In October 2024, I was sitting on a plane heading to Romania for my wedding. I should have been present. I was not.

The weeks before that flight had been what they always were: fund applications, acquisition cycles, waiting for decisions that other people would make about my time and my ideas. Every time I gained any ground, something urgent pulled me back. I had work with real potential that I could not pursue, because the mandate was not there, the funding was not there and the institutional permission was not there. I was burning through cycles of burnout, losing sleep over problems that would not matter six months later, unable to find the off switch.

The wedding was my biggest chance to step away from all of that. But it also brought something into focus. I was stepping into the role of provider for my family more seriously and for the long term, something I take genuine joy in, and I could not see how it would work from where I stood. I could not see a future in academia. I could not see a future in the larger institutional structure I had been part of for years. Freedom felt cut off.

Somewhere above the clouds, I made a decision. EdenCT came shortly after.

One year on...

A year on, I want to be honest about what that first year actually looked like. The real version, not the motivational one.

Decoupling from a regular salary is a structural shock that no amount of planning fully prepares you for. You acquire work, you deliver it and then you wait. Not everything arrives at once. You can be doing well by any reasonable measure and still find that invoice timing is the most stressful variable in your week. The bank account does not fill itself anymore. That takes some getting used to.

After a high and well-earned break in Mykonos, where I saw that things were working out, the lowest point came in July, six months into the journey. Summer in Switzerland is quiet. Clients and collaborators go on holiday, emails go unanswered and calls are not returned. None of that had anything to do with the quality of my work. But my mind was not interested in that distinction. I had not planned for the downtime. I had not understood that quiet weeks are not a signal that something has gone wrong. They are, in fact, the best opportunity a solopreneur has: time to strengthen the work, build what normally gets deferred and think more clearly. I was too anxious to see that in July.

I do not make the same mistake now.

What that summer taught me is something I could not have learned any other way. The stress of running your own company is real and it does not leave. But it is self-imposed stress, carried in pursuit of something you chose. Something you genuinely believe in. That distinction matters more than I expected it to. The stress I used to carry belonged to other people's ambitions and anxieties, their cycles and their decisions. The stress I carry now is mine. And on the other side of it, I feel growth every single day.

Solopreneurship & the Lean Business...

EdenCT was always going to be lean. That was not a constraint imposed by circumstance. It was a deliberate decision, and it took a year of real project work to understand fully why it was the right one.

I did not train in Switzerland. I came up through academic practice and learned the constraints of local planning and design as I went. Working on projects in Bern and Thun brought something important into focus: a design can fail not because it does not work technically, but because it cannot be implemented. The forces that stop a technically sound proposal are not always technical. Accessibility requirements, heritage designations, prior decisions embedded in the fabric of a place and heavily regulated standards with no room to manoeuvre: these are what stop a project before it starts. It is also these nuances that are trained to a certain extent in higher-level education, but specific to that country (in my case, Australia).

Colleagues with deep experience in local practice have taught me how to read those constraints. In return, I bring something they tell me consistently should have entered the project much earlier: the analytical foundation that shapes the design rules before the design begins. When those two forms of expertise land together on a genuine conflict point in a design, something useful happens. The result is not compromise. It is clarity.

This is the EdenCT model. My 5D Nature-Confidence Framework (Diagnose, Deconstruct, Design, De-risk, Defend) is how I communicate the value of bringing rigorous evidence in before decisions are locked, not after. Confidence early in a process is not a luxury. It is what prevents a design from stalling, reversing and having to be rebuilt from assumptions that were never properly tested.

Running EdenCT has also opened something I did not fully anticipate. I can now engage with my network more openly and more broadly than any institutional structure ever permitted, across cities, countries and disciplines, without waiting for a funding cycle to authorise the conversation. Ideas and creativity move differently in this space. Collaborations form naturally. I feel that more vividly every month.

Leaving academia, but not leaving research...

I want to be precise about what leaving academia did and did not mean.

I did not leave because I was finished with research. I left because the academic structure was not willing to walk with me outside the ivory tower. That is a meaningful distinction. I had spent years inside that world, moving from Asia to Australia and then, after eleven years, from Australia to Switzerland, each time following the institutional path as so many researchers do. Each move cost something real. I settled in Zürich because I wanted to settle, not because a posting required it. If I move again, it will be because I chose to.

Naval Ravikant writes in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant that the scientists who made real breakthroughs and contributions probably added more to human society than any other single class of human beings.¹ I also remember hearing him describe, in a podcast, the figure he called the applied researcher: the person who does not simply produce knowledge but closes the distance between what we understand and what we actually build. When I heard that, it named something I had been doing for my entire career without a word for it.

That is what EdenCT is built to do. I call it knowledge work now: research carried out with scientific rigour and applied with practical clarity. The tools are the same ones I built over fifteen years in academia, spatial modelling, dynamic simulation, scenario analysis and evidence synthesis. The difference is that the output no longer sits on a shelf. It shapes decisions. It moves cities.

Change at the personal level...

A year in, I wake up differently. That is the simplest way I can put it. I can pursue my vision with EdenCT, engage broadly with inspiring individuals through my podcast, continue my research collaboration with colleagues and have more time and presence for my family!

The mission is clear in a way it never was inside an institution. Work that used to feel like a loop now feels like a direction. Ideas come more freely than they ever did when each one had to be justified against a funding call. The sense of genuine impact is no longer something I defer to a future publication cycle. I feel it in the projects, in the conversations and in the way my network has opened up across the globe in the past twelve months.

Every day carries something new. The stress is real and the uncertainty is real. But both are mine, both are in service of something I believe in. And that changes everything. The saying "pursue your passion" does ring true, but no one ever said it was going to be easy. There is a lot more depth than the three simple words, but it is something each individual must explore and understand for themselves.

In closing...

Before I close, a question worth sitting with: where in your own work, your career or your city are you still waiting for someone else's permission to pursue the thing that matters most? I certainly do not wait for permission and I act unapologetically!

And if you are working on making your city more liveable, more resilient or more honestly designed, get in touch. That conversation is exactly what EdenCT is here for.