I didn't take the usual route into journalism. My career began at McDonald's, like all good Bitcoiners. Admittedly, I got there before the meme.
School ended at 16 with unimpressive GCSEs, no university plan, and parents who were understandably concerned that I might be making life harder for myself than it needed to be. The normal route was further education, university, a degree and then a career. The school system had not suited me, so going back for more of the same did not feel like an option. I needed to learn by doing something more practical, so I told my parents I would figure it out for myself. Somehow, they agreed to leave me alone and let me try.
I was barely 17 when I moved out of home because I had an overwhelming need to be independent. To make it work, I had a 9 to 5 office job, worked three evenings a week in a nightclub, spent Sundays behind a bar, and studied on the evenings I had free. It was brutal at times, but it taught me more about money, work and people than another few years in a classroom ever could.
Work came first, and it came in all sorts of forms. McDonald's, selling double glazing, shop assistant roles and plenty of jobs that turned out to be far more useful than I realised at the time.
I had always been good with money and budgeting and one day, while flicking through a college prospectus, I noticed evening classes in accountancy. It sounded practical, useful and, most importantly, like something I could study while still earning. I also had a pretty good typing speed, which led to a secretarial job on an accounting team at a reinsurance company, and the rest was history.
Accountancy qualifications were earned in the evenings alongside full time work. It was not glamorous and it was not part of some genius life plan. I learned, worked my way up, and built a career from the inside rather than waiting for someone to hand me the right credentials.
What started with evening classes and a secretarial job on an accounting team became a career in finance, accounting and technology. At 24, I left London with my boyfriend, now my husband, to travel through Asia and Australia. We spent a year in New Zealand, where I worked as an accountant, then came back through South America. Again, it was not exactly the standard route, but it changed how I saw the world, and how money shapes it.
Later, work took me to New York on a sponsored work visa for a specialist accounting role. On paper, it was a big step, but I badly underestimated the cost of living, failed to negotiate a salary that matched it, and somehow decided Midtown Manhattan was a sensible place to live. By day I worked as a consolidation accountant. By night, I seated people at Applebee's in Times Square to make ends meet. Eventually, the numbers stopped making sense, so I came back to London.
After New York, the work moved into financial analysis and systems accounting, putting me between finance and technology teams and the systems they relied on.
It was not the sort of work that made people lean across a dinner table and say, “Tell me more about enterprise planning software.” In fairness, this turned out to be useful preparation for Bitcoin, another subject that rarely makes people relax into a warm and curious conversation. Most people either ridicule it, assume I have been taken in by a Ponzi scheme, or tell me it is criminal money that kills the planet.
Long before Bitcoin entered the picture, I had already started to see how little of the world really made sense, and how much injustice was hidden behind systems most of us are taught not to question.
A visit to Malawi when I was 14 changed the way I saw the world. My dad was working on a consultancy project to help improve communications systems, and I remember seeing government officials with money, cars and status, while desperate people were left struggling on the streets. The mechanics of it were beyond me then, but the feeling was not. Something about the way power and money were arranged was wrong.
Bitcoin eventually gave me a framework for questions that had been sitting in the background for most of my life.
The first Bitcoin purchase was not noble, ideological or smart. I had read an article dismissing Bitcoin as a boomer coin, and at the same time I kept seeing articles about various other cryptos that sounded more exciting, more innovative and more likely to make me rich by Tuesday.
Thinking I was doing my research, I decided to dabble. What I did not realise was that many of these projects were effectively companies able to print their own tokens, raise money and pump out marketing dressed up as analysis. It made people feel as though they were doing their research, when really they were being taken in by a marketing machine that looked more plausible than most scams.
That kicked off what can only be described as a fairly committed shitcoin phase. Promises were chased, nonsense was briefly believed, lessons were learned the hard way, and getting rekt turned out to be an excellent but expensive education.
That was when I began to understand why Bitcoin was different.
Getting burned in the shitcoin casino helped me see the difference, and my background in accounting, finance systems and analysis helped me understand the structure beneath it. Bitcoin had no company behind it, no marketing department, no CEO, no pre-mine, and no one who could print more when the numbers got inconvenient. Its rules were enforced by code, energy, and a global network of participants who did not need to trust one another. Fixed supply, proof of work and decentralisation were what made it different.
Some crypto projects may have use cases, but Bitcoin was trying to solve a different problem. It was not promising a faster app, a better database or a new token economy. It was asking whether money itself could exist outside political control.
I was made redundant in 2022, which gave me the opportunity to work out what to do next. By that point, I had been deep down the Bitcoin rabbit hole for a while and knew that whatever came next had to be connected to it. For the first time in years, I was back where I had started, with no clear plan, no obvious route, and the freedom to work out what was next.
In January 2023, my first column for City A.M. questioned central bank digital currencies in the City of London's own paper. That column became My Two Sats, and the work later grew into more analytical pieces at Forbes, reporting on Bitcoin, energy, financial freedom, digital identity, surveillance and the future of money.
That same year, Bitcoin Policy UK was born. I co-founded the organisation, led its work on mining, later served as CEO and now sit as a Director. Bitcoin could not print its own token, fund a lobbying machine or buy influence in the way much of the crypto industry could, and policymakers were often treating it as just another part of crypto. So we built Bitcoin Policy UK as volunteers, to give Bitcoin a voice.
You will see that in the range of my writing, from price and markets to privacy, policy, sovereignty and freedom money. Bitcoin touches so much because it changes the relationship between money, power and the individual.
The conventional path was never really mine. Work, evening classes, travel, mistakes, finance systems, becoming Spreadsheet Susie, odd jobs and a spectacular shitcoin phase all ended up pointing in the right direction. It turns out that was the perfect preparation for writing about Bitcoin.
I came for Number Go Up and stayed for the revolution.