Journal
Mostly long-form, occasionally short. Pitch decks, fundraising, scaling, and the things nobody warns you about. Written between coaching sessions and across airports.
29 July 2026
What I actually use Claude for as an operator — 32 branded club storefronts, a WhatsApp agent that handles first contact for Sold Direct, and feasibility models in Excel that used to take a finance team.
Read the post →A walkthrough of the pitch deck I used to bring ZX Ventures and RMB into The Duchess — slide by slide, with the three slides I'd remove if I were building it today.
Read →Burnout in founders doesn't look like burnout. It looks like working harder, spending more, and slowly becoming the bottleneck of your own company. Three tells, drawn from being it twice.
Read →DOPE Drinks launched DTC into 42 US states and retail in 7 from a standing start. Here's what translated, what didn't, and the three things I'd do differently next time.
Read →How a five-person SA brandy startup cut a partnership deal with a 100-year-old institution — and why distribution-by-association is one of the highest-leverage moves an early-stage founder can make.
Read →How The Duchess hit a million units in our first year on South African shelves. The golden trolley, the LinkedIn-stalking, and the pre-launch playbook I'd run again.
Read →Representing DOPE Drinks at BevNET Live New York — the rise of micro-dosed cannabis beverages and what the room told us about the next phase of the category.
Read →1,000 entrepreneurs and thought leaders aboard a transformative event in Miami — Branson, Diplo, and the trip that secured the DOPE Drinks funding round.
Read →A workshop with the Airbnb Entrepreneurship Academy at the University of Johannesburg on how to build a pitch deck that actually raises money — drawn from the deck I used for The Duchess.
Read →An in-depth fireside conversation with Sandras Phiri (CEO of Pranary) on building The Duchess — manufacturing, fundraising, and the messy reality of growing a beverage brand out of South Africa.
Read →Sitting down with Bruce Whitfield on national prime-time radio to talk about The Duchess — what it took to build the world's first non-alcoholic G&T, and where the category was going.
Read →How We Made It in Africa profiled the Duchess story — the brand-building, the distribution hustle, and the move from 1 million bottles in year one to 8 million in year five.
Read →Free · 30 minutes · No upsell
30 minutes. No fee, no sales pitch. Bring the venture — early-stage or scaling, polished or messy. If it makes sense to keep going together, we'll figure that out as we go. If not, you'll still walk out with a clearer next step than when you walked in.