One of the most useful things I learned about money had nothing to do with money.
It had to do with conversations.
For a long time, I thought wealth was mostly created inside transactions. An investment gets made. A company gets acquired. A deal closes. A contract gets signed. Money changes hands. End of story.
That’s the version most of us see because it’s the visible version. It’s the version that gets announced, reported, celebrated, and occasionally envied.
But after spending enough time around founders, investors, operators, and people who build businesses, I started noticing something.
The transaction was rarely the beginning. It was usually the ending.
The visible moment happened after a long chain of invisible moments. The investor had been thinking about the market for months. The founder had been building relationships for years. The buyer and seller already knew each other. The partnership had been discussed long before anyone called it a partnership.
The opportunity existed befor…
