I have spent most of my career somewhere between ideas and the market
I started out in communications and spent more than two decades building and running agencies.
I co-founded Cow, which grew into an award-winning PR business working with companies including Google and Yahoo!, and later founded Rabbit, one of the early specialist social-media agencies. At their peak, the businesses I helped build reached around £3 million in turnover and employed 40 people.
I spent that first career doing a fairly improbable range of things. The agencies and campaigns won around 25 awards. I helped take a loyalty app to number one in the Irish App Store, launched new products and services in unfamiliar markets, and worked on everything from major technology brands to some considerably stranger consumer products. It was good training in how to make people notice something, understand it and ultimately act.
That period also taught me as much about business as it did about communications. Winning clients is one thing. Hiring people, managing cash flow, building something people will pay for and keeping it working as it grows is another.
Aviation became the next chapter
I joined SimpliFlying in 2016 and increasingly moved into aviation sustainability from 2020, working across research, publishing and advisory projects covering alternative fuels, new aircraft technologies and aviation's transition.
That work led to Sustainability in the Air, two books built around long-form interviews with the founders, executives and researchers trying to change aviation.
It also took me much deeper into climate technology itself.
Over the past several years, I have interviewed and researched companies working on sustainable aviation fuel, synthetic fuels, hydrogen, carbon removal, electric and hybrid aircraft and other emerging energy technologies.
The technology is only half the story
The more companies I looked at, the more interested I became in what happens after somebody proves that a technology works.
Can it be manufactured? Can somebody afford it? Is there infrastructure? Will customers sign contracts? Can the next plant be financed? Does the economics survive when you move from a demonstration to scale?
Those questions now sit at the centre of my work.
I am particularly interested in the point where technology, investment and commercial reality meet: why some promising ideas make it through the three valleys of death and others do not.
Today
I lead sustainability work at SimpliFlying, write and interview through Sustainability in the Air, and spend much of my time talking to founders, investors and companies working on the technologies that could change aviation.
I am based in London and work internationally.