About me
Who I am, how I behave when the work goes badly, and what happens when someone else does the scoring.
Sydney to Stockholm
Where I'm from, where I landed, and the jobs that had nothing to do with any of it.
My name is Francesco, but Frank is preferred. I'm 36, born and raised in sunny Sydney, and I live in Stockholm now with my wife, Josefin.
I moved here in November 2019 and have built a life over the six years since, with new family and friends.
I've worked for myself, and I've worked for other people. There were jobs along the way that had nothing to do with either. I've been a barista, which means I make great coffee (crucial in any modern workplace).
Working for myself meant doing every part of the job
Selling it, delivering it and coaching through it all happened alongside the code, not before it.
- Sales and Business development
Self-employed mastery of B2B/B2C sales - 90%+ revenue from referrals; scaled to 160+ projects via freelancers.
- Customer Service
Under-promise, over-deliver - clear communication and exceeding expectations build lasting customer trust.
- Ability to Lead
Bridging cross-functional teams and motivating people to do their best work, informed by years of coaching.
- Team Player
Adaptability, trust and shared goals - leading developers while collaborating with sales and design under deadline pressure.
- Coaching Skills
5+ years guiding individuals and business owners to expand their internal map and drive performance through communication.
- Project Management
Goal-based delivery on time and budget - clear goals, accurate estimates, agile iteration, reusable foundations.
What leading them actually looks like
I think of it like managing a football side. The manager never touches the ball on match day. You pick the players, drill the patterns in training, set the shape, then trust them to read the game and make their own calls in the moment. You can't run onto the pitch and take the shot yourself, and you wouldn't want to.
That's the part of working for myself I didn't expect to like. When a job was bigger than me I brought developers in, and what decided how it went was never the code. It was whether I'd been clear enough about the shape before anyone started. It's the same with the contractors now.
I'm still hands-on, and I wouldn't take a role that took the keyboard away. But the work I point at is the work that kept running after I stopped touching it.
How I would describe myself, including the parts that cost me
The bullets are unflattering in places, which is the point.
- I would rather succeed with a team than on my own. I have done it on my own often enough to know which I prefer.
- I say the thing rather than dance around it. Some people read that as blunt. It also means nobody has to guess where a project actually stands.
- I hold a high bar, for myself and for the people I work with. That is useful to someone who wants to get better at their job, and uncomfortable for someone who doesn't.
- I work at pace, and pace pushes people. Coaching is what I use to notice it, and I would rather be told I have the tempo wrong than find out later.
- I lose interest in work that repeats, so when a task keeps coming back I build the thing that does it instead. Most of what I have made that outlived me started as me refusing to do something twice.
I fit best where the bar is high and people are direct about it.
My biggest strengths
- Developing people is not something I picked up on the way to management. It was my first profession, five years of it, before I wrote software for a living.
- I am transparent about what I can do. If I don't know how, I'll go and find out.
- My curiosity keeps me moving. How things work, how they should work, and how to improve them.
- Once I am set on a purpose I find a way. It doesn't always go to plan, but the important goal gets met.
My biggest weaknesses
- I get bored easily, that's the other side of that curiosity. I either push harder than I should or pull back and recharge on something else.
- I set ambitious goals and take on more than I should. However, planning, a purpose-driven team, and being clear about the shape is the difference between that landing and not.
- When I am deep in the work I lose track of how I am doing, so what it is costing me usually gets pointed out to me before I notice it.
Picking up a domain I have never seen before
The competence that matters most in a cold start, and the one I have had the most practice at.
Every project at the agency started the same way. A business I knew nothing about, an owner who knew it completely, and a proposal due. Around 160 of those across about 40 clients: e-commerce, membership platforms, learning systems, trades.
Almost all of those customers were non-technical. They were not hiring me because I knew their industry, and they were not really hiring me for the code either. They came to me because I made the process simple enough to follow. Being the person who could take someone through something they did not understand is what I actually got paid for.
Where the curiosity comes from
I wanted to understand how people thought and behaved, so I became a coach. I found myself running a business for the first time, so I learnt sales, customer service and leadership. I got curious about how websites work, and that is when I started programming.
It can be draining. I am always pushing to the next level, looking for the next thing to apply myself to. It makes me effective and it can get chaotic.
If I don't know how to do something, I can learn how. Everything I can do, I learnt because the work in front of me needed it that week.
Personality tests
Psychometric tests on how I work, and what to do with it.
How you get the best from me
- Give me the goal and let me run at it. I need something to aim for.
- Put me on a team, so I can help the people around me hit theirs.
- Be direct with me. I would rather hear it than work it out.
- Say when something lands. I keep score, and I would rather do it honestly.
What the tests say
- MBTI
- ENTJ · the Visionary, or the Chief
- DISC
- D · the Captain
- Enneagram
- Type 3 · the Performer
- Intelligences
- Intrapersonal, logical · the top two of eight
- Learning style
- Kinesthetic · I learn by doing it
- Brain hemispheres
- 55 / 45 · logical against abstract
Full reports: Crystal Knows· Personality Max
The full record, one page at a time
Dive deeper into my work, my skills, my experience, and my certifications.
Work
Every project with the technologies, the constraints and what it produced.
Built and operatedAI practice
The agentic tooling I run daily, published tools I've authored, and what I actually use them for.
9 roles · 2008 → PresentExperience
The full timeline, every role, and the achievements attached to each of them.
TemperamentAbout me
Who I am, how I behave under pressure, what I'm still learning, and what the personality tests make of me.
16 certificationsCredentials
What I have, what I don't, and every credential linked back to the issuer.
PrintableOne-pager
The scannable printable version, for a fast skim.