Helping organisations navigate technology shifts: not just the software, but the culture, structure, and decision-making that need to change around it. Two exits as founder/CPTO. Twenty-five years across SaaS, energy, education, and telco.
Helping organisations figure out where AI creates defensible value, and what needs to change beyond the software: team structure, decision-making, assessment of build-vs-buy, and the discipline to not build things just because you can. Deep experience in customer engagement, conversational AI, and energy technology.
Helping growth-stage founders compress learning cycles rather than feature cycles. Architecture decisions, GTM discipline, and avoiding the trap of shipping more just because building got cheaper. Grounded in having actually built and exited twice, not in frameworks borrowed from other people's companies.
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. A low-risk way to get senior product and technology leadership without committing to a full-time hire before either side is ready.
Helping universities and institutions adapt to technology shifts at a structural level: curriculum relevance, industry partnership models, and bridging the gap between what academia teaches and what employers actually need. Nine years on the University of Melbourne CS advisory group.
Australia's first smart meter customer engagement platform. Five energy retailers, 250,000+ users. Multi-tenant platform operating across distinct regulatory contexts. Hands-on technical contributor to the data science capability (R, ML prototyping). Research partnership with the University of Melbourne on behavioural field experiments. Sold to industry acquirer.
Customer engagement platform. Led 20-person product and engineering team. Unlocked $5M ARR through enterprise product strategy. Established London office and signed first UK client. Acquired by Smart Communications.
Australia's first crowd-funded renewable energy retailer. +51 NPS. Built the customer engagement product that reduced churn by 25%.
Built the SaaS foundation that led to Billcap — early product and platform work in energy customer engagement. 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.
Long-standing member of the industry advisory group, providing practitioner perspective on curriculum relevance, graduate readiness, and the evolving relationship between academic computer science and industry practice.
Coaching growth-stage portfolio company founders on AI strategy, architecture decisions, and the discipline required to build well when building gets cheaper.
"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, and the companies that get both right are the ones that win.
From the Tech Trajectory podcast with Kavita Karwar (DiUS), July 2025.
"We're very good at recording the things that have already happened. When you're in the high-growth company game, it's ultimately a bet on what the next thing is, or what isn't being done that should be done, and that can be done economically."
"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."
"The mistake we can make is only listening to the complaint and not thinking about the difference between stated preference and revealed preference. A complaint is a stated preference. The revealed preference is: are they using the product more or less?"
Billcap's smart meter data underpinned a multi-year research programme with the University of Melbourne, producing peer-reviewed publications in leading economics journals. I was the individual contributor on the Billcap side, working directly with the research team on data quality, experimental design, and analytical rigour.
Byrne, La Nauze, Martin. Randomised controlled trial across 8,000 Victorian households testing personalised smart meter feedback on energy consumption. Published in a top-5 economics journal.
Byrne, La Nauze, Martin. Field experiment estimating household electricity demand elasticity at the monthly level. Published in the leading energy economics journal.
La Nauze. Uses Billcap proprietary data. Acknowledgements: "I thank Yann Burden and Billcap for access to proprietary data." Published in a top-5 economics journal.
See also: Smart customers save (University of Melbourne Pursuit, 2015) for an accessible summary of the research programme.
Named and pictured as Chief Growth Officer in coverage of Pendula's $14.5 million raise from MA Growth Ventures and Octopus Ventures. Pendula's customer retention platform uses advanced analytics and generative AI to reduce churn and maximise customer lifetime value.
Read on SmartCompany →Quoted as an expert on behavioural change in energy consumption, drawing on Billcap's work with social norm feedback and smart meter data. Cited alongside Robert Cialdini's research and the Opower model.
"People want to signal. Householders don't want to hide their solar panels. They want people to see them, and that's good."
"I think we'll see energy use becoming the next dinner party conversation — people asking, 'Well, how many kilowatt hours do you use?'"Read on Domain.com.au →
Based in Sydney. Works remotely with international clients across APAC, UK, and Europe. Open to both advisory engagements and permanent leadership roles in energy-tech, AI, and adjacent sectors. Working rights in Australia, UK, EU, and Canada.