Vince Frost is a world renown designer, author, creative impresario, and one of the most brilliant thinkers on human centered design that I know. He is the founder and Executive Creative Director of Frost*collective, Sydney. We met almost a decade ago, when I approached him to design my first book, ‘Futuretainment’ which was published by Phaidon. His inspired work on that book led to a design award by the Art Director’s Club in New York. Before starting Frost* Design, Vince was the youngest Associate Director at Pentagram. In 2004, he relocated to Sydney and, as Executive Creative Director of Frost*collective, has lead a wide range of projects for clients such as Deutsche Bank, Qantas, Frasers Property and the Sydney Opera House. His latest book is called, ‘Design Your Life’, and is well worth a read. Vince dropped around to my beach pad in Bondi for a coffee, and we took the time to chat about the future of design, and how everyone, even business leaders, could benefit from thinking more like designers.

I was in LA over Halloween, and so took the opportunity to look up one of my favorite genre-bending, sci-fi authors - Peter Clines. Peter has a number of brilliant books including ’14’, ‘The Fold’, and his latest, ‘Paradox Bound’, which he originally pitched to his agent as a cross between Neil Gaiman’s ‘Neverwhere’ and ‘Cannonball Run’. Growing up in Stephen King's hometown of Maine, his first epic novel at the age of eight was ‘Lizard Men From The Center of The Earth’. In the bright glare of the LA sun, we spoke at length about a wide range of geeky topics from time-travel to teleportation, evil stars to parallel universes and of course, the secret occult history of America. 

With more than 200 inches of snow each year, and a good eight hour drive from a major city, Michigan Tech didn’t see many recruiters from outside of the Midwest. That didn’t seem right to Garrett Lord. Why should talent be located just in geographies closest to tech companies? After driving to college campuses across the country, he realized that student access to opportunities was universally unequal, and so along with Scott Ringwelski and Ben Christensen, decided to form Handshake to reinvent the college recruiting business. I caught up with Garrett in Las Vegas, to talk about how data might change the way companies find, recruit and manage talent in the future.

Matt Pearson, along with Fleet’s other two co-founders, saw an opportunity to use nanosatellites to enable the world’s next industrial revolution, the connection of the estimated 75 billion devices set to come online over the next decade. Beginning in 2018, their plan is to launch more than 100 nanosats into space to create a free, global network. Just following a recent fundraising with Niki Scevak at Blackbird Ventures, Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and other investors - I caught up with Matt in Sydney to talk about why the future of global communications is cheap, small and disposable.

For as long as I’ve known him, Brady Forrest has been at the very epicenter of whatever the West Coast alpha geeks think is going to be the next big thing. I met him around 2008 when he was running the brilliant ETech conference for O’Reilly Media - which incidentally, was one of the first public tech talks that I ever gave. Since then he cofounded Ignite, a talk series which has been held thousands of times around the world - as well as Highway1, a hardware accelerator which has helped launch over 58 hardware startups.