A select number of founders, CEOs and inspired leaders each year. Unhurried conversations, chosen for depth and deliberately held away from the noise. The kind of room where the question you bring gets answered, and where the questions you didn't bring tend to surface as well.
I have been there.
More than 45 years of building. Six BRW Fast 100 placements. Companies built, listed, sold. Forty-plus documentaries. Five books, including The Hero's Journey, written from inside the work rather than alongside it. Today I co-lead MAD Ventures and MAD Fund 1, and I sit with a small handful of founders privately, each year, on the work that matters most to them.
The founders I work with are usually at a meaningful inflection point. A capital raise. A scale-up. An exit. A pivot. A partnership that has to be reset. A decision that the business is asking them to make and that they want to make well. They come for sharper strategy and clearer thinking, and they get both.
What tends to happen alongside that is harder to put on a page. Founders describe it in different ways. Stillness in the chaos. The right question at the right time. Seeing a pattern they have been inside for years. A way of building that starts to feel less like grinding and more like flow. Most arrive thinking the work is about the business. They tend to leave understanding that there's so much more.
Not because I told them. Because the room makes it visible.
My job is to look for the greatness in others and help them see it in themselves. That is the whole job.
