Back in pre-Covid Tokyo, one of my first startup clients was a 21-year-old who'd recently started a company called Taimee, now Timee. The app was revolutionary for Japan, real-time gig work for students and parents looking for extra income, no lengthy interviews, no payment delays, both sides rating each other so everyone knew who they were dealing with.
His problem when he came to me was specific: he had an international pitch competition coming up, and the pitch had to be in English, a language he'd mostly avoided until then. I'd coached plenty of professionals on presentation skills before, from the likes of McKinsey, Fujitsu and Mizuho, but pitching is its own discipline, more structured, more nuanced, higher stakes. So we spent six weeks rebuilding his pitch from the ground up: the story, the slides, the way he carried the room. He placed third against a field of native English speakers. First English pitch, international stage.
What stayed with me wasn't the result. It was watching someone step so far outside their comfort zone, openly talk about a past failure as proof of how far he'd come, and treat the whole thing as something to grow through rather than survive. That's the kind of founder I love working with, and that moment is more or less where this whole path started.
I stayed in Japan the better part of nine years, and those years weren't spent watching from the side. I worked closely with founders and VCs across the ecosystem at every level of the journey, from shaping raw ideas and navigating cofounder dynamics to sharpening pitches, preparing for raises, and thinking through product and go-to-market for markets these companies had never sold into. I learned what actually changes when you build for somewhere that isn't home, and how differently the same idea has to be told in Tokyo versus Sydney. When I tell a founder how something will land in Japan, it isn't a guess. It's a decade of being in the room.
Since coming back to Australia I've gone all in on the local ecosystem. I've mentored at startup weekends and accelerators, judged more pitch competitions than I can count, run a steady stream of events, and worked directly with founders across the whole build, pitching, product, tech, sales and marketing. I'm a regular at the larger startup conferences held around the country, because staying close to where founders actually gather is how you stay useful to them.
And I've kept one foot firmly in Japan the whole time. I've been to SusHi Tech Tokyo three years running, and every time I'm back I run events and workshops on pitching, product, building startups, and increasingly AI. I support the communities that hold this corridor together, Business in Japan, Innovators Campus and Venture Cafe Tokyo among them, because the relationships across these two ecosystems are the thing I value most, and the thing I can open up for the founders I work with.
But the thing founders actually thank me for is smaller and more personal than any of that. They tell me I get them unstuck. They come in with an idea they believe in but can't quite say out loud (conviction without clarity), and they leave able to explain it in a sentence, with a sense of what to do next. I've done that with more than 150 founders now, across Sydney, Perth and Tokyo, through accelerators, startup weekends, workshops and one on one. It's the part of the work I like most, because it's the part that changes everything downstream.
I've spent more than twenty years close to how things actually get built and sold. Product and sales roles in tech, my own freelance and coaching businesses, events and seminars, mentoring across multiple programs. I'm not going to tell you I built a unicorn and exited. What I'll tell you is that I've spent two decades in the room while founders did the hard part, across both Australia and Japan, and I've learned to see the decisions that quietly decide whether an idea can travel, long before most people notice them.
Global Day Zero is where all of that became a method. Not advice over coffee, but a structured way to take a vague, home-only idea and make it clear, proven, and designed to travel from the start, while those decisions are still cheap to get right.
If you've got an idea you believe in but it's still fuzzy, or you've only ever pictured it for home, that's exactly who I built it for.