The Signal That Made Me Pivot TeamScore Into WorkSights AI
Why I pivoted TeamScore into WorkSights AI - a founder’s lesson about product-market fit, revealed preference, and discovering the real opportunity.
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Building with AI: Everything Except the Code
How I’m using AI to design, plan, analyze, and build a tech company - and why the most exciting things aren't happening in engineering.
75 Books in 12 Months
Today is Election Day in the US, and after the “shoot-self-in-the-other-foot” results came out this time last year, I decided the news - which for me was mostly podcasts - didn’t deserve my attention anymore. I’ve always been a news junkie - from being an early user of
The Corrosive Spiral of Poor Performance
In remote teams, poor performance isn’t just bad — it’s contagious. One disengaged person can corrode trust, effort, and culture faster than you think. Here’s what I learned the hard way about stopping the spiral before it spreads.
Fifteen Years of Paying It Forward
Every few months, I’m reminded just how special Startmate is - and Demo Day for the Winter 2025 cohort today is another one of those moments. It’s a celebration not just of another set of ambitious founders, but of the community that has quietly shaped the startup landscape
Chapter 4: Building Ascendius in Public with AI
After two decades building and running technology companies, I wanted to approach Chapter 4 differently - not by forgetting what I’ve learned, but by questioning everything I thought I knew, because I believe with AI, the rules have changed. That’s what Ascendius is about - and this post
The Analytics Trap
Analytics sounds smart and data-driven. But for most people, it’s just homework they’ll never do. Here’s why analytics is a trap for founders who build it - and for the leaders who buy it.
Fixing the Machine: The False Trade-Off Between Health and Success
It took me twenty-five years to realize that sacrificing health for business isn’t ambition - it’s a lose-lose deal.
Kicking off Chapter 4
When I sold Accelo a year and a half ago, I promised myself something I’d never really given before: a break. Truth is, I wasn’t great at it. My family will tell you I failed miserably at "learning how to sit still." But spending more time
The End of Chapter 3: Expert Mode
Earlier this month we sold Accelo, a company I co-founded 15 years ago, and last Friday was my last day at the company. With this transition, I wanted to share a few reflections on a massive journey, appreciation for the work of our amazing team and thanks for support of
Deeply rooted in this Nation's (dark) history and tradition
The decision by the Supreme Court last Friday to overturn Roe vs Wade and eliminate a fundamental right of women in the world's leading democracy for almost 50 years is a shock but not a surprise. * To say that this is a massive deal for the United States
COVID Comparisons
Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic there's been plenty of scary headlines, statistics and tragic individual stories. One thing I've rarely seen, though, is a comparative base for understanding the statistics that drive the scary headlines. To help with my own understanding, I've compiled a couple
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E-3 Visa Renewal without Travel via I-129
Update March 2022do notrequires I'm the US right now in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns/shutdowns across most of the economy. One of my friends and colleagues happened to have his E-3 visa expiring next week, and so the usual options of a visa dash
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How to get useful feedback on your business idea
A startup mailing list I'm on recently had a customer-development survey link posted to it for an idea I thought was absolutely terrible. It is another "buy food from an app and have it delivered to you" product, but in this case they take inputs from
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Apple Stole My Music. No, Seriously.
Apple. It just works.
Stopping Autoplay Videos on News Websites with Adblock Plus
Like many Aussie and Kiwi ex-pats I know, checking in on the news in the old country is both a habit and an escape, but the constant attempts by the old print media to "reinvent" themselves as broadcast/video media had lead to an irritating and increasingly prevalent
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Watching ABC's iView from outside Australia without a VPN
As an Aussie expat, it is a shame that all the awesome stuff on ABC's iView site is locked away. Aside from wanting to keep across what's going on back in Australia, there's truly world-class content produced regularly for 4Corners, Foreign Correspondent and stacks
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Watching NBA without Blackouts or a VPN (and much more!)
As a big fan of the NBA (and particularly my adopted home town team, the Golden State Warriors) I was pretty excited to get into this year's season. While previous seasons have been aided by borrowing the Comcast credentials from a friend and streaming games via the CSN
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Advice for folks "putting my feelers out to find opportunities" in SF/Silicon Valley
From time to time someone will email (or be introduced via email) who's exploring career opportunities in San Francisco or Silicon Valley. Here's a variation of an email I recently wrote to answer this question - hopefully by putting this somewhere Google can find it I
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Why Uber (and Lyft) Win (over taxis): Public support 500x more than cabs
Got an email from Change.org inviting me to sign two competing petitions. One of them is to ban "illegal" Uber in one state of Australia, and the other is to change the rules to allow Uber in another state. On face value, the numbers are pretty clearly
Avoiding chavs/bogans/white-trash while on vacation in Majorca
This summer my fiancee and I took a vacation to Europe, and we decided to go to Majorca (also spelled Mallorca) for our "relax by the Med" part of our trip. One of the hardest things to work out what was how to avoid the hordes of chavs
The SaaS Fundraising Death Zone
TL;DR: the ecosystem of early-stage investors (angels, seed and VC) has a structure and set of incentives that creates ideal (or even necessary) points in a SaaS startups life for raising capital. Unfortunately, changes in the ecosystem have created what I call a "Death Zone" between Seed
America's Greece(s)
In summing up the situation in Europe, the APM's Marketplace show today made an interesting point: while the US and the EU both have a Monetary union, only the US has a Fiscal union - in short, the Federal Govt in the US raises taxes from all over
E3 Visa Renewal in Vancouver
TL;DR: renewing your E3 visa in Canada is possible, but there's a bit of a quirk that means rolling the dice. This an outline of how I did it in Vancouver in late June 2015. Almost four years ago I wrote a long and detailed blog post