My 2025 Retrospective: Hello 2026
2025 was the year I did two things I didn’t plan: moved my family 8,200 kilometers after 21 years in Asia, and returned to building companies after 6 years as an investor.
Welcome to 2026, my friend.
The Austin Catalyst
I traveled to Austin late 2024 to deliver a keynote to entrepreneurs on Atomic Scaling. I was supposed to stay 5 days. I stayed three weeks.
Day seven. 5 PM, atop a mountain that one of the entrepreneurs I met, part of Elon Musk’s circle — bought after exiting his Silicon Valley startup to build a new village 30 minutes from Austin. He sketches roads on a map pinned to the wall of the only house built so far. I realize that family wealth must be more communal for the world to truly thrive. Dogs bark and chase butterflies. Neither of us notices that six hours have passed in conversation.
We’re entering a new era — the rise of AI, the changing world order, climate transformation. The game is changing. It can feel daunting. But it can also be beautiful.
We’re moving from decades of intense Yang (materialist growth, extraction, accumulation) to a Yin response phase: flow over force, redistribution over hoarding, collective wisdom over individual dominance. As a father of two daughters and husband to a tiger wife, I feel this shift viscerally.
On that mountain, I realized: my impact through ideas (writing), training (Atomic Scaling), and investing (chasing unicorns) was meaningful. But I wanted to build product again. SuperIntelligence that lets families pool wealth, make investment decisions together, and redistribute profits to causes they care about, .
In a nutshell: build a powerful AI that helps families invest their combined wealth intelligently and purposefully — growing capital while supporting the next generation and the causes they care about.
What began as a book tour ended up drawing me back into entrepreneurship.
BOBIC: Back to Founder Mode
After six years as a full-time investor — two unicorns, one IPO — I didn’t expect to be back in the game. But here we are.
Redefining wealth in the era of abundance: BOBIC harnesses AI and collective intelligence. Thesis: Earn. Redistribute.
With AI, we are entering a new renaissance. History reminds us that French aristocrats who hoarded in the 1780s vanished, while the Medicis who invested in public works prospered and left a lasting legacy.
Traditional wealth management hoards value for the 1%. BOBIC democratizes it: resources pool, decisions are made collectively, and AI grows the capital — so humans can focus on living safely, healthily, and joyfully. Like the Minds — superintelligent AIs that control starships in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks, a favorite reference of Elon Musk.
What does this look like daily?
Input: You receive news about post-Maduro Venezuela. BOBIC highlights the shifts, identifies who stands to gain or lose, maps 4 pillars of change with 5 key winners each, and offers options to allocate based on your timeframe.
Output: When you profit, BOBIC suggests redistribution — part of your earnings flow to people and causes you care about, like a modern Medici.
Progress in 2025:
- Incorporated in Switzerland — hub for digital assets & family offices
- Banking rails live — fiat + crypto, up to $50M/day
- Seed round investors — ex-Goldman, Citadel, Flowdesk, Bitmain; former CEOs of Microsoft, BNP Paribas, and family offices
- Clients & expansion — first two family offices signed; Dubai expansion in progress with AMC licensing
- Vault access — onboarding & KYC in progress
- Product development — accelerating, with FLOW as main B2B2C growth driver
My 2025 numbers:
- 15,000+ LinkedIn followers (from 10,000 in 2024)
- 5,000+ Atomic Scaling books distributed since launch
- 1,000+ entrepreneurs engaged face-to-face or via live sessions.
- 100+ consecutive weeks newsletter published, 66–82% open rates (vs 20% industry average)
- Dozens of hours of content created, transforming them into free educational shorts this year.
Family: a New Chapter in Europe
Harvard’s 80-year study found one predictor of happiness: warmer relationships.
This year, we moved to Europe after 21 years in Asia.
Three reasons: nurturing Miya’s final high school years in Europe, completing a global education for my daughters, and savoring the priceless gift of time with family together.
The move was surgical chaos: 222 boxes, three months of logistics, geopolitical tensions, goodbyes to a city who’d become home.
The adjustment was beautiful… and complex.
Three months in, Anna woke up one morning to tell me about her dream: “Dad, in my dream, we went back to Beijing — all my French friends were with me at school there while all my Chinese friends went missing. I realized it was a dream so I decided to wake up instantly.” It was her way to digest all the changes — the new friendships made while maintaining old ones.
French bureaucracy felt Kafkaesque: 54 forms and logins, looping dependencies, and aged systems that seemed to break under their own weight rather than help integration.
But. Watching my daughters navigate French culture, Gloria’s concert at Notre Dame, Picasso museum visits, my mum’s spontaneous weekend visits, discovering bi-cultural identity in the Chinese neighbourhood — these moments made every challenge lighter.
52 dinners we cooked together after 20 years of household help. More hands-on family time than in two decades.
I cherished chess with Anna, Miya diving into math projects, weekend markets with my wife, playing cards with my mum, running in forests with Pascal, watching colors change in the sky.
As my favorite game designer Ian once said: “Every instant is a present.”
The true wealth is peace of mind.
Health: “2024 was strength. 2025 was speed and mind”
Year four sugar-free, year five alcohol-free. I made exceptions on sugar— my daughter called me out, we’re doing it together now. That’s ok.
Sleep is non-negotiable: 8 hours a night, 290+ nights logged. The #1 secret to longevity.
2024 was rebuilding after ski surgery. 2025 was speed and flexibility: 87 runs including 2 Paris charity races, and I just joined a new 3x weekly calisthenics community (LeoMoves — yoga meets animal movement).
The bigger evolution: mental and spiritual exploration.
April: 30 days at Balaji Network State in Singapore. I went to explore DeFi with tech entrepreneurs. I surprised myself doing self-organized past-life regression with former execs from Citadel and Goldman Sachs. The weird part? It worked and I loved it.
Twenty Vipassana sessions, breathwork, 100 participants from 11 countries, quantum trading workshops to altered consciousness. Zero alcohol for all, Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint diet.
Spiritual awareness in trusted proximity accelerated access to altered states. Mental defragmentation. Old patterns surfaced. Buried emotions emerged.
I’m exploring spirituality as consciousness expansion, not religion. Reading Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Alan Watts. Listening to new kind of music from Garth Stevenson. Experimenting with cold exposure, fasting, silent mornings. Curious about patterns the rational mind struggles to categorize.
Health is integration: body, mind, spirit.
2026: The Age of Flow
Year 2025 took me across continents — Austin (first-principles builders), California (Silicon Valley), Beijing (home for 20+ years), Thailand (family holidays), Singapore (conscious community), Hong Kong & Geneva (family offices), Dubai (future finance), with Norway and Brazil ahead.
Each location adds dimension to who we are and what we’re building.
It’s my birthday as I write this. Many trips around the sun. Anna just asked me to play chess. Miya’s reviewing her math homework. My wife is singing. This — right here — is abundance.
From our family to yours, wishing you a healthy, joyful, and abundant 2026!
— Ludovic Bodin
Paris | January 5, 2026
Are you sensing the rise of SuperIntelligence and a world of amazing abundance? Let’s talk.
