About
Hello, I’m Matt
A technology founder in Melbourne who is far more interested in things that work than things that sound impressive.
I’ve spent about fifteen years in technology, most of it in places where failure is obvious and immediate. A production line that has stopped. A business whose email went down on invoice day. A school office on the first morning of term. There is no hiding in those rooms, and no amount of good intentions gets you out of them.
That kind of work builds a particular temperament. You stop being impressed by architecture diagrams and start caring whether someone can pick up a phone. You learn that the clever solution nobody understands is worse than the dull one everybody does. And you notice how much money organisations lose to technology quietly not working, in ways that never show up as a line on an invoice.
I didn’t set out to run several businesses at once. Each one started as a problem I couldn’t stop thinking about, usually one I’d watched play out badly more than once. TechAssist exists because growing businesses deserve the same operational discipline that large ones buy as a matter of course, at a cost that actually makes sense. Essential Eight IT exists because too many organisations are told they’re secure when nobody has actually checked. AussieWave exists because hosting support shouldn’t mean waiting for someone in another timezone to wake up. And TeachingBlox exists because I got tired of watching capable kids quietly decide they were bad at something.
None of these are moonshots. They’re ordinary problems handled properly, which is a less exciting pitch and a considerably better business.
How I got here
Hands first, opinions later
I started in hands-on technical work and never fully left it. Comms rooms, cable trays, switch configs at six in the morning before a school day. Later, industrial systems, where a network fault stops a production line rather than delaying an email, and where nobody is interested in your explanation if the line is still down.
That environment teaches a discipline general IT largely lacks. You don’t deploy on a Friday. You don’t make two changes at once, because then you can’t tell which one broke it. You write down what you did. And you work out how to undo it before you need to.
Eventually the work shifted from fixing things to building the teams and systems that stop things needing to be fixed. These days most of my time goes into leading people and setting direction, but I’ve deliberately stayed close enough to the technical detail to know when an estimate is optimistic. The longer version is here.
What I believe
A few things I’m fairly firm about
Opinions earned the hard way, mostly by getting them wrong first.
Boring is a feature
Novelty carries a bill, and it’s never paid by the person who recommended it. Proven technology, maintained properly, beats interesting technology almost every time.
If it only works when you’re there, it doesn’t work
A system that depends on one person’s memory is a liability wearing a lanyard. Documentation isn’t bureaucracy, it’s the difference between a service and a dependency.
Tell people what it actually costs
Including the parts they won’t enjoy hearing. Almost every unhappy client I’ve inherited was unhappy because somebody was optimistic early and quiet about it later.
Plan for the bad day
Anything can be made to look good on a normal Tuesday. The real test is what happens when the link drops, the server dies, or the person who knew how it worked has left.
Family
The part that actually matters
I’m a dad, and I keep my family off the internet deliberately. You won’t find names or photos here. But they’re the reason the businesses look the way they do, so it would be dishonest to leave them out entirely.
Having kids makes you allergic to the idea of building something that only functions while you’re permanently on call. It’s why I care so much about documentation, process and handover, not because they’re best practice on a slide, but because a business that depends entirely on one person is a business that eats every dinner, every school assembly and every long weekend. I’ve watched that happen to people. It isn’t a badge of honour, it’s a design flaw.
So I’ve built things to be steady rather than spectacular. Four solid companies I can step away from beats one that owns me, and the measure I actually care about isn’t revenue growth, it’s whether I can close the laptop on a Friday afternoon without anything falling over.
Watching my own children learn is also the origin story for TeachingBlox. You see very quickly how much of school comes down to pace, and how much confidence gets quietly lost when the pace is wrong. That’s a solvable problem, and it bothers me that we largely haven’t.
Outside work
Dirt roads and no reception
I’ve been fortunate enough to see most of the world. Somewhere along the way I realised I’d walked around a dozen foreign cities and hadn’t properly seen my own country, which is a slightly embarrassing thing to notice in your thirties. So these days the map I’m working through is a lot closer to home.
Australia turns out to take a lifetime. Camping, four-wheel driving, and most things that involve being outdoors and a long way from a sealed road. There’s a specific kind of quiet you only get a few hundred kilometres from the nearest town, and I’ve yet to find anything that resets your head faster.
There’s more overlap with the day job than you’d think. Remote travel is an exercise in respecting the failure case: you carry recovery gear you hope not to use, you check the things that will strand you rather than the things that will annoy you, and you make sure someone knows where you’re going. Nobody is coming to fix it for you at the far end of a track, which is roughly how I feel about change control and rollback plans. Preparation is just pessimism with a purpose.
The best trips are the ones with family or a few good mates along. Kids turn out to be excellent company once you take the screens away and hand them a job, and there’s a lot to be said for a few days where the hardest decision is where to put the fire. No reception isn’t an inconvenience on those trips. It’s the entire point.
When I’m home, I’m a tinkerer by default. A fair amount of my spare time goes into infrastructure I don’t strictly need to run, because building the thing properly is how I actually understand it. A good deal of what I know about hosting, automation and security started as a weekend project that got comprehensively out of hand.
Say hello
I’m based in Melbourne and happy to hear from people anywhere. Partnerships, advisory work, a question about one of the businesses, or a recommendation for somewhere I should drive to next.