I’m a social entrepreneur based in Aotearoa New Zealand and the founder of Grokkist.
But the truer version is that I’m someone who spent a long time walking away — from jobs, from schools, from careers I was good at but that weren’t working for me, sometimes at speed — because I kept discovering that knowing what you don’t want can matter more than knowing what’s next.
Eventually I grew tired of the cycle, and wearier still of watching people I love get stuck in their own versions of it. I wanted to build something worth running toward instead — a home for the plural, hard-to-categorise sort of person who’s curious about everything, often out of step with the room, wearing forty-eight hats and already reaching for the next. People who care a little too much and notice a little too much, and have never quite fit the boxes.
That became Grokkist: a member-supported social enterprise and living learning ecology built on two simple postures — curiosity and care. It’s grown into a whole world — a community, a Press, an academy, and a practice of one-to-one accompaniment I call groksmithing — but beneath all of it sits something simpler. It began with two questions that had haunted me for years: why do some people keep their curiosity alive in a world that seems designed to school it out of us? And what would learning look like if it were built to light people up rather than sort them?
The through-line of my work, whatever form it takes, is helping what’s already alive in someone become legible — first to themselves, then to peers they never knew they had, and eventually to the wider world. In practice that often means sitting with people who have genuine gifts and helping them make what they do best legible enough that a meaningful livelihood can form around it — without flattening themselves into a niche or selling their soul to do it. Money, I’ve come to think, belongs inside a values-led life, not outside it.
And yes — despite never letting school interfere with my education, I’ve somehow accumulated a range of degrees and credentials, available on request from the tube in my cupboard should anyone wish to inspect them.
Check out Grokkist
