Nov 2024 – Present · 1 yr 4 mos

Jul 2023 – Sep 2023 · 2 mos · Melbourne, Victoria, Australia · Remote

• Devicie has a fantastic, sticky product which has attracted great funding rounds from highly respected VCs. The CEO asked me to come in to help with some scaling challenges in their dev/product teams.

Mar 2021 – Sep 2023 · 2 yrs 6 mos · Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

• Helping Gen Z women build healthy fitness habits.
• Steppen was acquired by Alta in September 2023.

Apr 2020 – Dec 2020 · 8 mos · Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

• Human knowledge advances through research, and systematic reviews are an essential part of that. Each review combines individual pieces of research into a coherent whole, and our platform makes that process smooth.
• This is especially crucial in health, even more so in a global pandemic. Researchers use Covidence to create Australia's official living guidelines for COVID-19 (https://covid19evidence.net.au/).
• We're building a top team to help make human knowledge better. I'm here to help out on an interim basis. Covidence has strong product-market fit and now needs to move fast on capitalising on it. My job is to speed along the growth of the tech team while helping to create a strong tech and product focus.

Apr 2019 – Apr 2021 · 2 yrs · Melbourne, Australia

• Helping out around the edges of Buildkite's wild ride, working closely with the founders and the small high-quality team.

Apr 2019 – Jul 2019 · 3 mos · Melbourne, Australia

• Work with the board and management to understand where the company sits, what its future opportunities are, and where the future priorities should lie.

Feb 2016 – Apr 2019 · 3 yrs 2 mos · Melbourne

• Creating and growing Stax, a B2B SaaS product which helps organisations get on top of the cost, quality, risk, and compliance of their AWS workloads. We built a great product team of eight people, drawing on the resources of the broader Versent group. We took the business to $1m+ ARR in just a couple of years. My roles were to lead and guide the team; shape the product and business model; oversee the tech and marketing; and generally run the company.

Feb 2015 – Feb 2016 · 1 yr · Melbourne, Australia

• Versent is a fast-growing cloud consulting firm. I joined to bring product expertise, and find ways to use Versent's skills, experience, and market position to spin out products. This led to us creating Stax.

Sep 2014 – Feb 2015 · 5 mos · Melbourne, Australia

• (combined role with SitePoint and Learnable - see below)

Apr 2009 – Aug 2013 · 4 yrs 4 mos · Collingwood, Victoria, Australia

• Founding GM of a fast-growing startup.
• When I joined SitePoint, Flippa hadn't yet spun out. I was the first employee and had a team of two working with me. Over the next four years revenue went up 600% and the team grew to a size of 18, spanning three continents.
• My responsibilities evolved as the company grew. To start with we were moving fast on building out the product under my guidance. I ran the Dev Team and was the Product Owner. As things changed, I focused at various points on Marketing, PR and on managing the Customer Support team. Throughout I was responsible for working closely with the board on Strategy, and for Hiring and HR. The most important part of my role throughout was to make sure we had the right people in the team and to put them in a position to do a great job. I take immense pride in the fact that we grew a strong team who worked well together.

Sep 2014 – Feb 2015 · 5 mos · Melbourne, Australia

• (combined role with SitePoint and Flippa - see below)

Aug 2013 – Sep 2014 · 1 yr 1 mo · Melbourne, Australia

• I ran a subscription business teaching web development using courses, videos and articles. In my year at Learnable, subscription revenue more than doubled and our churn rate fell. We focused on the quality of content we were commissioning, the quality of the product we were using to teach, and the quality of our acquisition marketing.

Sep 2014 – Feb 2015 · 5 mos · Melbourne, Australia

• Across SitePoint, Flippa and Learnable I was responsible for making sure that we were building the right things, using the right process, with the right people and the right technology. Despite being a short period, this was a very rewarding role. I worked closely with some great developers to make interesting tech choices, made some excellent hires and mentored others. I brought in a Scrum-style agile process at Flippa which was significantly more effective than the previous process. This was an enjoyable role which was difficult to leave.

Aug 2013 – Sep 2014 · 1 yr 1 mo · Melbourne, Australia

• I shepherded SitePoint further through its transition from selling print books to being an advertising- and subscription-driven business. Advertising revenue rose 80% across the year and the funnel of traffic across to Learnable improved significantly. Because of the nature of the transition, this wasn't without its challenges - most notably, it required me to learn about managing a sales team.

Mar 2012 – Present · 14 yrs · Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

• Angel investor in 20+ early-stage companies.

Jun 2010 – Present · 15 yrs 9 mos · Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

• Helping many many startups (always pro bono) in a wide variety of areas. We talk business strategy, raising funds, doing the tech implementation, hiring people, how the go-to-market looks; and, of course, about all the personal challenges of being an early-stage startup founder.
• Companies include: Diolog, Trova Health, Flowing Bee, Zello, Picjam, Open Realestate AI, CarbonHQ, WhyHive, GXE, Trace, Rntr, Syncio, ReciMe, Doohly, Leesy, One Right Eye, Hecate, PowerTester, Paddl, Umps Health, Nebula Health, The Baby Club; probably more I forgot, sorry!

May 2007 – Apr 2009 · 1 yr 11 mos

• I ran a small team of highly skilled developers building complex numeric software in C++ and Java. Our systems performed Crew Scheduling and Rostering for a number of airlines, and were extended out to apply to other domains.

Jan 2005 – May 2007 · 2 yrs 4 mos

Sep 2003 – Dec 2004 · 1 yr 3 mos

Dec 2002 – May 2003 · 5 mos