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Cameron Bell failed high school, got into BlackRock, felt sick about it, and walked away. Now he's building the company that controls the cost of moving things across America - at a moment when that has never mattered more.
At school, Cameron Bell was the kid selling things.
Not because he was ambitious in the conventional sense. Because sitting still and reading a textbook was not something his brain was wired to do. He has dyslexia. Even today, he reads at the level of a ten-year-old.
"I was always the guy selling stuff and playing sport," he says. "I didn't know academics. Literally none."
He failed high school. Assumed he'd figure something out. Had, in his own words, a blast.
What happened next is one of the stranger academic arcs in recent memory: community college, where his first essay was a single paragraph long. Then Glasgow University - a Russell Group institution, the British equivalent of the Ivy League - where he finished top of his class. Then LSE.
The kid who couldn't read had become one of the best students in the country. He just needed to find the path there himself.
At LSE, the path everyone wanted led to investment banking. The crème de la crème was BlackRock. Cameron got in.
Then he felt sick.
"I had this crushing feeling of, what am I doing?"
He knew exactly what two years at BlackRock would get him. Two years, then a move to private equity or a hedge fund. Then the ladder. Fixed, predictable, well-compensated, and - to him - deeply wrong.
"There was a fixed ladder. Very fixed, very boring. Just a lot of grind."
He left. Joined a London fintech called Teya that looked, for a moment, like it might become the next Stripe. It didn't go that way, but it got to a $10 billion valuation. While he was there, he watched the sales motion and decided it made no sense - deal sizes versus lifetime value, the economics just didn't hold. He complained about it constantly. Eventually he left for Revolut.
Then Lawrence, his head of partnerships at Teya, called.
"He said, okay, you can do your thing. We formed our own channel, whatever we wanted. No budget. Just me and one other guy."
Within six months, that channel was generating a third of Teya's revenue. It became the dominant GTM. Cameron had proven the thesis he'd been arguing - and done it from scratch, with nothing.
He left to start his own company.
His uncle runs a logistics company. Cameron knew the industry. He set out to build SaaS for freight.
For a moment, it looked like it was going to work. The deck was going vertical in terms of views. He was in conversations with five tier-one investors -GP and partner level, late-stage firms. The kind of meetings most founders never get.
Then it all fell through.
"I ran out of money. And the feedback I got was essentially: the co-founder."
He doesn't dwell on it. The lesson was clear, the experience painful, and the next step was obvious - if building with the wrong person was the problem, find a better way to find the right one.
A friend pointed him toward Entrepreneur First. He applied just before he would have had to move back in with his parents in the north of England.
EF gave him a £6,000 stipend and a room full of strangers.
Cameron describes the Entrepreneur First model with characteristic bluntness: "It's like Love Island meets Lord of the Flies."
Cameron and other founders at the EF office in San Francisco, CA
You're put in a room with a cohort of high-achieving people, all of whom are trying to find a co-founder and build something from nothing. EF gives you the £6K to survive for a couple of months. If you produce something worth backing, they invest £250K. A few months after that is demo day - where funds like Founders Fund come to see what the cohort has built.
For founders who didn't grow up in the Bay Area, who don't have a natural network in Silicon Valley, who haven't been absorbing startup culture their whole lives, EF provides something YC doesn't: it teaches you the game before you play it.
"Some kids grew up around here. They've kind of tacitly done it all their lives in a weird way. If you didn't come from that background, EF trains you on how to talk to investors, how the game works."
The second thing it provides is the hardest thing in startups: a co-founder you can actually trust.
"Finding a great co-founder is the hardest thing. It's the hardest thing. And in EF, if you're good, you'll find someone good."
Cameron told EF early on that some of the cohort might not be hardcore enough for him. He asked to be introduced to the most serious people. One of them became his co-founder.
His co-founder Ufuk Dede, - a founding engineer at Cenoa, an international payments fintech - was, in Cameron's words, the one the whole cohort crowded around to ask how he'd built things. A technical mind capable of building internal tooling that still isn't fully explained. "He's a killer, man."
Cameron and Ufuk on a call
When you import goods into the United States, a customs broker has to make a case to the government: here is what this thing is, here is where it came from, here is why it should be allowed in, here is what it owes in duties.
Most customs brokers do this manually, with information they receive at the last minute, in a way that hasn't fundamentally changed in decades. The result: goods stuck at the border, surprise fees, and duty rates that are almost always higher than they need to be.
"Your stuff gets stuck at the border and that can absolutely hammer your margins," Cameron says. "We hear two percent on margins a lot."
Greenwich Mercantile integrates directly with clients' internal systems - pulling the data early, building the documentation automatically, getting import filings in front of the US government without the last-minute scramble. If a filing doesn't pass, they don't charge.
The second thing they do is lower duty rates. A normal broker, handling dozens of clients at volume, can't justify a deep investigation into every import to find legitimate duty savings. Greenwich Mercantile uses AI and human expertise together to run that investigation at scale.
The timing is not accidental.
In a world of elevated tariffs - in some cases reaching 150% of the value of the goods - the difference between a mediocre customs broker and a great one is not a rounding error. It's the difference between a viable import operation and one that doesn't make sense to run.
The example Cameron uses: a Texas drilling company sending broken rig parts to Canada for repair. Each individual import was low enough value that no broker was going to do the paperwork to prove it was a repair rather than a standard import. Greenwich Mercantile did. The company now saves $200,000 a year in duties.
That's not a feature. That's why customers sign NDAs before they'll even take a meeting.
Two ICPs have emerged, one from inbound and one from outbound.
The inbound is lower ACV - cosmetics companies, often European, moving product into the US. They find Greenwich Mercantile through SEO, a channel the traditional customs brokerage industry has almost entirely ignored.
"The field doesn't know how to do SEO. It's crazy," Cameron says. "We're killing it there."
The outbound targets higher ACV customers: robotics and drone companies, and oil and gas. Both move complex, high-value components across the US-Canada-Mexico corridor constantly. Both have duty situations that are genuinely complicated. Both have margins where a 2% swing is existential.
The cold call still works. "Everyone's on their phone, sending emails. Emails aren't working as well as they used to. But calling someone up, pitching a value prop - if it resonates, people jump on a call." Conferences are working too. The pipeline, in Cameron's words, is looking sick.
There is a larger story Cameron is positioning Greenwich Mercantile inside - one that aligns with a current in American venture capital, policy, and manufacturing that goes by the name of American Dynamism.
Drone manufacturers. Defense suppliers. Allied industrial companies. Everyone agrees these sectors need to be rebuilt domestically. Far fewer people talk about what it actually takes to move the parts.
"Everyone talks about how we need to build these drone manufacturers up. But everyone underplays the role of logistics and getting the cost down. That was the key point of anyone who's researched Standard Oil."
Rockefeller's dominance wasn't just about oil. It was about carrier rates - who controlled the cost of moving things. Cameron has clearly thought carefully about this. He is not building a software company that happens to touch trade. He is building an institution.
In twelve months: raise from a tier-one fund. $3 million in revenue. Eighteen months: $5-6 million. A fully licensed US customs broker.
The longer view is bigger.
"Thinking 20, 50, 500 years out - we're going to be closer to the East India Trading Company."
His argument: the United States will remain credibly powerful, but it will need new trading institutions to act as intermediaries between itself and China - the way the East India Company acted as a middleman for Britain. Greenwich Mercantile intends to be that institution. A fully integrated trading organization.
Whether or not that vision arrives exactly as described, the immediate opportunity is real and large: a $100 billion-plus import market, run mostly by humans using legacy processes, at a moment when tariff complexity has made getting it right more valuable than it has ever been.
The kid who couldn't read failed high school. Finished top of his class at Glasgow. Turned down the BlackRock ladder. Built a channel that became a third of a $10B company's revenue from nothing. Watched his round fall through. Rebuilt.
He's in San Francisco now. The 500-year clock is already running.
Cameron Bell is the co-founder of Greenwich Mercantile, an AI-native customs brokerage built for the modern tariff environment. He is based in San Francisco.
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