A career in five acts.

I attended seven schools across England and Australia. On Christmas Eve 1975, aged nine, I boarded a Qantas jumbo at Heathrow with my mother and two siblings, bound for Darwin. My childhood spanned West Africa, England and the Northern Territory, with later stops in Alice Springs, Ballarat, Sydney, Bendigo and Melbourne. I've never had a simple answer to "Where are you from?" - which turned out to be excellent training for a life of starting things from scratch, and eventually became the raw material for my writing.

My first career was backstage. I worked as a stagehand, in technical theatre and lighting design, then moved into arts management, becoming Director of the Bendigo Regional Arts Centre. Theatre teaches you things no MBA can: the show opens on the date printed on the ticket, everyone from the fly floor to the box office matters, and problems get solved with whatever is to hand.

After leaving venue management I worked as an arts consultant. By the late 1990s, arts organisations were telephoning me looking for stage managers and staff, and I was making the connections for free. There was clearly a gap - a whole national sector with no central place to find people, jobs or information.

With my co-founder Fiona Boyd, I turned that gap into ArtsHub. The first version was gloriously manual: we cut job advertisements out of the weekend newspapers, retyped them, and emailed a jobs bulletin from home. Melbourne Theatre Company staff printed it out and pinned it in the foyer.

In November 2000 we introduced paid online membership - and despite everyone's scepticism that people would pay for internet content, attracted 950 subscribers within twelve weeks, more than a decade before paywalls became standard at the major newspapers. ArtsHub grew into national infrastructure for the arts sector, covering jobs, news, grants and professional development. We sold the business in 2007. Twenty-five years after that first hand-typed bulletin, it's still going, with a jobs newsletter reaching more than 38,000 readers.

After selling ArtsHub, I spent seven years consulting and building ventures between Australia and San Francisco. The anchor was icix, a Silicon Valley supply-chain risk platform whose original website I'd built back in 2003 when it was a tiny startup. I worked with the company for over a decade, including long stints in its San Francisco offices, helping develop major products within its SaaS offering as it grew into a network connecting more than 20,000 businesses - including Walmart, jcpenney and Sysco.

San Francisco also brought work as online architect for Inman News, the leading source of independent real estate news, and REmessenger, a startup I co-founded to help real estate agents share listings across social media. Back home, I built the online event management and sales platform that underpinned V8 Race Experience's business for a decade, and worked with Metro Magazine and the Australian Teachers of Media for more than fifteen years on content sales, event bookings and film awards.

In between came a string of our own ventures: collectZing, a social network for collectors; RushCrowds, connecting people with events; and Codocs, an online collaborative document tool that enjoyed a small success - until Google bought Writely and started building Google Apps, at which point our days were numbered. Fiona and I also co-authored Niche Content Millionaire, the true story of how we built a business around subscription content. Not everything worked. That was rather the point: this was the period where I learned, venture by venture, what makes an online business durable.

EdSmart began the same way ArtsHub did - with an everyday problem nobody else wanted to solve. As parents of three, Fiona and I were drowning in school paperwork and repetitive forms. We founded EdSmart in Melbourne in 2014 to digitise school administration, permission forms, compliance workflows and communications.

Over eleven years as CTO, CEO and CSO I did a bit of everything: product architecture, SaaS strategy, institutional and government sales, marketing and large school-system relationships. The company grew to serve more than 1,400 schools and over a million educators, students and parents, across Australia and into Europe, North America and South-East Asia.

I became particularly focused on what schools hold in their systems: identity, family, health and welfare information about children. I led EdSmart's ISO 27001 information security certification and spent years encouraging schools to ask harder questions of their technology vendors about privacy and security. In May 2025 I stepped back from full-time work; I remain a major shareholder, company director and advisor.

What people call semi-retirement, I'd call a portfolio life. I write two newsletters - Alone Rangers, on loneliness, belonging and the quiet work of being a good human, and Worth Following, on who leaders need to be rather than what they should do. I mentor founders and executives, take on advisory work, and travel more than I have in decades.

The through-line across all five acts hasn't changed: find the neglected, unglamorous problem, build something useful around it, and make sure it serves the community it's meant for.