You have carried the lives of an entire workforce on your shoulders for the better part of forty years. You know every machine in your hall, the first name of every apprentice, and the handwriting of your first secretary. When you wake in the morning you think first of payroll and then of your grandchildren — in that order, because you know the one is the precondition for the other. I write to you because I suspect that no one in your immediate circle quite understands this relationship. The bankers speak in multiples. The advisers speak in structures. You yourself speak, if at all, to your dog.
My name is Marcel Füssinger. I was born in 1989 in Feldkirch, in the Austrian Vorarlberg. My working life began not in a lecture hall but in the paint shop of the Liebherr works in Nenzing — between 2005 and 2008 I completed there the apprenticeship of an industrial spray painter, and in the years that followed I primed the components of tower and offshore cranes destined for the whole world. That hall was my first school in precision, and I have been grateful for it ever since.
Since 2012 I have worked as an entrepreneur out of Liechtenstein. One of the first workshops I helped build was the CloudLab AG in Vaduz, with branches in Dortmund and Romania. It took in the end nearly a decade to be sold. That was not a test of patience — that was the actual work. Heidelberger Druckmaschinen sat at the table for a while alongside other strategic addresses; in the end it was, this past spring — after a three-year strategic partnership — the NASDAQ-listed Cimpress group, because there the terms for the founders aligned the way we needed them. If a handover takes ten years, then it takes ten years. That is the harbour I mean — not in spite of the care taken, but because of it.
Shortly after, a second vehicle took shape in Vaduz — Newspaces AG, a small holding around a Berlin-based vector-graphics tool called Gravit Designer, which we domiciled here in the Principality for a brief season and which, looking back honestly, ought to have become a European Figma. It returned to Berlin, found its anchor at the German High-Tech Gründerfonds, and was sold to Corel of Ottawa in June 2018 — the price was not disclosed, which here is a word in itself. A year-and-a-half later Corel itself changed hands for over a billion dollars to the private-equity address KKR; the Gravit brand quietly disappeared from its users' toolboxes and survives today, melted into the generic, as CorelDRAW Go. From this second story I have kept two lessons I have never forgotten since: see potential where others have not yet looked — that scent has stayed with me from those years. And after the first sale, do not coast; stay hungry — for what could have been a Figma and was not, no founder forgets for the rest of his life.
In Singapore I do not keep a subsidiary; I run a stand-alone holding for special situations — built for entrepreneurs who need to settle, unwind or open something in Asia that cannot be moved out of Europe either through consultants or through law firms. And since 2015, under the roof of Equanimity AG, I have accompanied the first regulated tokenisations of equity and bonds in the Principality, from the prospectus filed with the FMA to the smart contract on the blockchain. The honest two thirds of that work has been less glamorous: the restructuring of failed token issuances such as Envion and Curio (with its tokenised Ferrari F12 TDF), the recovery of XiD Technologies in Singapore out of a liquidation bottleneck, and the discreet discovery and defence work for wealthy entrepreneurs in the German-speaking world, when forged documents or an inconsistent share register suddenly appear across a border. For sheer pleasure I also keep, on the side, an open notebook at ai-crypto.li (in German) on whatever I am reading or trying out in AI and Crypto — a private workbench that nobody commissioned. Palaimon Capital is what those years have produced — a promise I made to myself: to serve a small number of people, over long horizons, unconditionally, rather than many for short ones. Palaimon is the Greek god of harbours, of fishermen, and of seafarers worn out by the storm. He helps with the arrival, not the departure.
What I will not do. I will not push you toward a sale to a buyer who halves your workforce in eighteen months. I will not sell you a structured product. I will not place you in a life-insurance policy on which I quietly take a commission. I will not pretend to be a bank — last March's KfW Focus 488 documented in numbers what you already know in your bones: the small- and mid-sized German trust in banks has reached a depth that no board photograph can mend.
What I will do. I will sit at your kitchen table and listen, before any contract appears. I will take the call at half past eleven at night when your daughter-in-law is in tears about an inheritance question. I will refinance the two hundred and fifty thousand against the house when the bank wants four weeks you do not have. I will keep your foundation in Liechtenstein, if and when you decide that this is the right harbour; and if you do not, I will, just as quietly, build the alternative.
How I work. I work with very few families at a time. I take a long while getting to know you, because I mean it. I bill by the mandate; a portion of my fee can, if you wish, be settled in Bitcoin — an exercise in discipline on both sides. What I promise you, I write down and I sign. What you entrust to me stays between us; in Liechtenstein, that has a longer legal tradition than in the rest of Europe combined.
What you will find here. This site is intentionally slim. It has five chapters and a cover. In the Logbook I keep dated observations from my work — anonymised but specific. On the Chart lie our two harbours, in Vaduz and in Singapore, and the people with whom we share the road there. In Office Hours you will find how to reach me. In Safe Conduct is set down what the house outfits those who sail under our flag with. That is everything. If, after three logbook entries, you feel we ought to speak, write to me, or call. If not, I wish you a good day and a quiet harbour.
Stephan Huthmacher, on the succession of Comma Soft, formulated a sentence I am happy to repeat here: “ The core of my new role is that I now work, more than before, on the company rather than in it. ” A succession is not a goodbye. It is the second half. I help you shape it so that your lifework outlives you — not despite the handover, but because of it.