You have carried the lives of an entire workforce on your shoulders for four decades. You know every machine on your shop floor, the first name of every apprentice, and the handwriting of your first secretary. When you wake in the morning, you think first of the payroll runs and then of your grandchildren — in that order, because you know that the one depends on the other. I write to you because I suspect that no one around you quite understands this relation. The bankers talk about multiples. The consultants talk about structures. You yourself talk, if at all, to your dog.
My name is Marcel Füssinger, born in 1989 in Feldkirch, Vorarlberg. My working life did not begin in a lecture hall, but in the paint shop of the Liebherr works in Nenzing — from 2005 to 2008 I served my apprenticeship there as an industrial painter, and in the years that followed I primed components of slewing and offshore cranes for the whole world. That hall was my first school in precision, and I remain grateful to it.
Since 2012 I have worked out of Liechtenstein as an entrepreneur. One of the first workshops I helped to build was CloudLab AG in Vaduz, with branches in Dortmund and Romania. In the end it took almost a decade before it was sold. That was not a test of patience, but the work itself. Heidelberger Druckmaschinen was in the picture for a time, as were other strategic addresses; in the end, this spring — after a three-year strategic holding — it was the NASDAQ-listed Cimpress group, because there the conditions for the founders lined up as we needed them. If a handover takes ten years, then it takes ten years. That is not despite the care, but because of it: the harbour I mean.
Shortly afterwards a second vessel was formed in Vaduz, Newspaces AG — a small holding around a Berlin vector-graphics tool called Gravit Designer, which we housed for a short time here in the Principality and which, looking back honestly, should have become a European Figma. It went back to Berlin, found its connection at the High-Tech Gründerfonds, and was sold to Corel in Ottawa in June 2018 — the price remained unnamed. A year and a half later, Corel itself changed hands for more than a billion to the private-equity address KKR; the Gravit brand slipped quietly out of its users' toolboxes and survives today, melted into the generic, as CorelDRAW Go. From this second story I have kept two lessons that I have never since forgotten: to see potential where others are not yet looking — that scent has stayed with me from those years. And not to list after the first sale, but to stay hungry — because what could have become a Figma, and did not, a founder never forgets for the rest of his life.
In Singapore I keep no subsidiary, but a standalone holding for special situations — built for entrepreneurs who must put something in Asia in order, wind it down, or open it up, which from Europe can be moved neither by consultants nor by law firms. And since 2015, under the roof of Equanimity AG, I have accompanied the first regulated tokenisations of shares and bonds in the Principality, from the prospectus at the FMA through to the smart contract on the blockchain. The more honest two-thirds of this work turned out less glamorous: the restructuring of failed offerings such as Envion or Curio (with the tokenised Ferrari F12 TDF), the restoration of XiD Technologies in Singapore from the liquidation bottleneck, and the discreet discovery and defence work for wealthy entrepreneurs in the German-speaking world when, beyond a border, forged documents or a share register that no longer adds up suddenly appear. For the sheer pleasure of the thing I also keep, at ai-crypto.li, an open notebook of everything I read or try in AI and crypto — a private workbench that no one commissioned. Out of these years Palaimon Capital has come into being — as a promise to myself to serve a small number of people unconditionally over long stretches of time, rather than many for a short one. Palaimon is the Greek guardian of harbours, of fishermen, and of seafarers marked by the storm. He helps with the coming in, not the going out.
What I will not do. I will not press you into a sale to a locust that halves your workforce in eighteen months. I will not sell you a structured product. I will not talk you into a life insurance policy on which I take a commission. I will not pretend to be a bank — KfW Study 488 documented last March what you already know: mid-market trust in banks has reached a depth that can no longer be repaired with a photograph of the board.
What I will do. I will sit at your kitchen table and listen to you before any contract comes into being. I will take the call at half past eleven at night when your daughter-in-law is in tears over an inheritance question. I will refinance the two hundred and fifty thousand against the house when the house bank demands four weeks you no longer have. I will accompany your foundation in Liechtenstein if and when you decide that this is the right harbour; and if you do not decide, I will just as quietly build the alternative.
How I work. I work with very few families at a time. I take a long time to know you, because I mean it. I measure my fee by the mandate; a portion we can, if you wish, settle in Bitcoin — an exercise in discipline on both sides. What I promise you I set down in writing and sign. What you entrust to me stays between us; in Liechtenstein that has a longer legal history than in the rest of Europe put together.
What you will find here. This page is deliberately narrow. It has six chapters and a cover. In the Logbook I record dated observations from my work — anonymised, but concrete. On the Chart lie our two harbours, in Vaduz and in Singapore, and the people with whom we share the way there. In Office Hours you will find how to reach me. In Safe Conduct is set down what the house gives those who sail under our flag. In the Muster Roll stands who serves on deck — by rank, not by age. That is all. If after three logbook entries you have the feeling that we should speak with one another, write to me, or call. If not, I wish you a good day and a quiet harbour.
In an interview about the handover of Comma Soft, Stephan Huthmacher formed the sentence I am glad to repeat here: « The core of my new role is that I now work even more than before on the company rather than in it. » A succession is not a farewell. It is the next half. I help you to shape it so that your life's work outlives you — not despite your handover, but because of it.