I’m fascinated by how people reason and decide — so I keep building things that put the answer under pressure.
Get in touchHere is a recommendation that looks airtight. Switch on the biases hiding inside it and watch the conviction — and the quality of the thinking — come undone. It is the thing I build, in miniature.
Proceed — high conviction.
This is Decision Intel, in one tile — but it runs on real strategic memos, not a toy.
The same question has followed me into everything I do: why do smart, well-resourced people get important decisions so wrong? I don’t think it’s a lack of intelligence. I think good reasoning has to be built and pressure-tested, not assumed — and most of the time, nobody does the building. The mistake is already in the thinking long before it shows up in the result.
So I work the question from every side I can reach. I read the cognitive science and the market history. I write. I build software that audits the reasoning behind a decision before the outcome can punish it. And I teach it to people younger than me, because explaining something is the fastest way to find out whether you actually understand it. The thread isn’t finance, or psychology, or code — it’s the quality of the thinking underneath all three.
Most of us never audit our own thinking. We just trust it — and find out later whether we should have.
The same obsession — how people reason and decide — pursued as research, as companies I’ve built, as teaching, and on a live desk.
A reasoning-audit platform. It reads a high-stakes strategic memo and surfaces the cognitive biases, blind spots, and weak assumptions in the reasoning — before the decision gets made, not after the outcome punishes it. I built it because the most expensive mistakes I kept reading about weren’t failures of data; they were failures of thinking that no one checked.
An autonomous market-intelligence platform built on a multi-agent AI architecture. It doesn’t just flag what moved — it argues why, runs every thesis past an adversarial “red team” agent that tries to tear it down, and calibrates its own confidence against its real track record. The same obsession as everything else here, turned on the market and on itself.
A published paper tracing the 2008 financial crisis to its cognitive roots — the biases, and the cortisol and testosterone feedback loops, that turned individually rational people into a collectively irrational market. It’s where the whole obsession started.
A student-led initiative I co-founded to teach younger students how money actually works — and, just as importantly, the psychology that quietly drives the decisions they’ll make about it.
Built and run with other students, because the fastest way to find out whether you understand something is to teach it to someone younger.
The same lens, applied to live markets: building a portfolio-intelligence view that makes a fund’s exposure, its risk, and the real drivers of its returns legible at a glance — so the people making the calls can actually see what they’re deciding on.
A portfolio-intelligence dashboard — exposure, risk metrics, and performance attribution — assembled into one view a manager can act on.
A dozen of the twenty-two. Hover one.
Each one is a way a confident decision goes quietly wrong.
I was born in the United States and raised between Lagos and the UK — Lagos is home. San Francisco is where I’m headed next.
I’m sixteen — which I mention here, near the bottom, rather than at the top, because I’d rather the work spoke first.
Away from the screen, I’ve played piano for twelve years: ABRSM Grade 6 piano, Grade 6 guitar, and Grade 5 music theory with distinction. Practising something for years before you’re any good at it turns out to be the same discipline everything else here needed.
I’m a Christian, and it’s the quiet foundation under all of this — the reason I care about building things that are honest, not only clever.
When I'm generally reachable. Term keeps weekdays busy — evenings and weekends are best.
Twelve years in — ABRSM Grade 6 piano, Grade 5 theory with distinction, and Grade 6 guitar on the way. [confirm exact grades] Practising something for years before you’re any good at it turns out to be the same discipline everything else here needed.
Rated “Excellent” across quality of work, timekeeping, work relationships, and competency in role during a finance internship — cited for math and communication, and for being receptive to feedback. Objectives signed off as fully met.
Advised by a senior advisor who helped take Wiz to a $32B outcome.
Folahan Williams is a 16-year-old founder and the creator of Decision Intel, an AI platform that audits the reasoning behind high-stakes decisions. Born in the United States and raised between Lagos and the UK, he works at the intersection of behavioral economics, decision quality, and software.
Decision Intel is a reasoning-audit platform founded by Folahan Williams. It reads strategic memos and surfaces the cognitive biases and weak assumptions in the reasoning before a decision is made, grading decision quality on logic, evidence, and bias resistance.
Founding Decision Intel; published research on the cognitive roots of the 2008 financial crisis; co-founding Finding Finance, a student-led financial-literacy initiative; and a TED-style talk on metacognition.
By email at folahanwilliams@gmail.com, or through the GitHub, LinkedIn, and Decision Intel links on his website.
