A small practice with skin in the game.
The 1.21 Initiative is deliberately not a consultancy with a bench. It's a focused, founder-run engineering practice — built on a simple bet: an engineer who trades his own capital, armed with the best AI tooling available, can out-deliver a team that bills by the hour.
Trained for rigour
Postgraduate research at Oxford in complex systems modelling — the mathematics of how interacting parts produce behaviour nobody designed. Markets are exactly that, and the training shows up in how we test before we trust.
Forged in production
Years spent designing, shipping, and operating real software — and three live trading systems running today on Google Cloud. Not the longest CV in the industry; the most accountable one. Every claim on this site maps to something you can be shown.
Multiplied by AI
We operate an AI-accelerated engineering pipeline — agents for code generation, test synthesis, and review, with a human who understands the mathematics making every decision that matters. It's how a small practice ships at team speed without team overhead.
The rules we don't break.
Nothing ships untested
Trading code is held to a different standard: if it isn't proven by tests and survived production conditions, it isn't done. We apply that to our own systems first — our runway depends on it.
Honesty over theatre
No invented case studies, no inflated credentials, no cherry-picked equity curves. We'd rather show you a real dashboard with real warts than a fictional 68% win rate. Clients who value that are the clients we want.
You own everything
Code, documentation, infrastructure, knowledge. Engagements are designed so you could walk away and keep operating — which is precisely why clients don't.
Small on purpose
Two concurrent engagements, maximum. The person who scopes the work does the work. Growth comes from the platform, not from hiring juniors to bill under a senior's name.
Why "1.21"?
1.21 gigawatts is what it took to send a DeLorean through time — an absurd, precise number for a machine that had to work perfectly at the critical moment. That's the engineering standard for trading systems: precisely specified, and reliable exactly when it matters.
The first conversation is with the engineer. So is the last.
Book a free 30-minute working session — a straight technical conversation about your systems, not a pitch.