Overview

This is a book about a particular type - the opportunist - someone who reads conditions and moves before the move is obvious, who backs themselves into unproven territory on incomplete information, who finds the door and walks through it without waiting for certainty. And it is a book about what shapes that type, and whether the shaping is accidental or something that can be sought out deliberately. The opportunist appears in my bloodline across four generations: a Federation father who arrived in Australia as a travelling salesman and ended up at the table where the nation was constituted; a self-taught gunmaker who built a weapon in a shed in Wollongong after the army told him it was for gangsters, and died at thirty-three with forty-five thousand soldiers carrying it; a soldier who held Tobruk for two hundred and forty-one days. The disposition passes. The conditions that activate it do not always. My formation began at sea. Expelled from school at seventeen, I sailed from Sydney to England and back on the HMAV Bounty as part of the First Fleet Re-enactment - through Djibouti during a war, the Southern Ocean in forty-foot seas, the Suez Canal without a pilot. I stood watch at three in the morning with a ship full of sleeping people depending on me getting it right. I navigated by stars across three oceans. I learned, on a yardarm in the Coral Sea, that the safest thing to do was go with the motion - not fight it. I have been applying that lesson in business ever since. The business life that followed tested everything the sea built. A million dollars raised in a fifteen-minute courtesy meeting in Burbank from the backers of Skype. A company taken to the Australian Securities Exchange. Distribution through Microsoft, Ingram Micro and AppDirect reaching thirty million small businesses. A chairman recruited to the board who turned out to be working toward his own agenda from the day he arrived. An honest accounting of all of it - without victimhood and without excuses. The wins and the losses, the good decisions and the poor ones, the things I would do again and the things I would not. Written in the same voice I use in the accelerator rooms and investor meetings I work in now: direct, honest, no framework, no sanitised arc. The financial exit did not come on the schedule it was built toward. Everything else did. The book asks a question it does not fully answer: whether the type the sea produced is still available to people growing up in a world that has engineered away the conditions that create it. The reader is left to decide. The account is there to decide from. The opportunist reads the conditions in front of him and moves.

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