About

Actuary

I worked as an Actuary for a global reinsurance company for two years. During the first six months, I got bored of doing repetitive tasks, taught myself scripting languages and automated everything. After a few more months of process optimisation, I got poached by another team who asked me to lead an overhaul of their current processes and model - which ultimately became a global project.

Subsequently, I joined a software startup that sought to disrupt the market's approach to financial modelling with their proprietary software. I joined early and helped to acquire my business unit's first customers. I also led several of the design and delivery workstreams.

Founder

After a few years of working with this company and helping them grow, I became quite enamoured with the idea of launching a startup. Eventually, I left my role as Senior Consultant and decided to contract with clients directly. In my spare time, I would work on my startup.

The journey of launching a startup has been both fulfilling and frustrating. I'm still a long way from where I want to be, but glad I've started. You'll be able to find out more about what I'm working on my blog.

Coder

Days before starting my first job, someone gave me one of the most significant pieces of career advice I've ever received:

"Make yourself indispensable."

I didn't appreciate it initially, but this notably influenced my work ethic. By just teaching myself VBA and scripting, I quickly became a key man operationally. I intentionally became an advanced user of software widespread throughout the company, further making me a known expert. Shortly after, financial modelling and coding became my job description.

When I moved to the software startup, I learnt much more. It became even more fundamental to my role and worked alongside a fantastic team. I was creatively developing modelling and process-oriented solutions for clients. Towards the end of my tenure, I began my startup alongside some talented engineers. Since then, I picked up several other languages (backend & frontend), testing frameworks, firebase, AWS, VCS, npm, etc. At the time of this writing, I'm learning and using React, Gatsby and GraphQL to build this website. Coding is fun because there's always more to learn.

Investor

I've spent most of my career building and working in startups. In that time - with the help of great literature - I've gained more clarity about what makes companies succeed and fail. I've also had the privilege of informally advising many founders and startups.

Therefore, I decided to start investing in companies as a small angel investor. To understand more about my investment thesis (especially relevant if you need funding), then please click here.