I've never raised venture capital, pitched to investors, or taken a business loan. Everything I've built has been self-funded, deliberate, and mine. That shapes how I think about business – and what's actually possible without outside capital or permission.
I grew up alongside the internet, literally. Linux meetups and hacker spaces before most people knew what those were – and I got there without ever being a programmer. That path taught me something useful: you don't need to write the code to understand deeply what software can do, and what it's worth.
Machine Republic, the boutique software studio I co-founded with my partner, has been running for sixteen years. We built it slowly and deliberately – small team, high trust, an eclectic mix of clients at every stage. That range taught me more about how businesses actually work than any single industry or model ever could.
Indiemaker came from a specific frustration: watching great software get buried when startups failed, not because the product was bad, but because circumstances intervened. I wanted to create a way for those assets to find new owners, new energy, new life. In 2019 I acquired a newsletter, rebuilt it into a listing platform, lived through a pandemic with it, and relaunched it in 2024. The community that found us in the meantime – without us even trying – is the part I'm most excited about.
Running things in parallel is just how I operate. Alongside Machine Republic and Indiemaker, I've invested in and exited several startups – a commercial property platform in Singapore, an expense-claiming SaaS, a B2B perks platform. I'm not a traditional investor or a classical angel investor – I'm more interested in operational reality than cap tables. But I understand how value moves in this space, and I know how deals actually work.
The thread running through all of it is one idea: small exits are the dominant outcome in digital business, and that's not a failure mode – it's the model. I trained in M&A because it gave language to something I was already doing by feel. I understand what investors want, how acquirers choose, and how things actually break in the middle.
I work from wherever makes sense, homeschool our kids, and read more than is probably sensible. The businesses I build are designed to run without me standing over them. That's not accidental – it's the whole point.
The next chapter is Indiemaker becoming the default place for micro-exits – where independent founders list, transfer, and acquire digital assets without needing a broker, a banker, or a three-month process. The thesis has been right since 2013. The market has now caught up with it.
If you're building something in this space – or thinking about your first acquisition, or your first exit – I'd like to hear from you. Drop me a line at [email protected], or see what I'm working on right now on the Now page.