The Worlds Left to Conquer

PS: I will be free for lunch in Brisbane, QLD on the 18th and 21st of May. Queensland readers that want to hang out should drop me an email to arrange a meetup at Emporium Hotel in South Bank! It has been a year and a half since I quit my job to start a consultancy. It took me years to build up to quitting, and I had not only a chip on my shoulder, but to quote Seth Sentry, “the guac and the dip and the salsa.” The people that read this blog probably understand what I’m talking about. I looked around at how organizations are run, at the people that told me what to do, and thought “Surely I could do a better job than this.” This feels like a dangerous train of thought. On one hand, that arrogance is precisely one of the mechanisms that makes someone incompetent. If you’ve learned everything, there’s no real reason to open up another book, and even that is rather generously assuming that the person providing a service to you has bothered to crack the spine on even one. On the other hand, how else are we to make sense of the world? If you walk out the door, you will be immediately clotheslined by institutions failing to achieve the most basic of tasks with any reliability. Almost every office I’ve walked into as an employee has been a decrepit nest populated by the beaten-down working class, a sickly ooze of self-important managers amongst whom a Gladwell reader ranks as a towering intellect, and executives that are feverishly muttering the word “AI” to credulous journalists as they blindly cut headcount. So many of these institutions seem to be held together by either regulatory capture or writhing clients bound by enterprise contracts like so much barbed wire. I’ve lost track of the number of times that someone has looked at work from a company like KPMG and gone “Ha ha ha, maybe we should all be consulting – then we can do terrible work and bill at two thousand dollars a day.” This joke is so overused that you can see the person saying it is reluctantly dispensing the cliché. So when I kicked off the company, some traitorous part of me was hoping that it would be difficult, as horrible as that would be for me personally. If it was hard, yes, perhaps I’d have to go back to some miserable office and be beset on all sides by smiling imbeciles talking about innovation, but it would make sense. It simply can’t be that easy to be free of those structures. Surely there’s a reason for it that isn’t simply “Wow, we’re systematically producing people that are terrible at their jobs and they can’t even see it.” Unfortunately, that really is most of the explanation. In late 2025, I said I’d write more after admitting how awkward it is to say the business is going well. I haven’t written anything for five months, and there’s no delicate way to put this, I drastically understated how well we’re doing. I'm ripping off the bandaid: in February 2026, I realised that we had already generated enough revenue to last us until 2027. On some engagements, I split my income several ways with teammates that weren’t on the job and still exceeded my corporate salary. For forty hours in 2025, I broke a thousand dollars an hour on tasks with measurable success metrics, an amount of money that would have seemed like some sort of sick joke two years ago, and both customers asked for a repeat engagement because the service quality was higher than what specialised firms were doing – I had spent about ten hours thinking about the engagement model. And we still have seven months left in the year. All of this is to say two things. The first, I’m not going to pretend that everyone would find it as easy as I do1, but it’s easy enough that basically anyone that can read both a book in software and the humanities will be fine.2 The other is that this was all so easy that I’m going mad with boredom. Crept to their door, opened it slowly and tip-toed but, shit Somebody set the bar too low and I tripped over it Whoops, jumped up, tried to throw in a quick ultimate Just hopin' to scare 'em but, oh, it just killed both of 'em Bodies with slit throats on the linoleum I just throw 'em in dumpsters, the shit's appropriate I wish that I could say it was difficult to make things work. It would make sense of the world. I could have fun talking about going extremely overboard with machinations. The reality is that all of it, from service delivery to sales, has been more-or-less trivial. Closing and delivering a deal for twenty thousand dollars takes less time and energy than one sprint in a regular office. Nothing even feels high stakes – the global economy is so large that, for an efficient team, you can roll the sales conversation dice over and over until it turns up a 20. I personally blundered hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales over our first six months, and we’re fine. As a company, there are many things that I'd like to improve – it might sound silly given that we’re doing well and all our customers are happy (or lying to me), but the

The Worlds Left to Conquer

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