Portfolio
Ventures
Four companies and two specialist service brands. Some are established and profitable, some are still being built. I’ve been explicit about which is which, because a portfolio that inflates itself isn’t worth much.
How I choose
What makes something worth building
Three tests. If an idea fails any of them, I leave it alone, and I’ve left plenty alone.
Have I hit this myself?
Every one of these started as a problem I watched play out badly, usually more than once. I’m a poor judge of markets I’ve never worked in, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.
Can it run without me?
If the answer is no, it’s a job rather than a business. That distinction matters more the more of them you have, and it’s the test most founders skip.
Is it underserved, not unserved?
An empty market is usually empty for a reason. I’d rather enter a market that exists and is being served badly than gamble on one nobody has wanted yet.
The portfolio
Companies
Active
TechAssist
Managed IT for growing Australian businesses.
Who it’s for
Growing Australian businesses that have outgrown one person who is good with computers, but can’t yet justify a full internal IT department. We also do a lot of work in schools and manufacturing, where the constraints are unusual enough to need a specialist.
The problem
These businesses need enterprise-grade reliability without an enterprise-sized budget. What they usually have instead is a patchwork: one person who knows the network, a contractor for phones, nobody watching security, and no documentation when someone leaves. It works until it very suddenly doesn’t, and the bill for that arrives all at once.
The approach
TechAssist runs the whole stack: helpdesk and monitoring, network infrastructure, 3CX communications, security posture, and specialist industrial systems including programmable logic controllers and PROFINET industrial ethernet. That last part is unusual for an MSP, and it comes from genuinely having done the work on plant floors rather than from a brochure.
The commercial argument is straightforward. Unplanned downtime, duplicated tools, licences nobody uses and staff waiting on IT are all real costs that never appear as a line item. Most of the value we deliver is removing those quietly. The operating principle behind it is that documentation and process aren’t overheads, they’re the product.
My role
Director. I lead the team and set service strategy, and I’m still close enough to the technical work to know when an answer doesn’t smell right.
Building
TeachingBlox
Personalised learning designed to keep young people engaged.
Who it’s for
Students aged 8 to 16, and the parents and teachers trying to work out where a particular child actually came unstuck.
The problem
A classroom moves at one pace, because there is one teacher and thirty students. That’s arithmetic, not a failure of effort. But it means some students are waiting, others are quietly lost, and most are drawing conclusions about whether they’re a “maths person” from a few bad weeks.
The intervention that would fix it is small and early: fifteen minutes on the specific thing, at the moment it stopped making sense. What prevents it is that identifying which of thirty students has which gap, on which day, isn’t humanly achievable alongside actually teaching.
The approach
An AI-assisted platform that adapts pace to the learner, gives feedback that explains rather than just marks, and makes progress visible enough to be motivating. Critically, it’s built to support what happens in the classroom, not to replace a teacher. The teacher isn’t the bottleneck being removed.
My role
Founder. This is the venture I’m most personally invested in, and the one I’m most careful about overclaiming on. Education technology has a long history of promising revolutions and delivering worksheets with better graphics.
Active
AussieWave Hosting
Australian hosting, supported by Australians.
Who it’s for
Australian small businesses, agencies and anyone who has been burned by cheap hosting and would like to stop thinking about it.
The problem
Cheap hosting is usually cheap because support is a chatbot and the servers are in another hemisphere. For an Australian business that means slower sites and a support queue that only wakes up when you’re asleep. The costs are real but hard to see on an invoice.
The approach
Australian-based infrastructure, local support from people who can actually change something, and migrations handled properly rather than left to the customer. Nothing exotic. Just hosting that behaves the way you’d expect if it had been designed for the person using it.
My role
Founder, and closely involved in the platform architecture. This is the one where the tinkering habit pays its way.
In development
Self Storage Auctions
Transparent auctions for abandoned storage units.
Who it’s for
Storage facilities that need to recover unpaid fees lawfully and defensibly, and buyers who want to bid without driving across a state to look at a roller door.
The problem
When storage fees go unpaid, facilities have a legal right to recover costs by auctioning the contents. In practice it’s a fragmented, largely offline process: inconsistent notice, patchy record-keeping, and buyers who have to physically turn up to bid on a unit they can barely see. That’s bad for the facility’s exposure as much as the bidder’s confidence.
The approach
A single online platform covering Australia and the UK, with automated bid management, clear terms, and an auditable trail that protects the facility as much as the bidder. Transparency is the product here, not the treasure hunt.
My role
Founder. Currently in development ahead of onboarding facility partners. If you run a storage facility and the current process annoys you, I’d like to hear from you.
Under TechAssist
Specialist services
These are service brands operating under TechAssist, covering the two areas where the standard business approach needs adapting. They have their own sites because the audiences are different, but they are not separate companies and I won’t pretend otherwise.
TechAssist service
School Phone System
Some environments have communication requirements that ordinary business phone systems handle badly: site-wide announcements, lockdown and emergency procedures, handsets that must work for someone who has never seen them before, and integration with the systems the office already runs. Schools are the clearest example, which is why the brand is named for them.
We design and implement 3CX communications systems around those realities rather than retrofitting a standard office deployment onto a campus or a multi-building site. The design question we start with is what happens when the internet drops during an incident, because that’s the only scenario that can’t be worked around.
TechAssist service
Essential Eight IT
The Australian Cyber Security Centre’s Essential Eight is the closest thing Australia has to a common security baseline. It is also routinely misrepresented as a certificate you obtain rather than a maturity level you hold, and holding it costs real operational effort every month.
We assess where an organisation genuinely sits, explain what each maturity level will actually cost in time and disruption, and implement the controls that matter most first. Nobody gets told they’re compliant when they aren’t, which occasionally costs us the work.
Working on something similar?
I’m always interested in partnerships, pilot customers, and conversations with people building in education, managed technology or marketplaces. Particularly if you disagree with something above.