences came after. Then several market cycles, each one moving us somewhere we had not planned to go. Cross-border listings became the work because that is where the gap turned out to be widest.
The target has held. 10x10x10x10. Four tenfold steps to one trillion dollars. We named the formula partway through, years after we had started climbing it. Two steps are behind us: four public listings under our roof, and more than twenty founders who have run the process with us.
On 19 August we marked the decade in Hangzhou. Close to 40 founders and operators came from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. The people on stage were our own founding team and core partners, each walking through a listing they had run themselves. That was the design of the room.
Here is the part most advisory firms will not match: We invest. When a company convinces us, our own money goes in and we take the ride the founder takes. Berkshire built an industrial-financial engine on that alignment. We are building the Asian one.
Several of the founders in that room signed with us this week. That work begins now.
Two steps down. Two to go. The second decade starts now.