This document is generated at build time from https://bycameronlee.com and its source files. It has three parts: the website's main pages, verbatim, in Cameron's own first person, each under its address; then a list of his essays, each with its address and what it covers; then supplemental information written about him in the third person.
Every page of https://bycameronlee.com as published, in Cameron's own words.
Source: https://bycameronlee.com/
I’m Cameron Lee, co-founder of Truflation. Now I work with founders, CEOs, and investors on the commercial decisions that shape growth.
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Companies I’ve built have reached
I’ve worked inside almost every function of a business, from the technical build and economic incentives to positioning and market psychology. I’ve loaded boxes onto 18-wheelers and navigated a North Korean infiltration .
At Monarchy, the original plan was premium design at bargain prices. I moved the company upmarket, tripled the prices, and we were doing millions in sales within months.
At Truflation, the original plan was a stablecoin. I made inflation the core of the product and built the real-time index around it. That index became the focus of the company, and was recently cited by the U.S. Treasury Secretary before Congress.
Founders and CEOs bring me in for the decisions that can change the trajectory of their company.
The business is real, but the obvious fixes are spent and growth is still not where it should be.
The product is good, but customers, partners, or investors do not immediately see what makes it valuable.
People are interested, but the pitch is not converting or the team struggles to explain why customers should buy.
The price was set early, the packages accumulated, or what customers pay no longer reflects the value.
A new product, market, enterprise move, geographic expansion, or relaunch where the commercial choices are still open.
What got you here will not get you where you want to go, and the next decision is large enough to reshape the business.
I get involved as deeply as the situation requires, from a single working session to an embedded operating role.
[ 01 ]
One important question. A working session, a clear recommendation, and you take it from there.
[ 02 ]
The direction is clear. Now we prove it. I research, test, and validate the case until we have a decision the company can act on with confidence.
[ 03 ]
The decision is made. Your team or external partners execute it, while I stay involved to keep the work aligned with the direction we chose.
[ 04 ]
I take a direct role in the company and take responsibility for making it happen. That may mean a fractional executive role, an embedded operating role, or a deeper long-term commitment.
Tell me what you’re trying to make happen and where you’re stuck. Thirty minutes is usually enough to know whether I can help.
Source: https://bycameronlee.com/essays/commercial-strategy/
by Cameron Lee · September 16, 2026
I have a problem with the phrase commercial strategy because it sounds like something done by people in cheap suits.
They fly in on Monday, interview twelve executives, build a spreadsheet, and spend three weeks turning everything you already know into a 74-page PowerPoint. Then they stand in front of the board and tell you to improve customer centricity, strengthen differentiation, and optimize your go-to-market.
Everyone nods. Nobody knows what to do on Monday.
I don’t think that is strategy.
Commercial strategy, at least the way I think about it, is deciding what has to change about a company for the market to respond differently. That might mean changing the product, the customer, the price, the positioning, the distribution channel, the business model, or something else entirely.
The difficult part is that you usually do not know which one when you start. That is the job.
Traditional strategy consulting is built around an understandable desire to make strategy systematic. You break the market into segments, measure the TAM, study competitors, interview customers, build a matrix, score the options, and select the quadrant with the highest expected return.
There is nothing wrong with any of those things. I use data, study competitors, pull apart pricing, look at unit economics, talk to customers, and try to understand exactly how the business works.
The problem begins when the tools become the work.
Analysis can tell you a great deal about the company you have. It can tell you where customers are coming from, what they pay, where margins disappear, who your competitors are, and where things are breaking down.
What it cannot do on its own is tell you what the company should do next.
That requires imagination and judgment.
Most companies come to commercial strategy with a problem that sounds fairly specific. Growth has stalled. Sales are weak. A new product is not landing. Customer acquisition is too expensive. Investors do not understand the story.
The natural response is to attack the problem where it appears. If growth has stalled, improve marketing. If sales are weak, fix sales. If investors are confused, rewrite the deck.
Sometimes that is exactly right.
But sometimes marketing is doing a perfectly reasonable job selling an offer that nobody particularly wants. In that case, improving the marketing simply makes the company more efficient at pushing the wrong thing.
The real answer might be a different customer, a different proposition, a different price, a narrower product, a broader product, or a completely different route to market. It may even sit somewhere nobody initially considered relevant to the problem.
That is what I mean by commercial strategy. It is not optimizing one part of the machine. It is looking across the machine for the change that matters most.
The useful question is not simply, Why isn’t this working? It is, What could we change that would make it work differently?
One of the reasons I distrust overly structured approaches to commercial strategy is that the answer rarely respects organizational boundaries.
A marketing problem can turn out to be a product problem. A product problem can turn out to be a positioning problem. A positioning problem can turn out to be a distribution problem. A distribution problem can turn out to be an economic problem. An economic problem can turn out to be a financing problem.
Customers do not experience companies as org charts.
They see the product, what it costs, what it promises, where they encounter it, what alternatives they have, whether they trust it, and whether buying it makes sense. All of those things interact.
This is why I usually want to understand the whole commercial system before deciding where the problem lives. If you define the problem as “marketing” before looking at the product, or “sales” before looking at the proposition, you have already restricted the set of answers you are willing to find.
Sometimes the correct answer really is better marketing. But you should arrive there after looking at the business, not because the marketing department happened to be the one that called.
There is another part of this that makes traditional business people uncomfortable: intuition matters.
I do not mean intuition as some mystical substitute for evidence. I mean pattern recognition built from spending enough time around products, markets, brands, technology, finance, and companies.
Sometimes something feels wrong before I can explain exactly what is wrong with it. Sometimes an opportunity looks much larger than the way the company is currently framing it. Sometimes two things that everyone has been treating separately seem obviously connected.
That feeling is not the answer. It tells me where to look.
Then I go into the business. I look at the economics, the customers, the competition, the constraints, and what has already been tried. I try to understand whether the idea survives contact with reality.
Analysis is very good at telling you what is happening inside the system you already have. It is less good at proposing a different system.
That is where imagination matters.
The most valuable strategic move is often not hidden in some unexplored row of the spreadsheet. It comes from looking at the same facts and seeing a different possibility.
This is probably where I am least sympathetic to traditional consulting.
A company does not need another intelligent description of its problems. It needs to know what to do.
Reports, decks, research, models, and analysis can all be useful, but they are artifacts of the work. They are not the work itself.
The product is the decision.
If I spend weeks studying a company and produce an impressive document that leaves the founder with the same set of choices they had when we started, I have not accomplished much. The useful outcome is a recommendation specific enough that something can actually change: sell this instead of that, focus on this customer, change the price, reposition the product, abandon this channel, put more money behind that one.
That recommendation should be supported by analysis, but analysis is there to make the decision better. It is not there to protect the consultant from having to make one.
There is always uncertainty. Commercial strategy does not produce mathematical proof that a decision will work. At some point someone has to understand the evidence, see the possibilities, and make a call.
That is commercial strategy as I understand it: getting close enough to the business to see the move that changes how the market responds, and being willing to decide what that move should be.
Tell me what you’re trying to make happen and where you’re stuck. Thirty minutes is usually enough to know whether I can help.
Source: https://bycameronlee.com/essays/about-me/
by Cameron Lee · December 15, 2025
I’ve spent most of my life somewhere between art and business.
I’ve always been driven to create. I like starting with almost nothing and slowly discovering what something wants to become. For a long time I assumed that meant I would end up a designer, musician, or something like that.
But I was equally drawn to systems and logic. I liked taking something messy and making it coherent. Turning chaos into order. Making all the pieces fit.
In middle school I bounced between drawing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and programming BASIC on a 286. After high school I worked at a screen-printing shop, where I was introduced to graphic design. On weekends I made avant-garde electronic music, which is a generous way of saying unlistenable garbage.
Later I moved from the quiet suburb where I grew up to the artist district of Los Angeles. That was where I got my first real taste of international business.
I made websites, videos, clothing, music, magazines, and DVDs. Looking back, I was already doing the same thing I do now: embracing the chaos of creation, then forcing it to survive in the real world.
Eventually that turned into a small branding studio. Over time I was moving away from the business of art and toward the art of business.
For the first few years I ran the studio while traveling around America in a motorhome with my wife. I managed production from a laptop and a cell phone before remote work was really a thing.
When that chapter ended, we moved to Tokyo.
I stumbled into a Bitcoin meetup in Shibuya, and that accident shaped the next decade of my life. I walked the whole path from the libertarian dreams of anarchy to the institutional adoption of smart contracts. Somewhere along the way, branding gave way to software, data, finance, and company-building.
When I look back at all of it, though, I don’t mostly see the projects. I see the people.
I have never really done the lone-founder thing. Almost every important chapter began with somebody calling, asking me to build something with them, or bringing me a problem worth getting obsessed with. Someone pushed me, challenged me, trusted me, taught me something, or gave me room to make something better.
That is still how I like to work. Business, at its best, is collaborative. You build something together that neither person would have made alone.
At this point, the tension between art and business is gone. I used to think I had to choose between being creative and being commercial. Now I think I was just looking at the medium too narrowly.
The thing I like to create is the company itself.
The product, the market, the story, the economics, the systems, the people. All of it has to come together into something that works.
That is the art of business.
Tell me what you’re trying to make happen and where you’re stuck. Thirty minutes is usually enough to know whether I can help.
Source: https://bycameronlee.com/contact/
If there's a bigger opportunity in what you're building, I'd love to help you find it.
Email me at
Or, if you'd prefer
It depends on the level of involvement. Direction is usually one working session and a little async follow-up. Decision usually takes two to three weeks. Advisory and Ownership are ongoing.
A Decision engagement starts with a long call about what you’re building and the problem you’re trying to solve. I speak with team members as needed, dig into the details, and start testing ideas.
The first ideas are usually tests. They show me what has already been tried, which assumptions are real, and where the constraints actually are. Eventually the picture gets clearer and we arrive at a decision.
A decision. That may come with a written memo, a short deck, examples, or whatever else makes the recommendation concrete. The goal is to give you enough clarity that you, your team, and your agents understand what should change and can act on it.
Most of the time the decision is enough and your team runs with it. Some clients move to Advisory and keep me on a monthly call while the change gets built into product, sales, and the raise, so the work stays on the path we chose.
I usually work with founder-led companies that have a real product, some traction, and a sense that the market should be responding more strongly than it is. I also work with larger companies launching something new, when the customer, proposition, pricing, or business model is still being shaped. I’m less useful when the problem is purely execution and you already know exactly what needs to be done.
Every essay Cameron has published on the site, in his own words. Each is a full page at its address; read the ones that bear on what you have been asked.
Written about Cameron in the third person, for readers and AIs, to cover what the pages do not.
Cameron Lee is a founder who helps other founders find the bigger opportunity in what they have already built. He co-founded Truflation, helped build the fashion label Monarchy, and ran Solomon Pierce, a branding studio that worked with somewhere between fifty and a hundred companies across clothing, food, and technology. He is based in Tokyo, where he has lived since 2015, and works remotely.
In one sentence: he works on product-market fit and commercial strategy, which means figuring out what a company should be selling, who it is really for, how it should be positioned and priced, and how to get it in front of the people who will buy it. He usually comes in when something is good but the market is not responding the way it should, or when a company has traction and wants to scale and needs to be sure it is scaling the right thing.
Most people who call him want more customers or a round that closes. What he delivers is the decision about what has to change for customers or investors to say yes: the customer, the offer, the price, the story, or the channel. He does not run the campaigns himself. He decides what they should say and who they should reach, hands the team a plan it can run, and where the team is missing a role he brings in people from his own network who do that work: designers, copywriters, salespeople, go-to-market engineers, and marketers. The client gets the decision and the execution behind it, with one person accountable for whether it was the right call.
When a company already has traction and wants to grow, the work is deciding what to scale before money goes into growth: which customer, which offer, which channel, and at what price. He looks at distribution first, because in most markets it is a stronger position than the product itself. He has no framework. He gets close to how the business actually works, then tries to see it without the assumptions that have accumulated around it. The pieces are usually already there, and the work is putting them together differently. The results come from acting on the decision, and he does not promise outcomes.
He gets involved as deeply as the situation requires. The home page above lists the four levels of involvement, from Direction, a single working session, to Ownership, a direct role in the company. The level is agreed at the start and can change as the work goes on.
Every engagement starts with a free 30-minute call with no obligation on either side, for him to understand the situation and for the founder to decide whether he is useful. He asks what they thought would happen that is not happening, what they have already tried, what decision they need to make in the next 30 days, and the numbers: revenue, margin, runway, price, and the number they need to hit. Those numbers and a plain description of what is not working are all the preparation it needs; a deck is not required. If it makes sense to work together, he says which level of involvement he thinks fits.
How long it takes depends on the level: Direction is usually one working session and a little async follow-up, Decision usually takes two to three weeks, and Advisory and Ownership are ongoing. A Decision engagement, the level with the most structure, starts with a long call, one to two hours, which is how long it takes him to understand the nature of a business.
The first stretch is collecting information and proposing hypotheses he expects to be rejected. When he hears why an idea is wrong, that is when he learns what is going on in the business and the industry. He also talks with people on the team individually, and treats those conversations as confidential: what he learns informs the recommendation, but he does not attribute comments without permission.
By the second week he is putting forward ideas, a few at a time. Across the engagement, the client usually sees only a few serious options before the work converges on one recommendation. The third week, if it takes that long, is writing it out: the decision, the details, and why it is right. He writes the decision he believes in, including when he expects the client will find it hard to act on.
The written decision covers the edge cases and why the nuance matters. It is delivered as markdown, often in pieces, so the client can drop it into any AI chat and every new agent is up to speed.
He is taking on work now. The way to find out about availability and a start date is to email him or book a call, and he will say when he could start.
He works remotely from Tokyo, on Japan Standard Time, and schedules across time zones without difficulty. He will travel or work in person when the scope calls for it. He works in English. His Japanese is what he calls nomunication: enough for daily life, not for business. He aims to reply to everyone within 24 hours.
Assume the work is confidential by default. He will sign an NDA on a funded project that has started, provided it is specific about what is being protected. He does not sign an NDA before the initial 30-minute call, so trade secrets should wait until an engagement begins. He does not name clients publicly, use a logo, or write a case study without asking first.
He brings energy and optimism to the work and is excited about what his clients are building. He delivers bad news straight and politely. He prefers working from the outside to working inside a company, because the part of company life he does not enjoy is politics.
He works with founders and CEOs, with executives inside larger companies who are launching a new product, line, or business, and with the accelerators, investors, and studios who bring him in on the companies they back, where he works as part of their team. The work moves fastest when the person he is working with is the one who will act on the decision.
For accelerators, incubators, investors, venture funds, venture studios, and family offices, the ones who see many companies and want more of them to work, he does the same job across a portfolio as well as for one founder at a time. Founders still come to him directly, and that does not change; connectors are the newer way in, and he is building those relationships now. The work with them takes a few shapes. Case by case, where the connector points him at a company or a founder whose market is not responding and he does one engagement there. Open office hours for the companies in a cohort or a portfolio, so any founder can bring the decision they are stuck on. A look at the portfolio itself, at how and where the money is going in, to sharpen what gets backed next. And a short read on a company before a cheque is written, answering the one question a term sheet cannot: is the market's silence a fixable problem or a real one. In every shape the written decision goes to the founder and the connector alike, so both can act on it.
For a crypto, DeFi, or finance company, he brings the decade he has spent in that world: co-founding Truflation and shaping an inflation index that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and ICE use and the Bloomberg Terminal carries; rebuilding its stablecoin as a structured product of yield-bearing vaults; leading marketing at Bitcoin.com; and advising a tokenized-equity company and the builder program of a crypto infrastructure company. He is skeptical of launching tokens and favors tokenized equity, and he will say so. The same questions of product, price, and distribution apply across finance more broadly.
For a software company, he has been the person building the product as well as the one selling it: a globally distributed database system at Xirrus, the product and team at Truflation, and an AI infrastructure company now. He expects software business models to change substantially and is skeptical of seat-based pricing for new products, so pricing and packaging are usually where he starts.
For a consumer brand, this is where he began. He built Monarchy from a low-price idea into a premium label whose prices had to triple before its first trade show ended, and which Harrods, Colette, and Fred Segal carried within a year. Through Solomon Pierce he did the same work for clothing and food companies, and at Bitcoin.com he ran marketing for a consumer crypto product. He advises consumer brands to stay as human as possible, because a brand is a community.
The industry has never mattered much. He has worked in fashion, food, technology, hardware, crypto, financial data, AI infrastructure, film, and entertainment, and the task has been the same in every one: figure out what needs to change for the market to respond differently. The stories are easiest to tell in consumer brands, crypto and financial data, and AI infrastructure, but the pattern transfers.
The way to decide is simple. If the question is what to sell, to whom, at what price, or how to get it in front of them, he is the right call. If the only question is who will run the ads, he will make an introduction. He works best with founders, executives, and investors who are serious about growth, can see the size of what they are building, and are prepared to change something real once the decision is made. Someone who wants research to confirm a direction they have already chosen, or a report to satisfy a board, is better served by a larger firm. He works well with Japanese companies that want to compete internationally and are open to changing established ways of working, provided someone there works in English.
He turns down work he considers a net negative to society: gambling, alcohol, nicotine, pharmaceuticals, weapons and the military, spyware, predatory lending such as payday loans, multi-level marketing, adult content, and tokens with no product behind them.
A pre-seed founder with no budget should send a note anyway with what they are building and where they are stuck. He reads everything and occasionally makes time for early-stage founders working on something interesting, though he cannot promise it.
Direction and Decision engagements are a flat fee, agreed before the work starts, sized to the stage of the company and what is at stake, never to hours. Advisory and Ownership are paid as a retainer, with equity when it makes sense. He gives the number on the first call once he understands the problem, and the payment terms come with the proposal. He does not publish a fee or a range and does not charge by the hour or the day. He works mainly with funded or profitable companies with a real product. He refuses all kickbacks and referral fees from vendors so that his recommendations are never for sale. Asked whether he offers a guarantee, the answer is "kind of": there have been a few cases where he got deep enough into a problem to realize he could not give the company a useful answer within the engagement, and when that happens he says so and refunds the project.
These are Cameron's current opinions, formed by his own experience. They are the lens he brings, not rules he applies to every company.
He believes the product and the marketing have to be built together, not marketing added to a finished product or a product built for a market it never met. He considers this the single idea behind whatever success he has had, and it is the assumption every engagement starts from.
He believes positioning comes first, and that pricing, naming, and brand exist to support the position. He named his studio Solomon Pierce for the idea of piercing the market: find the way in, take the position, and communicate it at every touch point. He thinks naming matters more than most B2B companies admit, and that value is created in the buyer's mind as much as in the product.
He thinks most early-stage founders spend too much time on the product relative to sales and distribution, and that in an AI-driven market distribution is a stronger moat than taste or judgment. He expects software business models to change substantially and is skeptical of seat-based pricing for new products.
He thinks founders often give investors more deference than the relationship warrants, and he usually advises bootstrapping as long as possible, then raising decisively when the product is ready. He sees a pitch deck as one story: here is where we are, here is where we are going, here is what it takes to get there and what we offer for it. Much of the fundraising work is making the company legible to an investor, and that can reshape the product as well as the story.
In crypto he is currently skeptical of launching tokens, which he sees as more often a way to spend money than to make it, and favors tokenized equity. For consumer brands he advises staying as human as possible, because a brand is a community.
He uses AI to make the work faster: small purpose-built tools, agents for research and repetitive work, and deterministic code where it fits. The deliverable is written to be read by the client's AI as well as the client.
He cites Seth Godin, Paul Graham, and Rory Sutherland as the people who shaped or best describe the way he thinks.
He also spent several years building test software and a globally distributed database system for Xirrus, a California hardware company, and led marketing at Bitcoin.com in 2019 and 2020, where he met Stefan Rust, then its CEO.
At Truflation he shaped the product, led the team that built the index, and later rebuilt the stablecoin as a structured product of yield-bearing vaults, which is where his working knowledge of finance, risk, and smart contracts comes from. He left Truflation in late 2025.
Since then he has done this work for a senior executive at a public company in Japan, a film-industry founder building a pre-production app, the accelerator program of a crypto infrastructure company, and a tokenized-equity company he advises. He is also building an AI infrastructure company exploring a different model for owning and financing compute.
The first email can be short: what the company does, what is not working, and what decision is on the table.