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# The reward for being early
- URL: https://www.davidamayomorrison.com/the-reward-for-being-early/
- Published: 2026-10-04T10:00:23.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-04T10:00:23.000Z
- Author: David Amayo-Morrison

I’ve spent a lot of my career frustrated that other people couldn’t see things as quickly as I thought I could.

I’m starting to wonder if that was unfair.

I was early on generative AI. Not absurdly early, but early enough that I remember trying to explain what I thought was coming before most organisations had really worked out what to do with it.

It benefited me. At Tesco, it opened doors and pulled me into conversations I probably wouldn’t otherwise have been part of.

But I also remember the frustration. I could see the implications moving faster in my head than an organisation could possibly respond to them.

Looking back, maybe I was asking the wrong thing of the organisation.

Seeing around a corner and getting a large company to turn that corner are two completely different things.

My conviction only had to satisfy me. A company has employees, customers, budgets, technology, existing commitments, politics and opportunity costs. Something can be directionally right and still be too early to deserve a disproportionate amount of organisational attention.

I think I’m experiencing the same feeling again.

This time it’s blockchain, tokenisation and AI agents.

I have a growing suspicion that we’re going to look back at a lot of the blockchain infrastructure being built today very differently once software starts routinely acting and transacting on behalf of humans.

If agents are going to buy things, sell things, exchange value, hold assets, establish identity and interact economically with other agents, they will need infrastructure underneath them.

I keep thinking of parts of the blockchain ecosystem as potential tokenised toll roads for that world.

I could be completely wrong.

Or I could be right but five years early.

Or fifteen.

That’s the difficulty with seeing something before it becomes obvious. There isn’t a little notification that tells you which category you’re in.

And this time I notice myself being much more reluctant to evangelise about it at work.

At first I wondered whether that meant I’d become more cautious.

I think something else has changed.

I’ve stopped believing that every conviction I have about the future needs to be converted into an initiative inside the company that employs me.

Perhaps the reward for seeing something early sometimes has to come from somewhere else.

Ownership.

If I believe a technology, company, protocol or asset is going to become substantially more important over the next decade, I can study it. I can write down what I believe. I can put my own capital behind the parts I have sufficient conviction in.

Then I can be wrong on my own account too.

There is something cleaner about that.

Employment largely pays me for being useful in the present. Ownership gives me a mechanism, however imperfect, for being rewarded if I’m right about the future.

I think this also explains a feeling I’ve struggled to articulate throughout my career.

I’m a bit of a Swiss Army knife.

Organisations understandably hire people to do jobs. Jobs need boundaries. SEO belongs here. Payments belong there. AI belongs somewhere else. Blockchain is someone else’s problem entirely.

But the world doesn’t respect the org chart.

Search is becoming entangled with AI. AI is moving towards agents. Agents may increasingly participate in commerce. Commerce requires payments, identity and trust. Those things intersect with markets, platforms, tokenisation and infrastructure.

From inside a company, those might be six different functions.

From where I’m standing, increasingly they look like different layers of the same thing.

That can make being a generalist feel strangely uncomfortable. You’re constantly wandering beyond the territory you were technically hired to occupy.

Maybe the lesson isn’t to stop wandering.

Maybe it’s to become more discerning about what I bring back.

My employer doesn’t have to become the vehicle for every future I can imagine.

I can do my job well. I can raise the things that are becoming materially relevant. I can keep watching the things that aren’t ready yet.

And for the ones I have enough conviction in, I can own something.

Then time can decide whether I was early or simply wrong.