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Now

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Last updated Sep 1, 2022

WORK 💻It's now been almost a year since I announced my departure from Pinnacle. Since then, I guess I've mostly been dabbling in things across 3 main "buckets":1. My own projects
2. Helping some groups with their projects (aka consulting)
3. Advising a couple startupsThe one common denominator is that everything is in betting. I'm on year 13 in this biz and it's never been more fun.I launched The Betting Startups Podcast last November, which interviews founders/CEOs of promising betting industry startups. I've been producing and publishing episodes almost every week since then - we're almost at episode #40 at the time of this update, and we're booked up for the rest of the year.In January, I launched the accompanying newsletter, aptly called The Betting Startups Newsletter. It's the easiest way for busy people to keep their finger on the pulse of the betting industry's early-stage ecosystem.But the thing I'm working on that I'm most excited about is building the betting industry's largest job board. It soft-launched last month, and will be officially launching in the coming weeks as we start the marketing engines. I already have some paying customers, and am pumped to build my first SaaS product! This project will take the bulk of my focus and attention for the rest of the year as I work to find PMF.I'll have a lot more to say about all this in the next update!LOCATION 🏡I moved back to Vancouver Island in March 2020 after a 4+ year hiatus living and working abroad. It's good to be home.LIFE 🌱Mrs L and I got married in May, which was easily the best day of my life. It was a beautiful wedding, followed by a hell of a party! We then departed two days later for a few weeks on some amazing Greek islands. I'm still riding pretty high from it all. Let the good times roll 🥳️CURRENT AREAS OF INTEREST- Web3. It's impossible to keep up with the pace of things in crypto right now, but I'm trying. I finally had my "aha" moment with NFT's recently, and am finally past the it's just a jpeg phase of the adoption curve. Lots to learn in real-time...- No Code. As a non-technical product person, my achilles heel has always been dependence on developers to bring things to life. Well the no code space has completely changed that, and it's fully captured my imagination. Unsurprisingly, all of my projects are built using no-code tools. Bullish!Next update to this page: January 2023

📍Moderating the Pitch ICE startup pitch competition at ICE London -- 🗓 April 2022

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About

I've been an active contributor to the Internet economy since 2003 when I got my first job post-uni with an online payments company (doing front-line customer support on the graveyard shift 😴...)Now almost 20 years later, according to Linkedin: "I'm a digital product leader that sits at the intersection of strategy, commercial opportunity, and leadership of high-performing delivery teams."In non-Dilbert language, it basically means that I work with teams to build and launch stuff that hopefully makes money.I've been plying my trade in the sports betting industry for the last 13ish years. In that time, I have launched dozens of products that have been used by millions of people around the world that have transacted billions of dollars worth of betting volume.

Moderating the "UX & Innovation in iGaming" panel at the 2019 Betting on Sports conference

In 2009, I co-founded and launched Bet Smart Media with a couple friends. We did the cliche tech startup thing and raised money from some awesome angel investors, then promptly spent it all on office space and employees before we became cash flow positive. Oops.But we executed extremely well and built some pretty hot stuff that people liked (which I'll write about some other day). Unfortunately, we couldn't quite figure out product/market fit with the runway we had.Despite that, our work started getting the attention of people in the betting industry, and we started getting asked if we were available to help them deliver on their projects.We were broke but not yet ready to throw in the towel on our little startup. So, we pivoted away from our own product ambitions and moved into the services business as a full-stack product team for hire.From 2011-2014, we worked with some of the biggest sports betting brands in the world, including William Hill, bwin, Pinnacle, Oddschecker, DonBest, and plenty more. As it turns out, there weren't a lot of other independent and experienced teams with our depth of betting subject matter expertise. My job was everything that wasn't done inside a CLI.In 2015, we received an offer we couldn't refuse, and Bet Smart Media was acquired by the legendary Pinnacle Sports. Suddenly, my cofounder and I were working for the world's sharpest bookmaker from their head office on the island of Curacao!I lived on Curacao for a few years, and bounced regularly between it and the London office where most of my teams were based. Traveling between the Caribbean and the UK regularly can result in some jarring weather extremes, but I hold very soft spots for both Curacao and London.I moved back to Canada in early 2020, and continued working remotely with Pinnacle until my departure last September.Which brings us to now!

📍Halfmoon Bay near "Canada's Bohemian Backwater" on Vancouver Island -- 🗓 July 2020

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Lists!

MY NO-CODE TOOL STACKI am currently paying to use premium versions of the following no-code tools/apps:
- Database: Airtable
- Data transforms: Parabola
- Web Scraping: ParseHub
- Connecting & automating it all: Zapier
- Website builder #1: Webflow
- Website builder #2: Softr
- Website builder #3: Carrd (the website you're on was built using Carrd)

📍Hiking in Gowlland Tod Provincial Park -- 🗓 December 2020