Why we left the corporate AI rat race. What we're building. Weekly notes — what shipped, what broke, what we're reading. The kind of stuff we'd tell you over a beer.
said over a beer
not at a conference
Dave: I'd been at one of the big four consultancies running AI delivery for two years. Watched the same play every project: $50k slide deck → drop tools and run → 6 months later the tools were gathering dust because nobody had time to actually run them. The customer paid for transformation and got a JIRA ticket and burnout.
Shehan: I was leading a Telstra-backed sales org. Same pattern from the customer side — every AI vendor selling shiny tools, nobody offering to actually run them. Solo founders and tradies were the worst hit: priced out of enterprise, sold to by hype-merchants, left with software they couldn't operate.
Late 2025 we took a 4-month trip overseas. Sri Lanka · Vietnam · Kyrgyzstan · Kazakhstan · Georgia · Armenia. Met digital nomads running their entire ops stacks from beach cafes. Realised: the AI is finally good enough that you don't need a JIRA ticket — you need someone to install it and run it.
So here we are. Two operators in Sydney. We install your AI. We run it. You own the workflows. We carry the load until you can afford to hire.
That's the rat race we left. That's the rat race we're helping our customers leave too.
— Dave + Shehan · Sydney, May 2026
This page will get a fresh post every 1-2 weeks. What we shipped. What broke. What we learnt about installing AI for solo founders. What we're reading. What we're saying NO to. The kind of stuff we'd tell you over a beer · just written down.
Subscribe: not yet. We're not asking for emails until we've got 3-4 posts published and you can decide if they're worth your inbox space. Check back end of May 2026 — or follow on LinkedIn · we'll cross-post.