Helping organisations navigate technology shifts — not just the software, but the culture, structure, and decision-making that need to change around it.
AI strategy, founder coaching, fractional product / tech leadership, and education advisory.
Helping organisations figure out where AI creates defensible value, and what needs to change beyond the software: team structure, decision-making, build-vs-buy, and the discipline to not build things just because you can.
Helping growth-stage founders compress learning cycles rather than feature cycles. Architecture decisions, GTM discipline, avoiding the trap of shipping more just because building got cheaper. Grounded in two exits.
Time-boxed engagements where I embed with your team, scope the real problem, and either hand off a clear roadmap or convert to a permanent role. Low-risk way to get senior leadership without committing to a full-time hire too early.
Helping universities adapt to technology shifts at a structural level: curriculum relevance, industry partnership models, bridging what academia teaches and what employers actually need. Nine years on the Melbourne University CS advisory group.
Founder, then operator, across energy retail, customer engagement, and AI.
Hired as CPTO. Led a 25-person product and engineering organisation through Series A, international expansion, and acquisition by Smart Communications UK. Established London office, signed first UK client, led AI strategy through to sale.
Founding executive team of Australia's first crowd-funded renewable energy retailer. Built the customer engagement product that reduced churn. Delivered a market-leading digital sales channel for battery storage.
Co-founded Australia's first smart-meter customer engagement SaaS for energy retailers. Hands-on technical contributor (R, ML prototyping). Established the Melbourne University research partnership and ran randomised field experiments across 8,000 households. Sold to Tally Group.
Energy efficiency programme delivery across Australia and France (Energy Return, Cool Nrg). A decade of CIO advisory, IT strategy, and outsourcing governance at Accenture, PwC, and Unilog — working across energy and telco in the UK, France, and Australia.
Coaching growth-stage portfolio company founders on AI strategy, architecture decisions, and the discipline required to build well when building gets cheaper.
Nine-year term on the industry advisory group, providing practitioner perspective on curriculum relevance, graduate readiness, and the relationship between academic computer science and industry practice. Term concluded 2024.
The hard part of a technology shift is never the technology. It's getting the organisation to change around it.
As AI reduces the cost of building, the binding constraint shifts from engineering capacity to judgment. The discipline premium rises. This applies equally to startups shipping product, universities rethinking curriculum, and enterprises reorganising teams.
Most organisations treat technology shifts as software problems. They buy tools, run pilots, and wonder why adoption stalls. The real work is cultural: changing how people make decisions, what they measure, and which assumptions they're willing to let go of. That's what I help with.
The common thread across my career is building products and teams that sit between complex regulated systems and end users. Energy retailers, telcos, universities, customer platforms. The pattern is always the same: the technology is the easy part, the organisational change is the hard part.
Selected pulls from podcast appearances and press coverage.
You should put in ten times more effort continuously getting feedback from your customer than you did in guessing who they might be in the first place.
Named and pictured as Chief Growth Officer in coverage of Pendula's $14.5M raise from MA Growth Ventures and Octopus Ventures.
Read on SmartCompany →Multi-year experimental research with the University of Melbourne, anchored on Billcap's smart-meter data.
Byrne, La Nauze, Martin. RCT across 8,000 Victorian households. Review of Economics and Statistics — top-5 economics journal.
Byrne, La Nauze, Martin. Field experiment estimating household electricity demand elasticity at the monthly level.
La Nauze. Uses Billcap proprietary data. Journal of Political Economy — top-5 economics journal.
Based in Sydney. Works remotely with international clients across APAC, UK and Europe. Open to advisory engagements and permanent leadership roles in energy-tech, AI, and adjacent sectors. Working rights in Australia, UK, EU, and Canada.