The
Interview.

My grandfather had thirteen children. Eight of them became entrepreneurs. My father traded timber, ran trucks, built small developments, supplied construction materials. It was not something anyone talked about as a career path. It was just what the family did. You saw a gap. You filled it. You moved.

The word entrepreneurship was not something I grew up with. But the behaviour was everywhere. I absorbed it before I could name it. By the time I understood what it was, I had already been doing it for years. I was buying and selling things on freelancing sites between shifts at a full-time job in Sydney without thinking of it as anything other than obvious. My mother found out through friends. She did not call in concern. She laughed. She said there is no need to teach the baby of a squirrel how to climb a tree.

There is one thing about that family background I rarely spell out, but it matters. I am the eldest child in my family. My cousins joined the family businesses right after their schooling, stepping straight into the operations, watching deals close, moving through logistics, learning the commercial instincts from inside the environment that produced them. That path was deliberately closed to me.

The reason begins with my father. Of all thirteen of my grandfather's children, my father was widely regarded as the most gifted. Photographic memory. A precise analytical mind. A natural negotiator. A calm crisis manager. And the most artistic of all of them: he wrote poems, composed songs, and sang. My grandparents spotted his abilities early and steered him toward academic study. He showed interest in the business anyway. He discontinued his studies.

My parents never forgot what that cost him. When I was born, their eldest, they made a deliberate choice rooted in that experience. They did not want the family business to redirect my path the way it had redirected his. They wanted a stable career for me. A predictable life. Security over exposure. My management and leadership development started alongside my formal schooling, built through every institution I entered, every role I sought out, every operation I studied from the outside in. I came to the same depth of understanding as my cousins. I simply had to earn every piece of it myself, without the on-ramp they were handed. That is why thirty-plus roles is not a number that embarrasses me. It is the explanation.

Before I answer that, I want to say something about who he actually was. My father was the most gifted of his siblings. Photographic memory. A precise analytical mind. A natural negotiator who could read a room and find the resolution that nobody else had seen. A calm crisis manager. And deeply artistic: he wrote poems, composed songs, and sang. The Sharktech logo was drawn by him. After years of searching across two countries, through agencies and professional designers, none of it was right. He drew it. It was right immediately. That is who taught me everything I know.

What he taught me, specifically, was to plan for the worst case before planning for anything else. Not pessimism. Engineering. You identify every associated activity connected to the task, related and unrelated. You map every variable that could go wrong. You build the solution for the worst outcome first. Then you work backward.

He also taught me something I did not fully understand until much later. Always treat the person in front of you as someone who knows something you do not. Walk into every conversation to learn, not to confirm what you already think. The moment you assume you are the smartest person in the room, you lose access to everything the room knows.

He never explained what he was teaching before he taught it. When I was nine years old he gave me ten rupees and sent me alone to collect a ten-thousand-rupee debt from a tea factory an hour away by public transport. The money was not enough for the round trip. He knew that before he sent me.

He also said something that evening I have never forgotten. A donkey carrying gold bars from the mines never knows the value of what it holds. Know what you are carrying. And when the crisis comes, do not lose your grip.

That framework is now codified in how Sharktech launches new products. Before any platform goes to market, the first deliverable is not a feature list or a go-to-market plan. It is a full risk and contingency map.

It means your word is the most durable commercial asset you possess. More durable than your product, your revenue, your reputation as it appears on paper. All of those can be rebuilt. Your word, once broken, takes years to repair and some people never fully trust you again after it.

In my family, integrity was not a value written on a wall. It was a generational operating standard. My grandfather held it. My father held it. It passed whole from one to the next. When I built Sharktech, it was the first thing I brought into the company. Not the technology, not the go-to-market plan. The standard. Every commitment I make is the same commitment my grandfather made to his. You have my word or you do not have my involvement.

The Albatross project started because a group of us at university were obsessed with the same problem. How do you make something fly without a pilot and keep it stable? We chose the Blended Wing Body configuration because it was the hardest version of the problem. The entire airframe generates lift. The B-2 Spirit stealth bomber uses a variation of the same principle. The stabilisation challenge is enormous precisely because the system is so capable.

We failed repeatedly. Every failed test flight was data. We refined the self-stabilising algorithm through the failures, not despite them. Eventually it flew. The upgraded design was shared with a startup that had active defence contracts and was building UAV prototypes. I shared it for free. There was no transaction. The design deserved to go somewhere it could matter. That was enough.

I brought that rigour into everything I built afterward. It sits inside every product Sharktech puts to market.

Someone who moves through many roles because they cannot settle is running from something. I was not running from anything. I was being pulled. That is a meaningful distinction and it changes everything about what those years produced.

Naval Ravikant talks about specific knowledge: the kind of understanding that builds when you pursue something you are genuinely drawn to rather than strategically selecting it. When the interest is real, you accumulate faster than anyone operating from discipline alone, because the hours do not feel like hours. They feel like thinking.

Pest control. Carpet cleaning. Bar work at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Bus driving. Site engineering on submarine cable hauls. Retail leadership at Aldi, Woolworths, and Coles Distribution Centre. Each one was something I was genuinely curious about. Each one held a truth about how businesses function that you can only access from the inside.

And in my primary roles across that period, I was not just present. I was performing at the highest level. National recognition for closing out problems three years old that nobody else had been willing to touch.

The concurrent roles were short-term by design. Casual and part-time, mostly run across annual leave and company shutdown periods. The management years were a completely separate chapter. When I moved into senior infrastructure management, all of that stopped. That role was full-on. Depth, not breadth.

Before any of that happened, I was in the hardest stretch of my early career. Working a leadership role at Aldi. Performing well. But carrying something that had nothing to do with the work in front of me. I had an engineering background. I had done the postgraduate work at UNSW. I knew what I was capable of. And I could not get a foot in the door.

I met him playing social badminton. He was not a recruiter. He was not a professional contact. He was a person who watched how I competed, how I thought under pressure, how I carried myself in a setting that meant nothing professionally. He saw something worth investing in.

He became a father figure. He gave me the unspoken rules of corporate leadership that most people learn too late or never at all. He held me to a standard without apology, without softening.

I am not walking away from this occasion without honouring that. This person is no longer in my life. The relationship did not end the way I would have chosen. His name will not appear here. That is a form of respect, not an absence of gratitude.

It taught me that the operating model is the margin. Not the product. Not the marketing spend alone. The structural decisions about how a business organises its people, its range, and its cost base determine who captures the value and who subsidises it.

From 2014 I progressed through every level of store leadership at Aldi, from Night Fill through to Assistant Manager, full-time. Aldi gave me the full internal picture of a lean store operation from the ground up. Woolworths gave me a structurally different store model. Coles Distribution Centre gave me the supply chain layer.

That insight became the foundation for every Sharktech platform. Not features on top of existing structures. Operating systems that change the structure itself and return margin power to the people who create the value.

Quitting before something real exists is not commitment. It is impatience dressed up as conviction. What made the parallel possible was that I was not building alone. The co-founders were deep in it. My role in that period was to bring the operational domain knowledge, the commercial framework, and the problem-depth that comes from having worked inside the industries the platforms were being built for.

Let me start with the one thing I will never say. I will never tell you Sharktech cannot fail. Every founder who has told you their company is failure-proof was either not being honest or had not looked carefully enough at the data. I have studied the founders behind failed startups, the decision points that cracked them, the patterns that appear in almost every post-mortem.

The first deliberate decision was to operate lean. When you extend your runway without requiring additional capital, you buy yourself the most valuable asset a building-stage company can possess: time to make better decisions.

The second decision was to bootstrap through the entire build phase. We did not take external investment in the first twelve months. Not because capital was unavailable. Because we were not yet ready to deploy it responsibly, and because accepting capital before your model is validated means your failure costs someone other than the founders.

The co-founders are the reason Sharktech was able to build while I was still in full-time employment. Each of them brings over a decade of experience in building SaaS products and enterprise-grade systems. We are not a founding team that learned how to build on the job. The learning curve that breaks most early-stage teams was behind us before we started.

Instead of building each product from scratch, we identified globally proven platforms whose capabilities aligned precisely with the problems we had already validated in the Australian market. We approached those companies as local implementation partners. We sat with them, adapted their platforms for Australian operational conditions, compliance requirements, and commercial realities.

It comes from my father. Meeting someone is always a positive event. There is no neutral encounter. Every person carries knowledge, experience, a perspective that you do not have. The moment you treat a meeting as routine, you walk past something that could have mattered.

In practice, I pay attention. When I meet someone I am genuinely looking for what they know that I do not. That discipline came from my father.

There was not one trigger. There was an accumulation, and then there was a moment that changed the calculation permanently.

I was working more than seventy hours a week, consistently. The hours were not producing proportional outcomes. The work was consuming everything. And I could see clearly that the people around me were not better for the effort I was putting in.

There is a pattern that Dr Arthur Brooks describes as success addiction. The state where you do not feel fully alive unless you are winning in the business, and where the cost of that pattern accumulates silently in your relationships. I had been running that pattern for years without naming it.

In 2024, I sat down and wrote a resignation letter. I did not send it. I saved it to my drafts folder, closed the laptop, and told my closest friends and family that I was leaving critical infrastructure management for good.

The first thing I did after stepping back was not update my LinkedIn profile or start pitching investors. I took a career break. In July 2025, I got on a motorcycle and rode solo through the Himalayas.

The route took me to Umling La. At 19,024 feet, it is the highest motorable pass in the world. The air is thin enough that the body and the mind both strip back to something simpler.

Within that twelve-month window, the exit came in May 2025. On my terms, on the timeline I had committed to. I joined Sharktech as Operations Manager first.

For years, I was the person companies called when they wanted to see what they could become. I had worked as a consultant across China, India, and the Middle East: jewellery brands, boutique manufacturers, a political party, companies of every size and type that were sitting on infrastructure they had not fully used.

That contentment was the mistake. Not because the work was wrong. Because I was directing the best version of my strategic thinking into other people's businesses and going home satisfied. Every skill I used to write those proposals for other founders was a skill I possessed completely. And I was not applying a single piece of it to myself.

Sharktech is the proposal I finally wrote with my own name on it as the client.

Plan for the worst case first. Not because it is likely. Because if you have already built the solution for the worst outcome, everything between the worst and the best becomes manageable.

Treat every person you meet as someone who knows something you do not. That single discipline, applied consistently, will teach you more than any formal education ever could.

Find the work that pulls you rather than the work you have to push yourself through. This is not soft advice. It is a structural advantage.

Dr Arthur Brooks talks about four things that genuinely determine whether a life has meaning: faith, family, real friendships, and serving others. Your business is the vehicle. It is not the destination.

Executive meetings at Sharktech are short. There is an agenda before anyone walks in. Every decision made in the room is recorded with a named owner and a date. No exceptions.

I separate decisions into two categories: reversible and irreversible. For reversible decisions, I move fast. For irreversible decisions, I map every associated variable. I build the contingency for the worst outcome first.

Underperformance is named early. I do not let it settle into the background.

Doing things myself. That is the honest answer. When the company was smaller, the fastest path to a high-quality outcome was often for me to do it. That was true when it was true. It stops being true at scale.

The second thing is over-indexing on my own judgment. I have a high confidence in my pattern recognition. That confidence is earned. It is also a liability if it crowds out people on the team who see things I do not.

The third is the hardest. I hold standards that do not yet live in systems. They live in me. Sharktech cannot scale past a certain threshold while those standards remain personal rather than institutional.

It is the filter. Every decision Sharktech makes passes through one question: does this have the potential to transform lives at scale? Not improve. Not optimise. Transform. If the answer is no, we do not do it.

Revenue is the signal that tells you the mission is working. It is not the mission itself. Dr Arthur Brooks describes happiness as having three components: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Meaning is what is most absent from people's lives today, including leaders who are winning by every external measure. The billion-lives mission is the meaning layer.

The number is real because it has to be. A smaller ambition produces a smaller standard. And the standard is everything.

One billion lives is the north star. The path there is specific, not abstract. Own the ANZ SMB vertical first. Build the distribution infrastructure that makes the next market faster and cheaper to enter than the last. Extend the model to the international markets we have already identified.