Practitioner thinking, from the people doing the work.

For one bank, the answer starts with more than USD 15 million in five year software licensing savings. That is before the cost of running a simpler stack, before reduced operational overhead, and before the strategic value of growing a digital business without being penalised for every new customer, transaction, environment, or channel. For years, enterprises treated CIAM as a premium software category. That made sense when the market was less mature, open source was harder t

Earlier this month I spent several days away from the business. No meetings, no notifications, no family obligations. For the third year running I blocked out time to do nothing but think, about what I want from the years ahead, the kind of company I want to build, and the kind of person I want to become, and answer the big question "what do I want to be when I grow up". The exercise is uncomfortable by design. This year it surfaced a question I had been avoiding. For years I

Professor Paul Morrissey C.Eng, FIET, FBCS, FRSA published a piece this week on the Agentic Digital Workforce that deserves serious attention. His central warning is right: human oversight designed as theatre, nominal checkpoints with no real authority or context, is not governance. It is liability without accountability. I agree completely. Where I think the argument needs to go further is what happens at scale. Enterprises deploying AI agents across real-time, high-volume w

Earlier this month, a security firm called CodeWall pointed an autonomous AI agent at McKinsey's internal AI platform, Lilli. No credentials. No insider knowledge. Just a domain name. Two hours later, the agent had full read and write access to the entire production database. 46.5 million chat messages. 728,000 confidential files. 57,000 user accounts. And — most critically — 95 system prompts that controlled how Lilli thought, responded, and behaved. All writable. Silently.

Ajit Gupta presenting during a Midships strategy workshop — discussing focus, growth, and risk As a bootstrap founder, we have to constantly balance growth and risk. Over the past year, we’ve gone through significant internal change (for the better), and it gave me an opportunity to tackle a risk that has kept me up many nights. I thought it might be helpful to share this experience and would love any feedback. Each year, I try to mitigate one major risk that could lead to a

... it turns out I'm not! Sustainable (slow) growth is just fine for me! Let me explain. Accelerated growth sounds fantastic, every startup's dream, right? As a startup founder, you work hard to get to a position where your business products and services are in demand. The general belief is that you must see accelerated growth to succeed. When it finally comes, all will be well. At Midships this year, we have had the privilege to work with some of the most prominent financia