Twenty years building digital businesses globally. A decade at Google. An $80M+ media portfolio bootstrapped without VC. Now in code daily, rebuilding my own operation with AI at the core and writing about what's actually happening from inside the transformation.
I've been building digital businesses for twenty years, and AI is the biggest shift I've seen since Google changed how advertising worked. It's squeezing our existing revenue and opening doors we couldn't see a few years ago.
My career started at Google in 2006, when the company was just 12,000 people strong. Over a decade there, I worked across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia. In my last position, I was managing a $1B+ advertising business and a 25-person team across four continents. I left in 2017 to build something of my own. Together with my wife, we bootstrapped a portfolio of online publications to $80M+ without raising a dollar. 90%+ profit margins and a global organisation of 20+ people.
Today I spend most of my time exploring frontier AI capabilities and rebuilding our operations on AI infrastructure, shipping production AI systems for new ventures, and discovering what actually works in the gap between promise and real business outcomes. That gap is what I'm most interested in, and it's what I write about.
Operations scaled. Global SMB P&L led across four continents at Google.
Bootstrapped cumulative sales at mOOnshot digital. Zero external capital.
Net profit margins. High-margin operations architected for the AI era.
International talents managed across remote and in-office teams worldwide.
Business exit to a private investment group. Portfolio property sold at 4.5x valuation.
Global users reached across the mOOnshot digital portfolio. An audience built from Dublin, Singapore, New York, and Dubai.
Recommendations from people who worked with me directly, mostly during my decade managing teams international at Google.
Hye In Kim
APAC Growth Lead, Google Play Games
“He cares about people very much and he also knows how to push people beyond their comfort zone.”
Maiko Fujita
Consumer Marketing Manager
“Simon had led the team by showing clear vision and goals, always giving actionable feedback.”
Pratik V Udeshi
Head of Amazon Ads, Asia-Pacific
“Simon also has very good product knowledge and displays an amazing sense of ownership towards all his projects.”
How AI is reshaping content creation, monetisation, and the economics of online publishing. Written from inside the transformation, not from the sidelines.
Read moreBuilding without VC, achieving 90%+ margins, and the discipline of profitable-first growth. The frameworks behind scaling a portfolio to $80M without external capital.
Read moreWhere online publishing, audience attention, and content monetisation are heading. Why the advertiser-first model won't survive AI. Industry analysis grounded in 20 years of operating data.
Read moreThe daily practice of building AI-powered products. Build logs, architecture decisions, and what AI-assisted development actually feels like in production.
Read more
$80M+ bootstrapped, rebuilding AI-first
Two-arm media operation: an owned publications portfolio plus an agency serving premium brands. Currently rewriting the production stack from zero around AI agents and orchestration.
100M+ readers, agent-driven editorial
Flagship luxury lifestyle publication. The 15-person manual editorial team is being replaced by a quality-gated AI agent pipeline: 4-week cycles down to 4 hours.
Directory + networking, scaling globally
Directory and networking platform connecting elite luxury professionals from world-class companies. Members-only graph of operators across hospitality, fashion, and design.
Sustainable luxury travel guide
Curated guide to ethical hotels, vegan restaurants, and sustainable destinations for conscious travelers. Editorial built on the same AI publishing rails as Luxe Digital.
Stealth, on Shopify
Direct-to-consumer home design brand. Curated objects for considered interiors, with the catalog and merchandising loop run end-to-end by AI.
Stealth, regional pilot
Official news aggregator, zero noise. Pulls only from verified institutional sources to cut through the social-feed haze around major events.
Stealth, internal tooling
End-to-end content framework powering the mOOnshot publications: research, drafting, editorial review, SEO, and publishing as a single agent loop with human quality gates.
Stealth, testing on myself
A multi-tenant personal-brand publishing system. This site is the first tenant — the framework drafts, this repo publishes, and the same rails will serve other operators next.
Stealth, live on 2 domains, scaling to 10+
Templated directory platform for niche business categories. Shared Next.js + Supabase core, AI-generated entries, designed to scale across verticals from one codebase.
The same publishing operation, rebuilt from zero around AI. Not a tool layered on top. A full rewrite of how the work gets done.
“Once digital transformation starts gaining momentum, we can develop the right marketing strategy for luxury brands to grow.”
Best way to reach me is email. I read everything but reply selectively. If you're an operator rebuilding your business around AI, an institution thinking through operational AI deployment, or a founder bootstrapping with AI-first infrastructure, I'd like to hear from you.