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I was on Facebook recently when Mick Liubinskas posted this piece about founder mental health. I realised there’s things I’ve learned about this in Silicon Valley that could be useful to the startup ecosystem in Sydney so I’d like to share that. It’s no secret that entrepreneurship is a very psychologically difficult process to participate in.…

I just posted this video: It’s a documentary about a three families crossing the Atlantic in the ARC Rally of 1987. There was an American family, a British family and an Australian family. We were the Australian family. Thurston family highlights: Spoilers below The Lopez family were the Americans and whilst we lost touch for…

So much has happened since I last wrote but that’s to be expected given that was about 10 months ago. Here are the highlights: Those are the key points.

It’s Memorial Day today in America. Adam has talked me into doing the “Escape from the Rock” duathlon. He’s doing the swimming leg (1.5 miles) and I’m doing the running leg (7 miles). This has forced me to start doing the running part of our routine which had fallen by the wayside recently. We’ll be…

SportHold got into 500 Startups. We’ve already started and it’s pretty exciting. The credit goes to my co-founder, Adam, who did the pitch and the interview that led to the invitation to join. We’re a part of batch 9. Sometimes I have to pinch myself. The people I’m meeting on a daily basis are impressive and the things…

This is one of the things I love about working on SportHold as a startup. If I were in a corporate role and wanted to use my digital marketing skills to boost traffic I would have had to ask for approval, create a proposal, discuss it with managers, etc… I’d then have to broaden it to cater…

It’s been a while since I last published here. I’ve still been writing but just not publishing. I’ve recently joined SportHold as a co-founder. I was about to get in touch with Mike Casey over something else but he happened to get in touch with me first. We met for breakfast in Pyrmont at the end of…

I don’t have any good photos to verify it but I happen to look a lot like Johnny Depp (apparently). I hear it at least once a week and, if I go out to bars or clubs, I’ll hear it at least 10 times or more (literally). I can usually see it coming: “Has anyone…

I recently pulled the plug on ESL Relief. It wasn’t that it was a very hard decision to make by itself but it was hard to admit that the whole project wasn’t really going anywhere. I’ve tried to distill down the learnings and key take-aways. Learnings Domain Expertise < Passion It doesn’t really matter how…

In April 2006 I went to North Korea for Kim Il Sung’s birthday. I was a university student in my final semester and the entire trip took about two weeks. Whenever I tell people this they’re usually pretty amazed or sceptical. The most common response is: “But how did you get the VISA there?” The…