The Work
Experience in the room, not theory.
After building two companies over 25 years, I work with founders and businesses who want someone who has actually done it. I'm open to advisory roles, board positions and mentoring.
Mentoring & advisory
I mentor founders and executives on the things that actually decide whether a company works: product, strategy, culture, governance, and staying sane while you do it.
EdSmart
EdSmart is the cloud platform I co-founded in Melbourne in 2014 to take the paperwork out of school life - digitising permission forms, consent, compliance workflows and the communications between schools and families. What began as two frustrated parents' side project grew into one of Australia's leading school administration platforms, used by schools across Australia and internationally.
I led the company as CTO, CEO and CSO for eleven years - through product and market expansion, large school-system partnerships and ISO 27001 information security certification - before we handed day-to-day leadership to a new CEO in 2025. I remain a major shareholder, company director and advisor, committed to the company's long-term success.
What I bring
Beneath the tags
What I'm good at. What I care about.
What I'm good at
- Spotting the operational problem before anyone frames it as a technology problem. ArtsHub started because arts organisations couldn't find people; EdSmart started because schools were drowning in paper. In both cases the insight came first and the software second.
- Building things manually before scaling them. The first ArtsHub was job ads cut from newspapers and retyped by hand. I'm comfortable in the unglamorous early phase where you do the work yourself until you've earned the right to automate it.
- Combining mission and commerce. Both companies were built to serve a community - the arts, schools - and both were deliberately designed as sustainable businesses, not grant-dependent projects. I don't think those goals are in tension; I think each one keeps the other honest.
What I care about
- Technology that treats people well. Schools hold identity, family, health and welfare information about children, and I've spent years advocating for privacy-by-design and pushing schools to ask harder questions of their vendors. Ethical technology isn't a compliance checkbox; it's a habit of mind.
- The people doing the work. From a decade volunteering in the Royal Children's Hospital Emergency Department to mentoring first-time founders, I keep coming back to the same thing: showing up consistently for people matters more than any strategy deck.
- Being a good human. It's the question underneath both my newsletters and, increasingly, everything else - how the qualities we admire in leaders (honesty, listening, adaptability, lifting others) are really just the qualities of a decent person, practised in public.