Jess co-founded Neighbourlytics in 2017, taking the placemaking work she'd done as CEO of CoDesign Studio and turning it into a data product that measures what people actually do in a neighbourhood. It grew to cover more than twenty thousand neighbourhoods across twelve countries, raised about five million dollars across five rounds, and was acquired by REA Group in late 2025.
She walks through the quarter the business was growing four hundred per cent a year and still only had fifty logins against $600,000 of revenue, why she sat her team down on a Friday lunchtime and told them she might have to give them four weeks notice, and the phishing scam that drained the bank account while she was at a wedding in the UK.
She finishes with three life lessons: why it's always harder than you think and you can't believe your own bullshit, why the hard work of people and culture matters more than the four per cent of running a business that is raising investment, and why her identity was never the business - it was having a team.
Find Jess
Jess on LinkedIn
Neighbourlytics
Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship
Books mentioned
Crossing the Chasm
The Mom Test
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