About Colt Consulting

Greetings!

I'm Colin Taylor, principal consultant at Colt Consulting. Since 2021, I've worked with innovative teams across Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Singapore. My industry expertise spans network security, media, advertising, data analytics, financial services and more. I'm passionate about leveraging technology to enhance knowledge, products, processes, and teams.

Core Offerings:

• Strategic Consulting: With a knack for bridging technology and business, I architect solutions, assess capabilities and teams, and instigate transformation.
• Candid Advising: Expect unfiltered insights geared towards actionable improvements. Tact and discretion are a given.
• Developer Mastery: In early 2022, I started writing a course to level up developers in the theory and practise of software, and career management. After more than a thousand hours of research and writing, I'm excited to start the first classes in 2024. I also work with teams seeking high performance directly.

Approach

I bring a certain set of skills, knowledge and biases to the table.

• I've always had an innate grasp on statistics and probability. From an early age I could never understand the certainty of others when faced with incomplete information. Now, we are in age of too much information to the point of paralysis. One of my strengths is to have the width of knowledge to be aware of all possibilities and the skills and tools to go 'deep' enough to make accurate decisions.
• New technology disrupts the incumbents and the entrenched interests, aka Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma. Organisations that want to survive and thrive are continually looking for the opportunities and threats that new technology brings.
• I believe all new companies are really technology companies. The real world is being digitised by automation, artificial intelligence, and soon robotics. All existing companies must become technology companies or die. This will mean technology alone won't be an advantage for most businesses, it will be the novel combinations of technologies, and human expertise that wil be required.
• Developers aren't fungible commodities, the bell curve definitely applies here. 10x (over the average) developers might exist, but you probably won't hire Fabrice Bellard or Sanjay Ghemawat. 2-5x on the other hand is much more common. Similarly, there are some developers that are net negatives for the organisations that are unlucky enough to hire them, ask me how I know.

Tell me what's on your mind - risk or opportunity? There's no obligation and no aggressive sales pitch. I'm happy to give you my thoughts up front.

Background

I started my career in the late 90s working on ecommerce and financial application for companies in NZ and then in London. I had my first startup adventure as founding engineer for the ecommerce platform Eforce in the early dot-com days, before becoming the technical lead for the IBM team building online subscriptions for the UK National Lottery.

Returning back to NZ, I co-founded a startup Right Context building another ecommerce platform which was the backend for $10s of millions of SaaS sales, including the NZ Heralds photo publishing services. Right Context was acquired by SMXemail one of its customers in 2009, and I became VP of Development, and when the founders left CTO.

At SMX, (based on Right Context technology) I architected an internationalised, white-labelled SaaS platform to support our partners and customers around the world. As SMX's CTO, I was responsible for the security, design, and 24/7 operation of a world-class email security and hosting platform handling billions of emails for government and enterprise customers around the world.