“Build better connections with yourself, your team, and the world outside.”
– Craig Davis
“Build better connections with yourself, your team, and the world outside.”
– Craig Davis
About.
- Co-founder, Sendle
- Adjunct Professor, UTS Business School
- Mentor, Startmate
- Advisor, KPMG High Growth Ventures
- Teacher, Search Inside Yourself
A few years ago I was asked to speak at the first ever “Fuck Up Night” in Sydney. Having had more than my fair share of failures and missteps it was an occasion for which I felt eminently qualified.
I remember saying to the audience that night, “failure was a necessary but insufficient precondition for success”, and I remain convinced of that still. I’ve lost a small fortune in failed ventures, jeopardised my health, teetered on the brink of mental illness and, worst of all, tortured my relationships with those I love. But failures are also great teachers, if you’re prepared to look at them, because they force you to forensically examine your faults and defaults. It’s hard and it hurts, but that’s how you grow.
Don’t get me wrong, there has been plenty of upside as well. I started an advertising agency at 25, fresh from AWARD School, and grew it into a successful business over 10 years before selling it and heading overseas. For the next 10 years, I lived in Singapore, Hong Kong and London leading multinational advertising networks, and getting to work with amazing people and clients all over the planet. For a kid from Dubbo it was dizzying, and it was destructive.
By the time we returned to Australia (thankfully there was still a “we” with my wife and three kids) it was time for some seismic changes. I was determined to start something new, and save the world. I did, and I didn’t.
The very next venture was Sendle where I had the pleasure and privilege to team up with James and Sean, two of the best and brightest humans I know. It was an opportunity to create a business that was purpose driven, satisfying and sustainable, and I’m immensely proud of the Sendle team and their trajectory. At the same time, for reasons that are entirely aligned, I committed to expand my meditation and emotional intelligence practices and signed up to train in San Francisco as a Search Inside Yourself teacher. Which, as providence would have it, is the reason you’re here now.
I love to teach these skills, especially to startup founders and teams. They’ll help you be a less precarious human being, be smarter and better and bouncier. Of course you’ll still fuck up, and you must, but these skills will help make much classier mistakes, understand them faster, and get back on your horse.
“In challenging times you don’t rise to the occasion, you fall back on your training.”
-Craig Davis. See me talking here.
