It started with a few conversations with members of my team at Moderna.

Some of them had been asking me for financial advice. I had spent years managing my own finances, building spreadsheets, developing templates, and making decisions based on what I had learned along the way.

I thought perhaps I could share some of those experiences through a podcast. Talk about different financial topics, explain some of the choices I had made, and hopefully help someone make better decisions of their own.

I wasn't thinking about starting a company.

I figured if a few people listened and found something useful, that would be a pretty good outcome.

I also thought I could go a little further. Maybe help a couple of people each month by taking their financial information, organizing it using my spreadsheets, and giving them something they could use to manage their own finances going forward.

But I quickly realized how much work that would involve. Collecting the information, organizing it, setting up the spreadsheets, and keeping everything current would be a significant manual effort.

Still, the idea of helping a few people appealed to me.

Then came the website.

If I was going to produce a podcast, I needed somewhere to publish it.

Around this time, I had also been spending considerable time exploring what AI could do.

At Moderna, I had been encouraging my team to think beyond using AI for meeting summaries and action items. We were experimenting with practical applications such as shipment tracking, route optimization, and risk scoring. We were also learning about the limitations of AI and the importance of verifying what it produced.

On October 19, 2025, I sat down and asked GPT to help me build a website.

I had never built a website before.

It generated some code. Then it suggested a few additional things it could do.

I looked at the suggestions and thought, that makes sense. Let's do that.

It generated more code. And suggested a few more things.

Sure. Let's do those too.

This went on for about four hours.

By the end of the evening, GPT informed me that I now had production-ready code that I could deploy.

Wonderful!

There was just one small problem.

I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

I was staring at code involving React, Node.js, Tailwind, Terraform, Firebase, and several other technologies I had never worked with.

Apparently, I had a production-ready website. I just didn't know how to get it into production.

Fortunately, I knew someone who could help.

I called my good friend Jensen, with whom I had worked for more than a decade. He had servers at home and knew how to set things up.

I explained what I had been doing and asked him to get the website running so that I could access it, make changes, and eventually upload podcasts.

He told me to give him a few days.

And that was when something interesting happened.

I started thinking: If AI could generate all this code, why was I limiting myself to building a website?

Why couldn't I build the financial management capabilities I had developed in my spreadsheets?

Instead of helping a couple of people manually, why not create something that could help many more people manage their finances themselves?

That question changed everything.

I started building. One module led to another. Ideas that had existed in my spreadsheets began turning into capabilities in a software platform.

When Jensen came back, the project had already started becoming something much bigger than the website I had originally asked him to set up.

He became deeply involved in building the backend and technology infrastructure. Today, he is TiVaMo's CTO.

And that's how TiVaMo began.

There was another idea behind this journey.

Around the same time, my wife had been encouraging me to help our daughter become familiar with AI.

I thought building something together would be a wonderful way for her to learn. She could build some of the capabilities, I could build others, and we could learn along the way.

Well, that part didn't quite work out as planned.

As it turned out, she had a rather busy schedule of her own!

But she has contributed in a different way.

Whenever I need a younger perspective on something we're developing, whether it's a user interface, an article, or marketing material, I ask her to take a look.

Her feedback has been genuinely useful. Sometimes a different perspective reveals something that seems perfectly obvious once someone points it out.

So here we are, one year later.

The TiVaMo Tapestry platform is live.

I am grateful to the people who have joined me on this journey and helped bring TiVaMo to life.

[Only some of the team members are here, the others are a little shy, especially Jensen. We will include them in a future picture when we take a proper one, not a screenshot from a team call (we all look so serious, must have been talking about something important).]

We have implemented the first release of the product, taking ideas that began in my spreadsheets and turning them into a working financial management platform. And building in some of our supply chain, analytics and optimization expertise.

But what we have built is not simply a digital version of those spreadsheets.

It reflects a philosophy that I believe is fundamental to managing money:

Your financial decisions should be connected to the life you want to live.

That is what we mean by Individualized Financial Management (IFM).

Financial management isn't just about knowing how much you spent last month, whether you stayed within a budget, or how much you've accumulated for retirement.

Those things matter. But they are pieces of a much bigger picture.

The decisions we make over the coming weeks and months affect what we can accomplish this year. And those decisions, in turn, affect the life we can build over the years and decades ahead.

TiVaMo Tapestry connects those different time horizons through five integrated solutions.

For the short term — weeks to months, Cash Flow Tracking, Budget Planning, and Budget Tracking help you understand your financial position, plan how you use your money, and track how you're doing against those plans.

For the goals you're working toward this year, Financial Asset Tracking helps you understand your financial assets and how they relate to your financial objectives.

And for the life you want to live, Life Event Planning helps you look further ahead, explore possibilities, and understand the financial implications of important life decisions.

The real value isn't in any one of these solutions operating independently.

It's in connecting all five into one seamless thread of time.

Your budget is connected to your cash flow. Your cash flow and financial assets are connected to your goals. And those goals are connected to the life events and choices that matter to you.

As your circumstances change and new financial information becomes available, the different parts of your financial picture can be updated, allowing you to revisit your plans and make better-informed decisions.

Because life doesn't stand still. Neither should your financial plans.

That's the idea behind TiVaMo's approach to Individualized Financial Management: helping people make realistic, informed financial decisions that reflect their individual circumstances, priorities, and aspirations.

And it's a long way from the podcast website I sat down to build a year ago!

Now comes the next chapter.

Jensen has built a strong technology foundation, including the infrastructure and internal tools we need to operate and manage the platform. Based on the feedback we've received, we're significantly ahead technologically for a company at this stage.

I am proud of what we've accomplished in a year.

But building the technology was only the first part of the journey.

Now comes what may be the harder part: getting people to discover TiVaMo, sign up, use Tapestry, and, most importantly, get real value from it.

Because the reason for doing this hasn't really changed.

A year ago, I thought helping a couple of people manage their finances better would be a worthwhile outcome.

Today, we have an opportunity to help a lot more.

Whether people are trying to get through the next few months, make progress toward their financial goals, or make decisions about the life they want to live, I hope TiVaMo can help them make those decisions with greater clarity and confidence.

October 19 isn't our official company registration date. It's the day I consider TiVaMo to have been born.

The day I sat down to build a website for a podcast.

And ended up starting something entirely different.

Happy first anniversary, TiVaMo.

The next chapter is underway!