about me

This is a potted history of me. The 'work' stuff is towards the end, but if you’re all about business, you could just go to my resume here. I definitely won’t mind.

I was born in 1977 in Sydney, Australia, a year mainly notable for Star Wars first blowing people's minds. 

In the 1980s I loved holding my breath underwater, wrestling with my brother and listening to the Stones and Dire Straits with my dad.

The 1990s have somehow become my fondest decade, even though I hated them at the time. Angsty, with the added confusion of Catholic boys school, I stayed sane playing and watching huge volumes of sport. Pearl Jam, Steve Waugh, Tim Hardaway (yep, that Tim Hardaway) and the emerging 'bloods' of the Sydney Swans were my heroes.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a bit of a haze, mainly due to undertaking a classic young adult rebellion - to be fair it was a battle fought mainly in my own head. There was a lot of procrastinating, loitering and a decent dose of anti-social behavior. But keeping it together by working at pubs and expertly and expediently delivering pizzas and Chinese food, I came out the other side with a Bachelor of Business and some reasonably good stories.

In 2004 I landed my first job in advertising at Arnold. Mainly Arnold needed a car person to work on their new Peugeot account, and I happened to like cars. For maybe the first time in my life it felt like I'd found my people. Paid to talk about car culture, pontificate about future trends and drink (and smoke...?) in the office, it was every pseudo-young punks dream. In all seriousness though, it awakened a mix of skills and passion I didn't know I had. 

In 2007, what I (and many others) believed was the hottest agency in Sydney - BMF, hired me as an Account Director. It was the Agency of the Decade in fact, and I was pretty stoked when that offer came through on their uber-cool letterhead. I learnt about truly great advertising here, and a lot more about what I wasn’t good at too.

Sometime in late 2010, my obsession with New York City - and American history and culture more generally - reached boiling point. So in 2011 I went on a ‘holiday’ to NYC and was lucky enough to meet with the leaders of the best agencies in the world. It was such a cliche; the kid in the blazer pounding the streets of Manhattan in 95 degree summer heat, naive and cocky in equal parts. Probably the craziest two weeks of my life. Then, when Wieden+Kennedy (my fanboy agency crush) hired me to run the Heineken account, well, shit. Things were making finally sense to me.

What a wonderful place. Such nice people, so damn good at their jobs. A humbling experience from the beginning, but very proud to be a part of the cool things we did at WKNYC.

One Friday in summer 2015, I was asked if I wanted to go to Delhi to interim MD our Indian office. WHAT? The following Monday I called him back -“why not?” - and like that I was on a plane to India.

From 2015 to the end of 2016 Delhi was my home, I stayed longer than I and everyone thought possible. Life experiences don’t get much wilder, weirder and richer than that. Life in that city can be tough, and it was, but proud of what we did while leading W+K Delhi.

Having returned to the States, in mid 2017 I made the tough decision to move on from W+K, and the less tough decision to take a break. After 18 years running at 110 miles per hour in the whacky world of advertising, I needed to recharge. So I did. Traveling, writing, reading and working on a handful of projects, it was a brilliant time. 

So what's next? Lots of things. I mostly think about human progress and it’s intersection with technology and government. It's a discombobulating time for the world and I’m scared and enthralled by where this all goes. Let’s see. But whatever happens, I want to be in somewhere deep in that broad space. Hopefully in some small way, solving the challenges of the future.