There was a point early in my career when I built something I was genuinely proud of.

It was called The Trading Club.

I was working in private banking at the time, and I kept noticing the same thing.

A lot of the business owners I knew were managing significant portfolios, making investment decisions and looking for opportunities…

…but they were mostly doing it separately.

So I thought:

Nothing particularly sophisticated.

Get a group of smart business owners together once a month.

Review portfolios.

Compare investments.

Talk about what they were seeing.

Share deal flow.

Introduce people who could potentially do business together.

So I started building it.

And it worked.

Eventually, around 150 top business leaders were participating in the club.

Every month, people would come together to talk about investments, opportunities and their businesses.

Some of them became clients.

I was managing investment accounts.

The club was creating relationships.

Those relationships were creating business.

And the thing had started to develop a reputation of its own.

For someone relatively early in his career, it felt huge.

I had created something from zero that people actually wanted to be part of.

And that was probably where I made the mistake.

At the beginning, nobody particularly cared about The Trading Club.

Because there wasn't much to care about yet.

There was an idea.

Some meetings.

A lot of work.

A lot of introductions.

A lot of convincing people to show up.

That's the strange thing about building something inside a company.

When the thing is uncertain, you're often given enormous freedom.

Nobody wants to interfere with something that may not work.

Go experiment.

Go figure it out.

Go make the calls.

Go invite the people.

Go create the process.

And if it fails?

Well, it was your project anyway.

But then sometimes it works.

People start showing up.

Clients come in.

Revenue appears.

The brand starts meaning something.

Now everybody understands what you've been building.

And suddenly questions that seemed completely theoretical at the beginning become extremely practical.

I hadn't really thought through any of those questions.

I was too busy building it.

There was an older executive inside the business.

Around 55 years old.

By this point, The Trading Club had become visible enough that the opportunity was pretty obvious.

He created another version.

The Investment Club.

Similar idea.

Same basic opportunity.

And then he asked for the client list.

That client list wasn't just a spreadsheet to me.

It represented months of work.

Relationships.

Conversations.

Trust.

People I had brought into the room.

People who were now doing business with us.

But this was the moment when reality became very clear.

I had created the network.

I had created the concept.

I had built the meetings.

I had helped turn people into clients.

But I didn't control the asset.

Eventually, I was pushed out of the project I had built from scratch.

That hurt.

Probably more than I expected it to.

Not because somebody had copied an idea.

Ideas get copied every day.

It hurt because I had spent all that time behaving like an owner…

without actually being one.

I had ownership in my head. I didn't have ownership on paper.

Those are very different things.

I think ambitious people are especially vulnerable to this.

You're told to:

And I actually think that's mostly good advice.

A huge amount of my career came from doing things before somebody gave me permission to do them.

But there's an important second half to that advice that people don't talk about nearly as much.

If you're going to work like an owner, understand whether you actually own anything.

Because creating value and owning value are two completely different skills.

You can create the product without owning the company.

You can build the audience without owning the distribution.

You can create the client relationships without controlling the client list.

You can build the process without owning the IP.

You can increase the value of somebody else's asset enormously while your own position stays exactly the same.

That doesn't necessarily mean somebody is doing something wrong.

Employees create value for companies. That's the agreement.

Partners create value together.

Platforms help creators build audiences.

Investors provide capital to founders.

There are always different people contributing different things.

The problem begins when your understanding of what you own is different from reality.

That was my mistake.

This is the part I find most interesting looking back.

If somebody had asked me on day one:

I probably would have thought they were massively overcomplicating things.

There were no 150 members.

There wasn't a valuable client network.

There wasn't really anything to fight over.

It was just an idea and a lot of work ahead.

And this happens constantly in startups too.

Two people start building something together.

Nobody wants to have the awkward equity conversation because the company is worth zero.

Someone creates a side project inside a business.

Nobody thinks about who owns the IP because there isn't any meaningful IP yet.

A creator builds an audience entirely on somebody else's platform.

Why worry about an email list when you only have 200 followers?

Then the project works.

Now there are customers.

Revenue.

Distribution.

Data.

Reputation.

Maybe millions of dollars of value.

And suddenly everyone becomes very interested in agreements that nobody cared about when the thing was worthless.

The best time to understand ownership is before there is anything worth owning.

Once the value is obvious, the conversation becomes much harder.

When I eventually started building companies myself, I thought about that experience a lot.

Not because I became obsessed with controlling everything.

You can't build anything meaningful that way.

You need partners.

Employees.

Clients.

Platforms.

Vendors.

People will always have different interests.

But I became much more conscious of the difference between activity and assets.

A meeting is activity.

The relationship created from that meeting might become an asset.

Posting content is activity.

An audience you can reach directly is an asset.

Recruiting candidates is activity.

A proprietary network, data and process built over years can become an asset.

Closing a client is activity.

The trust and reputation that creates the next ten clients is an asset.

That's something I'm very conscious of now while building HiresLink.

Yes, we're helping U.S. companies hire people across Latin America.

That's the visible part.

But underneath that, we're also building something much more valuable over time:

A deeper understanding of what companies are actually paying.

Which roles are getting harder to fill.

Where certain skills are concentrated.

How salary expectations are changing.

Which countries make sense for different roles.

How long different searches take.

What clients budget.

What candidates expect.

What actually happens between opening a role and making a successful hire.

That intelligence compounds.

And I've learned not to treat that as a side effect of the work.

It is part of what we're building.

There's another project I'm working on right now that reminds me a little of The Trading Club.

Except this time I'm looking at it very differently.

We're putting together LATAM Talent Hub, a community for founders, HR leaders, recruiters and people who are actually hiring across Latin America.

The basic idea is similar to what attracted me to The Trading Club all those years ago:

Put useful people in the same room.

Give them information they can't easily get elsewhere.

Let the value compound through the network.

But the information we're sharing now is about hiring.

Things like:

Salary benchmarks by role and country.

Real compensation expectations we're seeing from candidates.

Comparisons between hiring in LATAM and the U.S.

Which roles are becoming more competitive.

Skills we're seeing more demand for.

Contractor vs. EOR questions.

Country-by-country hiring differences.

What companies are actually paying, not just generic salary ranges copied from the internet.

Hiring signals we're seeing from our own searches and placements.

And practical resources for companies trying to understand the LATAM talent market before they make a hire.

Some of this will come from the work we're already doing inside HiresLink.

Some will come from conversations with recruiters, founders and talent leaders.

And hopefully some of the most useful information will come from the people inside the community themselves.

Because the best communities aren't really content channels.

They're networks of useful information.

If you're actively hiring in LATAM, thinking about doing it, or simply want access to the salary and hiring data we're putting together, I'd be happy to have you in there.

Or just reach out to me directly and I'll send you the details.

When founders hear “ownership,” we immediately think about shares.

And obviously equity matters.

A lot.

But I think the lesson is broader than that now.

There are several things worth understanding whenever you're building something valuable.

Who owns the customer relationship?

If the platform disappears tomorrow, can you still reach those people?

Who owns the data?

Can you take it with you? Can somebody else restrict access to it?

Who owns the brand?

Is the reputation attached to you, a company, or somebody else's platform?

Who owns the process or IP?

If you leave, what actually goes with you?

Who controls the decisions?

Having economic participation without control can produce a very different outcome from what you expect.

And of course:

Who owns the equity?

Because “we're building this together” can mean very different things depending on what the documents actually say.

None of this is particularly exciting when you're starting.

That's probably why people avoid it.

It's much more fun to talk about the product.

The customers.

Growth.

The opportunity.

But boring questions become very interesting once something becomes valuable.

I also don't think the lesson should be:

That would have been terrible advice for me.

The Trading Club taught me an enormous amount.

I learned how to build a community around a specific group of people.

I learned how relationships create business.

I learned that sometimes the most valuable thing you're building isn't the product itself, but the network forming around it.

I learned that I could take an idea from zero and convince important people to participate.

Those skills stayed with me even when the project didn't.

That's the part nobody can really take.

And I've seen the same thing throughout my career.

Companies disappear.

Platforms change.

Projects end.

Partnerships break.

Sometimes businesses you helped build continue without you.

But capabilities compound.

If you built the thing once, there's a pretty good chance you can build again.

The difference is that the second time, you understand the rules much better.

I wouldn't tell myself not to build it.

I wouldn't tell myself to protect every idea.

I wouldn't tell myself to become suspicious of everyone around me.

I'd still tell that younger version of me:

But before you get too far…

Not because you should assume things will go badly.

Because you should know the answer before the answer becomes expensive.

For years I thought the painful part of this story was that somebody took over something I had built.

I don't really see it that way anymore.

The more useful lesson was realizing that I hadn't understood the difference between creating value and owning it.

I do now.

And I think that's one reason I'm so deliberate today about what we're building with HiresLink, the data we're collecting around the LATAM hiring market, and the community we're starting around it.

Not because everything needs to be protected.

Because when something starts compounding, you should understand what the asset actually is.

If you're building something today: a company, product, audience, client book, community or even an internal project that is starting to become important, it's probably worth asking:

If this becomes 100x more valuable, do I understand exactly what I own?

Because that's the question that becomes very difficult to answer after the value is already there.

And if you're hiring in Latin America and want to be part of the community we're building around real salary data, hiring benchmarks and what we're seeing in the market:

Or reach out to me directly.

I'd genuinely like to know what you're hiring for and what information would actually be useful to you.

— Julian

CEO to CEO is where I write about hiring, entrepreneurship and what building companies actually looks like once you remove the hype.

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