About

I've spent about twenty years as an operator, and the useful part of that span is its range. Half of it was inside large corporates: Crown, then Coles through the turnaround years, then Philip Morris, where I built a pricing and strategy function from nothing. At some point I got an itch to test all that with less of a safety net under it, which is what took me to startups: Honee, a Blackbird-backed Australian business I ran as CFO and then CEO through to its sale, and then lead and scaled the international arm of CloudKitchens' FutureFoods business, the company Travis Kalanick built after Uber on more than a billion dollars of funding.

That mix is the point, because corporate and startup are nearly different languages, and most operators are fluent in only one. Having had to get results in both, I can usually translate between the boardroom, the operating model, and the data underneath them without too much falling out in the gaps.

For most of my career the teams I led were people. At FutureFoods it was general managers and functional heads and several hundred staff across roughly twenty markets. The team I lead now is my own, and it looks very different. As the tools have got good enough, I've moved more and more of the work that used to need people across to a team of AI agents, more than ten of them now, some managing others. What strikes me is how little the job of leading them changes. You still brief well or badly, coach or dump, work out who is good at what and put them there. None of it came from being a technologist. Getting good work out of agents is the same problem as getting it out of people, and I treat it the same way, because that is what it is.

UPwind is the vehicle for it. It works with real companies on real problems, and doubles as a way to find out how much of a business can actually run on agents now, and which parts stay stubbornly human. The headcount goes the wrong way on purpose. The system the team runs on is called HindsightNOW.

Away from work, I fly aeroplanes, do a bit with the Australian Army cadets, and cook as a creative outlet: less following recipes than pulling the techniques apart to see what each step is doing. Sometimes it's even edible.