The adventures of m0nty

G'day, my name is Paul Montgomery, also known as m0nty. Yes, I know that nickname looks dumb with the zero instead of the letter o, but there aren't nearly as many m0ntys out there as Montys. Googlejuice is important for names in this day and age.

I grew up mostly in the country Victorian town of Seymour (with two years in Bangalore). I will copy the start of this short biography from a post I made in 2005 at my other blog which is mostly about technology startups, Tinfinger.

I am a journalist by trade, having gone through the RMIT Journalism course finishing in 1995, and then spending a year co-editing the RMIT student newspaper Catalyst (the Web site used to be a lot more grotty in my day when I was its first Webmaster, but also filled with content which I coded and put up singlehandedly: Catalyst circa 1996). Before that I had an ill-advised year at the University of Melbourne doing Economics & Commerce, but after a year of arguing with lecturers about how stupid economics was, there was a parting of ways which benefited both sides.

After finishing with university, I was lucky enough to get the second job I applied for: journalist at a weekly technology newsmagazine which was then called Computer Week, later PC Week Australia (since folded). [...] I wasn't really cut out for the news grind, with my style more suited to the expansive feature where I got a chance to explore issues in depth and run really long quotes.

At the height of the dot com boom, I decided that I needed to try my hand at the business before everything went pear-shaped. I joined a business set up by medium-sized Australian Internet service providers to promote a peering network called AusBONE, acting as CEO. Unfortunately, partly due to my own inexperience and partly due to industry movements, it didn't work out. It was a valuable experience nonetheless. After that, I moved back to Melbourne to take up a job editing corporate newsletters with Delphi Consulting, which promptly went belly up less than a year later for reasons completely unrelated to anything I had done (anyone see a pattern here?).

I am now in Geelong, having spent a good amount of time in the interim working in sales for Neighbourhood Cable which, apart from keeping me fit hoofing it around the backblocks of Geelong, gave me a direct insight into what broadband users are thinking. Or so I tell myself.

 From there, the period from 2005 to 2009 is covered in this long post about my startups FanFooty and Tinfinger, and 2010 to 2011 on just FanFooty in this follow up post. Since then, the main change in my life has been finding my partner, to whom I will be married in September at the ripe old age of 40.

There, I think that was comprehensive enough!