I started a business at seventeen out of the school kitchen, selling gingerbread houses to the teachers. Nobody had shown me how. So I come in, for free, and show your students what figuring it out actually looks like: business, life, tech, solving real problems. Then I sit with them and work through it.
Why free
Schools are doing their best with a world that changes faster than a curriculum can. Preparing kids for it takes people who've gone and figured it out coming back to pass it on. The adults who turned up for me at school made the difference. This is me turning up.
There's no catch, no upsell and no pitch to the kids. If your school wants me back, ask.
No fee, no pitch, nothing for anyone to buy at the end.
The sessions
Most business subjects start with "invent a product". I start with a real business and a real problem. Students learn to walk in, ask what hurts, diagnose it, build a small fix (with AI if it helps), take it back and offer to help. It teaches connection, diagnosis, building, selling and taking a no. Entrepreneurship is the vehicle. Capability is the point.
What it's actually like to start, run, sell and close things. The bits nobody puts in the textbook: the $1,000 quote that became $20,000, the ice cream shop that wouldn't let me grieve, the money mistakes I'd save you from. Honest, funny, and useful.
The five things I won't let a room of teenagers leave without. Everyone is a human being, so the rules of connection apply. Say yes to the scary thing with enough underneath you. Work out what you rock at. Be dangerous at enough things and use AI for the rest. Learn how money works before you need to.
A live build. Students bring a problem from their school, their part-time job or their family's business. We work out what's actually going on and build a small working thing with AI in front of them. They leave knowing they can do it too.
How I run a room of teenagers
I ask questions, I tell the truth, and I let them be the hero of their own story. The same rules apply to Year 9s as to executives: get to what matters, make it make sense, give them something to do. The kids I build video games with have taught me most of what I know about keeping a room's attention.
For parents and staff
A talk for parent evenings and staff days on presence, technology as a bridge instead of the enemy, and what a significant adult can add to a kid's life. Plus Press Start Together as a parent-and-kid workshop for schools, libraries and community groups.
A game design workshop you run with the kids in your life, then build together with AI. Parents produce. Kids design.
Uncle Steve →Proof
How it works
Tell me the year level, the subject, the date and what you'd like them to walk out with.
Quickly, and by me. We pick the session and shape it for your students.
In person around Melbourne, online anywhere.
Every session ends with something they can actually go and do.
What rooms say
These comments are from adult audiences, because that's where the written feedback comes from. The approach in a classroom is identical: get to what matters, make it make sense, give them something to do.
"Legendary! Lit me up and opened my eyes to a new way."
TraceyKeynote attendee"Engaging and educational."
RadhikaUniversity of Sydney"Great energy and more valuable than the NIDA workshop."
KelseyUNSWTell me who they are and what they're stuck on. I read every one myself.
Book a school session