2019 — A Year in Review
2019 in Review + 2020 Goals
I just looked back on my 2018 Year in Review (+2017 here).
Status Quo
- 🏡 Location — Live in Australia, Sydney (July — October in Melbourne)
- 👩❤️👨 Girlfriend — Gabrielle Bleakley (5Y anniversary in July 2019), M&A lawyer
- 🧳 Work — Startmate, startup accelerator which invests in and helps 10–15 startups grow twice a year
- ✈️ Travel — Fly every 2–4 weeks to Melbourne, 2x 1-week trips to San Francisco (April / October)
- 🚴♂️ Sports — Triathlons
- 📺 Hobbies — Anime (One Piece, Boku No Hero Academy)
- 🚶♂️ Things I do — Read, Write
Update vs Last Year
- 👩💻 Gabby left Clayton Utz joined Corrs
- 🧑💻 I stepped up from Head of Ops to CEO of Startmate
- 🚴♂️ Hardly any Volleyball, but lots of Triathlon training
Family & Friends
A notable difference to last year is that I’ve leaned into better updating my family and friends. It gives me lots of energy and is paying off in closer relationships.
- Calling my family every Sunday
- Monthly email wrap up about Good, Bad and Uglies in my life
- Annual (and more often) catch-ups with my closest friends
- Elephants group with my closest friends
- Booking out time for weekends away (more below #social)
Health & Sports
My goal was to finish a Triathlon this year and train 4x a week.
Stuck pretty religiously to the 4x week training routine.
Stark drop-off post-Half-Ironman in mid-Nov.
Instead of one triathlon finished a Sprint and Olympic triathlon and topped it off by a Half-Ironman in 6 hours (1.9km swim, 90km cycle, 21km run).
Bucket list item done, but wouldn’t do it again - training takes way too long ☠️
Professional
A big year for Startmate —more detail here:
- People: Sascha joined 🙌, extended an offer last week to our newest member 🤞, I stepped up from Head of Ops to CEO
- Accelerator: SYD19, MEL19 and SYD20 climate cohort announcement
- Fellowship: 2 cohorts of 16 fellows
Intellectual
Reading
Lost my book reading routine when I moved to Melbourne halfway through the year. Would love to pick it up again, on the other hand, I’m enjoying reading longer blog posts and online articles.
Favourite Read: Courage to be Disliked
Writing
Started out with a big goal. I realised after a while that quality was more important to me than quantity. Problem with that was that I then almost completely stopped writing 😣
Distribution
Another realisation was that producing anything including content without distribution doesn’t make sense — so started to engage and build an audience via Twitter. The more I engaged the more followers.
Public Speaking
Didn’t track this as strictly as the above — but had some sort of presentation or panel roughly every other week.
Social
Lots of good stuff here. It was a real priority in 2019 to spend lots of quality time with Gabby and friends.
Barossa Valley, Hunter Valley, Japan Trip, Blue Mountains, Weiheke Island, Boomerang Beach, Newcastle
Environmental
🐄 Stopped buying and ordering beef and drinking milk since Jan 2019, because of the environmental impact of cows. Easy, small change.
2019 Reflection
My goals for 2019 are here and below:
Work
- Pay it Forward
- 12 public speaking engagements
DONE — paying it forward every day at Startmate :) still core to the job ++ lots of public speaking
Sports
- Finish a Triathlon
DONE — finished 3x incl Half Ironman
Hobby/Interests
- Find a non-sports related hobby
- 4x go deep in an industry/area and blog about it
PARTIALLY DONE — drawing class for 3 months, but didn’t blog enough
2020 Goals
2020 will be a big year of travel for me → SYD, MEL, AKL, SF, Poland and Canada. My focus will be on still spending enough time with Gabby and empowering the Startmate team to work in an environment they love.
- Build a great team culture
- Spend quality time with Gabby
- Explore my personal brand
