Things I’ve Done

I’ve worked in a number of industries, across various sectors – always with the goal of trying to help customers discover innovative solutions to their problems. I believe you should always be learning and if you don’t look back at yourself from a few years ago and think how naive you were, you’re not learning enough.

It’s not a linear career like many you see, but I’ve always wanted to find where I can have the biggest impact on the biggest problems. Below is a very quick summary, along with some links to things I’ve written through the time.

Banking

I studied finance and economics as I find it very interesting, and it’s clearly an important sector. Because of this, I got a job at ANZ (an Australian bank) and worked various roles that were mainly within margin lending – lending money based on stocks you own.

The most interesting things I did were to build risk models to determine lending levels based on a company’s performance, building models of customer behaviour to determine where the business could grow and developing a customer loyalty program.

I left because I didn’t love the amount of structure and bloat that comes in a large corporate business. Having to get 12 approvals for a simple decisions was not efficient and incredibly frustrating when you wanted to move quickly.

Fresho

I went in the complete opposite direction after this and became the first employee at a food-tech startup in Melbourne. (It actually started as a distribution business, but I knew the founder was super smart and would take the business to a good place, which he has)

Being an employee at a fast-growing startup means you do anything and everything. Because of my finance background, I often ran the finance side of the business including modelling and building the IMs for capital raises. However, as the business grew, I worked very closely with customers and the development team to deliver outcomes for our customers that drove the business forward. I later learned this was the precise definition of product management (I know it’s not the precise definition – it’s my precise definition).

Junkmail

I left Fresho as I had had a startup of my own for some time on the side, and it was showing promise. Working at a startup is intense enough – trying to juggle another business is impossible. I had to take the opportunity to see how I could progress my ecommerce brand, Junkmail, which was a subscription underwear company for men.

I raised two rounds of funding to grow it worldwide, but in the end, there wasn’t enough growth to continue focusing on it after 5 years. I learned an amazing amount and it helped me grow significantly in business, and life. I have written about some of it here.

Testing and experimenting

I think it’s very strange that in a standard linear career, you’re forgiven for not knowing everything when you start and as you grow. After 10+ years, you may start to be the fount of knowledge and people will not be as forgiving for basic mistakes. However, if you’re an entrepreneur, you need to succeed with your first swing. If not, people tend to think that’s not the career for you.

Throughout Junkmail, I studied successful founders and noticed that a very common trait was that they were technical (among many other things). I also came to love tech businesses that I worked with like Shopify and Klaviyo. The zero marginal cost, the ability to scale rapidly and infinitely and no transaction costs were very appealing to future business endeavours I pursued.

Therefore, I spent time freelance marketing (skills I had acquired from Junkmail) while running some experiments (which I’ve discussed in a little more detail here) and getting to know more great people in the Australian tech ecosystem (including working with two great founders at a brand new startup Elenta).

Learnosity

I once again learned so much working on those very early-stage endeavours, but I thought it was time to work at a scale-up. It was appealing to me to see how things were done at a grander scale (I had been in super early-stage for a long time) where you could reach tens of millions of customers within minutes.

I had been studying the Education sector in my spare time and thought there were enormous opportunities to have business success, while creating huge societal value (I still do if you want to read here).