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Why?
I created Explode to offer a fun and engaging coaching experience. Whether it's one session or many we should come out of it feeling energized and with a plan to address whatever challenge or opportunity you bring to the session. Also:
🥳 It's free! My first 100 hours of coaching is totally free. I'm asking only for your feedback and - totally at your option - a testimonial.
🧑🎓 UBC Coaching Program Student (Cohort 19). This award winning program is accredited by the International Coaching Federation.
🤝 20 years of global leadership. Including as a Co-founder, Director and CEO.
🌱 Role & sector transitions. Global finance, sustainability, Internet tech, and aerospace.
✈️ Cultural diversity. Former United Nations staffer. Professional travel to over 60 countries, lived and worked in Canada, Switzerland and the USA.
🧢 Workplace diversity. Experience in government, private sector, nonprofit and advocacy workplaces.
Story
Hi! I'm Jake. I was tired of living my life in boxes. I felt like a software stack that was constantly failing to interconnect. My work app, my family app, my surfing app, my entrepreneur app. The list goes on.
Last year I had a monster bike accident. I was airlifted to hospital. Lying in bed, unable to eat or move, forced me to run just one single app: recover. And I did.
Then, those other apps started creeping back in. Explode reminds me to blow them up. Our identity is a whole and unique way of relating to the world. Sure, we can run apps to relate to parts of it, but why give up our agency?
I came to coaching as a commitment to sharing this intention with others. Boxes may not be what gets you stuck, but we all have things that are holding us back.
Working together, we create a space for you to think deeply about how you relate to the world.
Experience
I have over 20 years of experience at the forefront of global environmental, social and technical change. I've worked with some of the world's great leaders, including Astronaut Chris Hadfield, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's office, executives at the world's largest pension funds, and the founders of the Internet Vint Cerf and Steve Crocker. My goal with Explode is to bring that experience to help you achieve great things. Some more of my career highlights are below.
At the UNEP Finance Initiative I project managed the first global collaboration of financial institutions to undertake research on the materiality of ESG issues to equity pricing (report here). This work, along with the Freshfields report on the fiduciary duty of ESG issues, laid the foundations for the Principles for Responsible Investment. Along with James Gifford, I ran the PRI process until the first investor meeting. I've written about it here. Others have written about it here.
I left UNEP FI to join ICANN, the nonprofit responsible for critical aspects of technical Internet governance. While at ICANN I developed and launched the ICANN fellowships program and was a founding member of the ICANN Global Partnerships team. I left ICANN to co-found the .eco Internet domain with Trevor Bowden and Anastasia O'Rourke. I was Director and CEO of Big Room Inc, the company behind the .eco domain registry, for ten years.
After exiting from .eco I worked with Foresight - Canada's leading cleantech accelerator - on their ecosystem strategy, including open innovation challenges and cluster development.
I left Foresight to join the Open Lunar Foundation, where I worked to help it transition from a policy advocacy organization to an open technology policy innovation lab focussed on delivering a peaceful and sustainable lunar future.
Outside of work, I advocate for the preservation of open and accessible technologies. Most significantly this included the Save Dot Org campaign, which I helped catalyze with these posts, leading to global media coverage and the eventual regulatory rejection of the proposed sale of dot-org to private equity.
I'm an avid surfer, snowboarder and mountain biker, and I live with my wife, two kids and a bernedoodle in Comox Valley on Vancouver Island.
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