Context

I’m studying electrical engineering with a major in computer engineering and neuroscience at the University of Sydney. I’m a subject away from completing my neuroscience degree and I’ve completed about 60% of my engineering degree, with the remaining subjects being electives in computer engineering. I’ve deferred the past 3 semesters (have deferred a total of 4 semesters) and with the way Streamplate has been progressing, I’ll probably drop out to focus on work. …

Last week we pitched Streamplate at Fishburners and learnt how unattractive the term “food-ordering” was to some people. They think it’s a crowded market, a space unable to change because of how well capitalised the incumbents are, and effectively a “dead” market.

So when a venture-capitalist (VC) heard the words “food-ordering”, she admitted to “switching off”. Not good for Streamplate.

We spoke a bit more to this VC and she explained there were other vectors about our idea that we should lead with. …

In a few months, I think Streamplate will become sustainable and in doing so, become the first project that I initiated, to sustainably grow. When I say sustainable, I mean I think we’ll be able to secure a few million dollars in investment during 2021 which will finance what’s needed to continue building the App and the Orb. We’re in a bootstrapped/pre-seed stage now.

I realise that the App isn’t even completed nor is it available on Android, but I think part of my job is to think a few months in advance and accordingly adjust the company so its…

I’m not religious, but I do think there’s value in how religion is a vehicle for a lot of people to become spiritual. And the value of mindfulness that arises from spirituality seems to have been valued across most civilisations. From Abrahamic religions to the Indigenous beliefs in Australia and the pagan ideologies in antiquity, there’s palpable evidence that no matter the time, people have always sought more than just physical sensibility in this life.

This is an observation I keep noting and I’m going to briefly describe it here.

I’ve always believed that for the majority of the Western world, the two most life-defining events for anyone, excluding birth are;

1. Getting married,
2. Securing a mortgage.

This is because of how consequential both of these are. Marriage typically brings with it a host of new fundamental new responsibilities that emerge when a couple begin raising a family. A mortgage forcibly changes what most people will spend most of their waking lives doing — working.

What’s strange about this, is that so much of this traditional…

Consider the following:

• It only takes 3 minutes to bleed out,
• Ischaemic heart disease remains the leading cause of death, and,
• 1.9 billion adults are overweight or obese.

For all the human body has offered us, it remains, and always will be the Achilles heel of our livelihood. As the mind ages, our body degrades and while modern medicine has done much to keep us afloat into our 70s, 80s and beyond, there is an inevitability of death that no one can escape. This obsession with avoiding what must happen is founded on the fragility of the human body. …

One year on and Streamplate has grown exponentially. With nearly 20 team members, a completed App and an Orb ready for manufacturing, we’ve gone through a lot to get here. As the year closes, I spent some time reflecting on what we achieved and what we failed to reach.

It’s worth clarifying some guiding philosophies though that I’ve been adhering to:

1. Action Creates Opportunity — Doing nothing creates nothing and so even in the face of everything stacked against us, we have to do something to change the odds.
2. Keep Moving Forward — We’ve had a lot of setbacks, but…

The first idea for Streamplate was to build a hardware device that projected the menu onto a table. This was going to be a projector that was centred on a table and was nicknamed “The Snowglobe” because it was to be a dome-like structure with a frosted housing.

In that initial message, I sent a document detailing the idea further and included a few drawings.