The dreaded Bio
Breaking through one of my biggest aversions
If you get this far you deserve to know a bit about me. Every time I get asked for a Bio I immediately sigh internally. I’m a poor writer at the best of times but writing about or collating information on myself is the height of my aversion to the craft.
So here goes:
I’m 51 and live in Aotearoa - the land of the long white cloud aka New Zealand. Spell check reminds me I have misspelt that Māori name again which I find extremely embarrassing (more on that later).
My LinkedIn profile is here for those of you engaged with that platform.
The short version -
I was educated in New Zealand and took a minimalist approach to university in my home town of Christchurch for about the same amount of time most get a PhD in. I built a couple of businesses during that time also and exited with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History with a focus on World War I and early New Zealand.
I’m a salesperson - started my corporate career with Fuji Xerox in Wellington then moved to Hewlett Packard (my favourite corporate experience ever). With several smaller stints at various corporates including IBM and ANZ Bank, I headed into the Startup trenches.
I co-founded Sonar6 which was an HR performance management solution - we did “performance reviews that don’t suck”.
In 2010 I founded (with the support of the NZ government and several of NZ’s most prominent founders) the Kiwi Landing Pad based on an idea many had but no one executed. It’s a passion project for me and in its 12th year with a community of over 5,000 founders and their teams across the globe.
We “reimagined” the organisation last year and it is now known as Territory3 .
For the last 6 years or so I’ve been fascinated by the concept of Purpose in all respects - personal, organisational, social.
That’s where my focus as a Founder is today. I worked on a concept for a couple of years which got to a landing page - Purpose Exchange. It focused on trying to get large Corporations to apply more thought to Corporate Philanthropy. I couldn’t get traction with it so I shut it down early and sadly.
As with any idea you are trying to transition to a live thing I spoke with a lot of people and got more ideas about more fertile areas of opportunity in the Purpose Domain (which is of course MASSIVE).
One of those conversations lead me to become aware of the challenges and sins of the Fashion Industry globally from both a social and environmental perspective.
All Things Considered was born from one of those conversations in late 2020 with Andrea van der Meel , uber passionate climate warrior and founder of Seekstock We’re in early beta here - go on - have a look and play and tell me what you think :)
I’m also supporting the establishment and growth of an anti consultancy in the sustainability advisory and assurance space with Mitchell Winton-Smith - currently in very early stages but our website here and podcast channel here
Finally (and goodness this was hard to get through) on the more personal front I’m a twice divorcee and passionate aviator having learnt the basics of driving a plane in my late teens but not yet having a full pilot’s licence.
Grammarly tells me the tone was some sort of green T-Shirt level but that’s exactly what happens when you ask me to write about myself (even when I was the one who asked).
On to more interesting posts and ultimately there will be an audio version of each of these as well :0