The promise behind the record.

I grew up between a Swiss mother and an Australian father — two countries, two temperaments, and a childhood spent moving between them. It gave me a patchwork of places and people, and no tidy answer to where I'm from. What it did give me, early, was the sense that where you come from is something you have to hold onto deliberately. It doesn't keep itself.

Most families keep photographs. Ours did too. But a photograph tells you that something happened — not what it meant, or who else was in the room, or why anyone chose what they chose. My father once wrote our family's story into a single book. It's a beautiful thing and I'm glad it exists. But a book is written once: it holds the ink, not the voice. The next generation will have his words. They won't have him saying them.

My working life has been in finance, in Switzerland and Australia and a few places in between. It's a career built around one fairly narrow question: what makes a thing durable? Alongside it I've always been founding things, advising, and turning ideas over with people building something of their own. That has been the more honest constant — more than any title.

Working around wealth taught me something uncomfortable. Enormous care goes into preserving the money, and almost none into preserving what made them a family in the first place. The structures for one are centuries old. For the other there is a shoebox and good intentions.

I built Cerne so that any family can keep its own record — a little at a time, and on purpose. Not out of fear of losing the past, but because a family is worth being deliberate about while everyone is still here to be asked.