2000

My OG collab was with my dad and his business partner Pete. After my dad retired from fishing he bought a commercial boat broking business called Salter Marine (later renamed Salter’s Boats). Pete came on as a partner a couple of years later and I joined in 2000, eventually buying into the business. It was a great job in an industry I’d grown up in and cared about but eventually I realised it was always going to be someone else’s collab and not mine.

2010

GrowThink was a collaboration I started in Perth. We had our sights set on opening Hub Perth, which would have been Perth’s first coworking space. But in mid 2010 I left Perth for Melbourne.

2011

Along with one of my colleagues from GrowThink and a couple of colleagues I met via Hub Melbourne we started a future of work consultancy called Tomorrow[at]Work in late 2011. After about 18 months it imploded mainly because we failed to get enough work (in hindsight this might have been because I started my first ever consulting business in a new city in an industry I’d never worked in before). Rather than call this a failure one of my collaborators Luke Grange still kindly calls this an experiment.

2013

After Tomorrow[at]Work, Luke and I went to start another consulting business called We Work Together which supported organisations in their adoption of cloud computing platforms such as Google Apps and later, Office 365. We Work Together lasted a couple of years before Luke and I parted ways to focus on other things

2020

Pirate TV was my greatest of all collabs and I still do work under the Pirate TV banner with my two partners. I’d known Mykel Dixon and his brother Dave for years and it was a chance conversation with Myke at the beginning of the pandemic that sowed the seeds for Pirate TV.

Basically we would take people’s in person conferences and turn them into interactive online TV shows. Myke and I both built elaborate TV studios in our house and Dave built a custom TV production setup. Wired together using superfast NBN connections we would then host and produce super slick event productions.

I will always be grateful to Myke and Dave for the time we spent together during COVID. At times it felt a little guilty that we were having so much fun when so many people were struggling. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the camaraderie, love and support that we all gave each other during what was some pretty tough years.