Don’t let the flowers wilt

I recently came across a post by Mike Abel that stopped me in my tracks. He shared a story about mistaking a snapdragon for a foxglove, which led to a powerful lesson in chemistry.

The lesson was simple: If you put a snapdragon in a vase with ripening fruit, it wilts. Why? Because ripening fruit emits ethylene gas, a chemical “message” that tells the flower its time is up. But if you move that same flower into a different room, into a different “chemistry,” it thrives.

As I wrap up my first official week of restarting Libertad here in Cape Town, that metaphor feels incredibly personal.

Moving the Flower
Leaving the “ethylene gas” of a traditional corporate structure to go out on my own seems daunting. There is a specific kind of silence that comes with being your own boss, a silence that can easily be filled by the “what-ifs.”

But the chemistry of this first week has been different. In the last five days, I have had more high-energy strategic debates, chance encounters and productive coffee chats than I have had in months.

I have spent time with innovators in the Fintech and Orchestration space, and the energy is infectious. We aren’t just talking about code; we are talking about unblocking growth.

My time in this industry has taught me a hard truth: “Frankenstein Stacks” are not born out of bad intentions; they are born out of being wowed by features while ignoring the architecture.

During my discussions this week, a specific pain point kept surfacing: the rise of “auto behaviour” and the dangerous disconnect between security and fraud teams. In some organisations, these two functions operate in silos where security is focused on the perimeter and system integrity, while fraud is looking at transaction legitimacy. This gap is exactly where sophisticated threats thrive.

When your systems operate on “auto behaviour” without cross-departmental context, you create a silent friction. You have teams moving at breakneck speed to stay ahead of the competition, but they are doing so without a unified defensive strategy.

Security as the Accelerator
In high-growth environments, security is often perceived as the “brake” that slows the mission down. But my time in the trenches has taught me that the opposite is true.

Robust controls and integrated fraud-security guardrails are like the high-performance brakes on a F1 racing car. They are not there to stop you; they are the very thing that allows you to go faster, take sharper corners and scale with confidence. You can only push the limits when you know the system is built to hold under pressure.

Also this week I was caught in a debate with a colleague who is looking to rip out their Microsoft environment and replace it entirely with Google. On the surface, the appeal is obvious, to them the UI is smoother, the collaboration feels more intuitive, and the feature list is seductive. But as we dug deeper, the same old questions surfaced:

• Have the downstream implications been mapped?
• Has anyone looked at the identity management hooks, the legacy data governance, or the security permissioning that will inevitably break during the pivot?

Often, the answer is no. Companies often chase the “wow” factor of a new tool without realising they are just adding another limb to a creature that is already difficult to control. In the rush to solve a surface-level problem, they create a systemic risk that no single feature can fix.

The Chemistry
Whether you are migrating a global enterprise or a scaling fintech, you cannot ignore the underlying “chemistry” of your tech stack. If the pieces don’t speak the same language, the system eventually breaks under its own weight.

Libertad exists to be the architect in the room who looks past the demo and asks about the plumbing. We ensure that when you move your “snapdragon” to a new environment, you are not just putting it in a prettier vase, you are ensuring the water is actually clean.