About
G’day, I’m Richard.
I work with founders whose company is outgrowing how they run it, and with the leaders around them: workshops for the whole leadership team, and coaching for the founder and the leaders growing into bigger jobs.
Before that, I spent six years at Google, two at Amazon, and was CPO of a listed company.
Where I've come from
I come from Adelaide, South Australia, about an hour from the Barossa, where the best shiraz in the world comes from. (I may be biased.)
I spent six years at Google, working on ads and maps: AdSense, DoubleClick and Google Maps. Then two years at Amazon in Luxembourg, leading a team of over 100 developers, product managers, translators and data scientists. We ran EU localisation, translating millions of products across all of Amazon’s European marketplaces, with over $1 billion in revenue impact.
I’ve also worked in software development and systems administration, started three small businesses of my own, and been CPO of a listed company. That’s over 20 years across pretty much every part of a technology business, and it’s why I can sit in a room with a CTO, a CMO and a CFO and speak all three languages.
Since leaving Amazon in 2016, I’ve spent ten years working with founders and executives across Europe and the US, from fast-growing scale-ups to some of the world’s largest organisations, doing my own sales and marketing along the way.
I got there by trying harder, which worked until it didn’t. Two burnouts later, at 47, an ADHD diagnosis explained a great deal. I stopped, trained as an executive coach at Henley Business School, became ICF-accredited, and built a way of working that fits how my brain actually operates rather than how I thought it should.
16
startup leadership teams
19
early-stage founding teams
200+
leaders worked with directly
€3bn+
the value of the startups I've worked with
€1bn+
raised by them
Startups and accelerators I've worked with
Who I work with
Founders and CEOs of companies with a few dozen to a few hundred people, and the leaders around them: the chief of staff and the leadership team. Sometimes the company has slowed; sometimes it’s growing faster than the way it’s run.
Leading change in a bigger organisation? Transformation →
Want coaching for yourself? Coaching for you →
How I work
I’ve coached people for as long as I can remember: at school, at university, then my teams as a manager. For the last ten years, it’s been my job.
I don’t come with a syllabus for you to follow, or a model to fit you into. I follow the person, not a script. What I bring is pattern recognition from over two decades inside fast-moving organisations, so I can understand context fast and we can get straight to what actually matters.
Rather than doing the analysis and telling you what I think you should do, I help you figure out what you actually think, what you want, and how you’ll go about getting it. I’ll draw on my own experience when it’s useful, to close a knowledge gap or challenge an assumption, but you’re the expert on yourself, your team, your business, and your customers. My job is to help you access that expertise and intuition, not override it with mine.
Most leaders are good at thinking and much less comfortable slowing down enough to notice the frustration, fear, or desire underneath it. I push for that honesty alongside the analysis and strategy, because it usually points straight at what needs to change. And I’ll tell you what I see, including about you, privately and kindly.
What I believe
Everywhere, remarkable people are trying hard to live up to someone else’s expectations. Following the playbook. Fitting the template.
That is why I work with leaders: they multiply impact. A leader who is fully alive gives many more people permission to live.
So here is what I believe, and it still scares me to say it. Your instinct is not the thing to outgrow. Your emotions are not the enemy of good judgement. And a person fully alive, speaking and acting on their own truth, does more good than a timid person doing everything correctly.
Aliveness beats correctness.
What's shaping my thinking
People often ask me what to read. Here’s where I’d start.
If you’re running a startup: start with Tony Fadell’s Build. Then Matt Mochary’s The Great CEO Within for running the company week to week. For the hard calls, Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things. When growth stalls, Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. For building a company that doesn’t depend on you, Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer’s No Rules Rules.
If you manage people: if you’re new to it, start with Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager. Then Michael Bungay Stanier’s The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap. For feedback, Kim Scott’s Radical Candor. For your leadership team, Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
Thinking about working with a coach? Read Scott Osman, Jacquelyn Lane and Marshall Goldsmith’s Becoming Coachable.
Behind how I coach: Claire Pedrick’s Simplifying Coaching, Michael Neill’s The Inside-Out Revolution, Tony Robbins’ Awaken the Giant Within (much better than his first book), Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing and Richard Schwartz’s No Bad Parts.
Credentials
BSc with a double major in Pure Mathematics and Computer Science (Adelaide University, South Australia)
Off the clock
I live in Luxembourg with my wife (who writes an amazing Substack), three kids, and my mother-in-law: a full house by any measure. We have no pets (yet).
I can order food in French, beer in German, pass tests in Luxembourgish, listen in on my kids in Russian, and I used to be able to flirt in Spanish. Despite this, I am genetically monolingual.
My accent is South Australian, which already sounds half British. Ten years in London added a British passport and a bit of Cockney that slips out now and then.
I work out two to three times a week, have been known to do yoga, and love to relax in a 90C (200F) sauna with a skilled Aufgussmeister. In 2019 I rode 320km over three days with TechBikers from Paris to London (yes, we took a ferry), raising over £2,000 for charity, which I’m still proud of.
I cook frequently and make a genuinely excellent chilli con carne. My physique still reflects my cooking more than my exercise regime.
Let's meet
Book a free 20-minute Clarity Call so we can get to know each other a little and explore your goals and what’s keeping you from them. We’ll finish with an invitation to work together, a recommendation to meet someone else, or simply a clearer next step.