Proud to be a panellist at the Muslim Wealth Brisbane

On Saturday the November 15th, I had the privilege of being a panellist at the Muslim Wealth Summit. I was on the Professional Development & Entrepreneurship panel with three other extremely accomplished panellists.

The panel mostly addressed the question of whether entrepreneurship was the right path and how to know it is the right path for you. My reply was the “annual leave and sick leave” test. If you would miss having paid annual leaves and sick leaves, entrepreneurship is not for you.

I also pointed out that anyone entering entrepreneurship looking to make money would be better off upskilling into better jobs. I emphasised needing to fall in love with the problem. Emphasising the need to find a solution for the identified problem, the goal and mission. The other panellists supported the point I was trying to make, and it was overall a great experience.

This was the first Muslim Wealth Summit in Brisbane. It was previously successfully hosted in other states, and it is the brainchild of Tanvir Uddin, the founder of Wholesum. I mentored Tanvir while he was initially developing the concept of Wholesum through the Catalysr pre-accelerator way back in 2021. It’s great to see he’s made a success of it. I look forward to seeing Tanvir and Wholesum go on to achieve further success!

Catalysr Mentoring

One of these days, I am going to get back to my pre-COVID levels of posting. But it’s clearly not this year, given that it’s almost finished, and after the New Year’s post, I haven’t made any posts. I do have a big post coming, but I kind of want to get to the end of November before I say anything about what I have been up to for 95% of the time this year.

So let’s talk a little about the 5%. I mentioned in the New Year’s post that last year, I had the honour of joining the Catalysr accelerator with Pontinet. We are still working on Pontinet, but the progress has been slow. In the meantime, I am back on the other side and signed up as a mentor for this year’s cohort.

My photo was also used to advertise this year’s accelerator program. Which was cool. I like that picture too!

So, who am I mentoring? Train of Thought founder Ileana Koumoukelis. The pitch for Train of Thought is “Historically, women carry most of the household tasks. When, Stress, ADHD or Perimenopause are involved - Forget it -- literally, Forget IT... Working Memory is gone-- Disaster - Only 1 in 5, will seek medical help, let that sink in. Only, 1 in 5. It simply, takes too long. Train of Thought is the first Online Training/Community paired with Physical Memory Aids, designed to help fast (3 Weeks/10 min a day). We can't do the tasks. But... We can help: To remember to do it, To reassure it is done and Challenge why it is done. Based on Science and Our Experience Train of Thought, a breath amongst the chaos.”

I used to have a great memory, but age has caught up with me. My memory is deteriorating. So this is a startup trying to solve a problem near and dear to my heart!

I had my first session with her last month, and we will have another session down the track. Our session seems to have gone well, and Ileana produced a short on her main takeaways. I am looking forward to our next session and the improvements Ileana makes to her tech stack!

Welcome 2025!

Wow! It’s already 2025, and I only made two posts in 2024! One of them was the New Year post, which would give the impression that nothing happened in 2024, but in truth, a lot happened in 2024. Mostly not positive.

I would have still posted about the negative things. I am, if nothing else, a natural diary keeper, and I do see this blog more as a record for me to reflect on later down the track. Although being public, it is also here for those who want to know more about what I have been up to and what I am doing. So, let’s reflect on everything that happened in 2024 and what that means for 2025.

For much of 2024, I was quite sick. The underlying cause is Uterine fibroids that manifest in multiple debilitating symptoms, including extreme exhaustion due to anaemia. However, after much trial and error, I was put on Ryeqo, which is an extremely new and expensive medication designed specifically for uterine fibroids. It’s helped me get many of the symptoms addressed. But I was still extremely exhausted all the time.

I also had bouts of unexplained fevers and a whole bunch of other things. So my GP ordered a whole range of tests, echocardiograms, breath tests and a whole bunch of other things. But it all came back normal EXCEPT my glucose. I have diabetes. A diagnosis so anticlimactic after everything that I went through that I am frankly a bit annoyed.

I was never pre-diabetic. I think my anaemia masked the symptoms of diabetes as they are similar. So, I have no idea how long I have had diabetes. But since October, my diabetes has been managed. Unfortunately, Ryeqo increases the chances of blood clots in people with diabetes. However, the tablets have been such a game-changer that I am happy to risk the increased chance of blood clots.

So that was the big thing on a personal front, but since it's health-related, it affected everything, including my work, which did not go well in 2024 because Kyco Australia has been liquidated. I finished up my last duties as the Chief Technology Officer on the 5th of December 2024 when I shut down the last of our IT infrastructure. So that book is closed.

At some point, I will probably write another post reflecting on my time at Kyco. But it got messy and litigious by the time everything was said and done. So, I am unsure how much I could or couldn’t make public. But I will reflect and put something together that will hopefully not get me sued!

With Kyco closed, I am looking for my next adventure. To that end, I decided to do two further short courses with RMIT University to consolidate my project management knowledge. I already talked about doing Project Management for Professionals during the first half of last year. Then, during the second half, I took the digital project management bundle with Digital Delivery with Agile. After that, Agile Project Management.

I am not sure how I got through Digital Delivery with Agile because I was so unwell during it. I thought I could power through Agile Project Management, but I actually had to take a medical deferment. So I literally ended up finishing the Agile Project Management course in December, getting my badge on the 2nd of January this year!

I have previously included the videos I produced for these courses as part of these posts. However, I was so out of it for Digital Delivery with Agile and so stressed to get everything done for Agile Project Management that these were not my best work. Still, the courses did what I wanted. I was able to verify my experience and knowledge. I also learned a few things I hadn’t had to use yet. All in all, I feel like I updated my knowledge base and closed some skill gaps.

Presenting for PontiNet at Catalysr Accelerator Demo Day

So what’s next? Well, even before Kyco was put into liquidation, I started to work with Dr Jonathan Chernilo on Pontinet. Pontinet is a social enterprise that aims to improve access to Specialists in underserved communities.

It’s a cause I am invested in, given I have seen how underserved folks in places like Bangladesh are outside of the capital. But the venture is in very early stages.

That’s why it was a great honour to be included in the 2024 cohort for the Catalysr accelerator for migrants and refugees. I have previously worked with Catalysr as a chapter lead for their pre-accelerator program and as an IT mentor. But this time, I was on the other side as a participant. My co-founder Jonathan had to take the lead in relation to the accelerator program as a lot of it overlapped when I was at my lowest healthwise. But I ended up presenting on my own at Demo Day in Melbourne in December as Jonathan had to be in Europe.

It was a great day, and I am glad I could finish such a challenging year on a somewhat high note as I look forward to the future and what 2025 brings!

Judging UQIES Weekend of Startups

It’s been sometimes since I was back at UQ for any reason. So it was nice to be back this Sunday to be a Judge for the University of Queensland Innovation and Entrepreneurship Society (UQIES) weekend of startup.

This year’s theme was “Future of Work”, and it was interesting to see the mix of startups that were pitched. There were a lot of pitches solving “now” problems like an AI marking startup. However, I think it is obvious to all that assessments need to change drastically going forward since people are already using ChatGPT to cheat.

Unfortunately, a good portion of the solutions were technology being thrown at very human problems that can’t meaningfully be solved with tech. I hate to say this as an engineer, but the simple fact is that no amount of employee retention tech will work if you can’t or are unwilling to fire the nepo-baby toxic manager.

There were also a few startups pitched towards trying to solve the lingering isolation issues from COVID, including two pitched towards getting remote co-workers to socialise more. However, the issue is that the ideas rest on the premise that we want to be friends with our co-workers. Most people don’t, and those who do are unlikely to wait for company-mandated togetherness to socialise. I am not saying remote work isolation isn’t a real issue. It’s not an issue you can solve with minigames during lunch breaks.

Winners: Teach Wise, Photo Credit: Aryan Rustagi

The three winners addressed the theme of the Future of Work well. Two of the winners focused on pitching technologies that automate need-to-be-done but annoying tasks. One proposed a robotic sander for bespoke furniture. I think the startup was called Joynery or something like that, and they were planning to use computer vision and machine learning to allow for the robots to sand non-standard parts. The other, and the winner, Teach Wise, proposed using generative AI to help teachers create lesson plans. Teaching has become more of a transient field, and it is likely to undergo massive changes in the coming years, so anything that can reduce drudgery is a welcomed service.

The third place, Joynery was second, went to Attention Cube (I think that was the name), which attempts to solve the sticky problem of how to focus! It was an issue I tried to tackle with my team during the MIT Bootcamp, and it’s not something that will ever be truly solved because paying attention is hard! Attention Cube is probably not a longterm business, but it’s a great project that can net the founders a fair bit of money. So yes, I hope the students do pursue the venture!

Aryan Rustagi took all the UQIES event day photos.

Finally, I was one of the mentors for the Catalysr accelerator for high-performing migrant and refugee entrepreneurs - aka Migrapreneurs again this year. I could not attend all the sessions, but I hope I added value to the two sessions I did attend. The expression of interest for their 2024 program is open now. So interested migrapreneurs should apply today!

The Kyco Way Webinar

Yesterday, Trond hosted the first webinar to present the Kyco way to interested people. The webinar had a strong interest, with 159 people signing up. But unfortunately, the turn-up wasn’t as strong.

So it’s unlikely we’ll host another webinar anytime soon. But we did record Trond’s explanation of what Kyco is, and we’ll be sharing that with the public in due course.

I think it’s important to realise that in Start-up land, more things don’t work than do work. The trick is to learn, adapt and move forward. We tried to do a webinar because we had a strong showing when we hosted these information sessions in person. But I think a webinar doesn’t have the same appeal. So no more webinars!