I've had what a friend once called a Nessa career (Nessa being the character in Gavin & Stacey whose throwaway asides reveal an impossibly long back-catalogue of past lives). I catch myself saying "back when I was embedded at Qantas", or "the time I ran a global offsite for Visa", or "in my marquee days", rather more than is strictly dignified. The thread through all of it is operations. I'm the one who quietly makes the thing actually happen.
At the louder end that meant live events: music shows for fifteen thousand people, where the plan meets reality at eight o'clock whether you're ready or not. I ran my own events company for twelve years, then spent nine at Decoded, an education business, going from running the odd workshop to being its COO and opening the Sydney and Hong Kong offices. There's an economics degree from UCL and a spell at Merrill Lynch in there too, which is why the finance doesn't faze me.
Away from work I'm a bit of a masochist about endurance sport, and I have an entirely unironic love of model trains. Make of that what you will.
These days I do the operations job part-time, for a few early companies at once. You get someone who has genuinely run things, without a full-time hire, and without the day you outgrow the help, because by then it's built to carry on without me.
