A little about me.

Since the age of 15 when I started my first 'enterprise' teaching my class-mates guitar, I have basically always been self employed, apart from a brief 3 month stint as a customs clerk in Sydney. (Hello Dick Franko!) Over the course of this period I have worked as sub-contract motor bike & van courier, done stints as a car magazine test driver, launched my own restaurant and catering company, performed as a musician, built a number of IT&T companies, agriculture related businesses and been involved in capital raising, venture capital and the private equity markets.

What it has actually been like

I've travelled widely, lived abroad and enjoyed varying levels of success, along with an edifying number of business failures. Yet through it all I have been privileged enough to garner invaluable experiences and lessons from a number of individuals who have shaped my outlook, my abilities, my knowledge and ultimately my life.

The whole record is on the portfolio page rather than a selected highlight reel. Thirty years produces a long list, and the shape of it is more useful than any one entry.

Where I tend to be useful

Corporate structuring, intellectual property strategy, and sourcing angel, seed and investment capital. The industries have ranged from IT and telecommunications to food and beverage, hospitality, agriculture and green tech.

What carries across all of them is narrower than it looks. The same problems recur in different clothes, and most of the value is in recognising one early rather than solving it late.

Alongside my own ventures, I work as a professional director. My experience includes roles as Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director and Chairman.

My current board roles include Financial Hub Financial Services Pty Ltd and Dinetap Australia, and I am rejoining the board of Pipezi Pty Ltd. More on the portfolio page.

No fixed address

Since February 2024 I have been perpetually itinerant. More than five hundred different hotels so far, mostly across Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia with Australia in between. It started as convenience and turned into the way I work.

You get very good at packing. The businesses run just as well for it, which after three decades of offices was a genuinely useful thing to find out.

What I am doing now

Still building, mostly across Australia, Indonesia and Singapore. Still reading far too much neuroscience for someone with no formal training in it. Still playing guitar, now in a different room every few nights.

Hotel Hobo, my hotel-review and travel-writing venture, launches in November 2026.