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Tinker First with Dawid Naudé
What if the advantage isn’t being the smartest person in the room… but being willing to break things until they work?
Anton speak to Dawid Naudé, whose story moves back and forth between Australia and South Africa with five years of childhood in Australia, then back to the Eastern Cape, and later a deliberate return to Australia on his own terms.
This episode starts in the real places that shape a person: Grahamstown and the National Arts Festival, where Dawid helped turn a local computer shop into an internet café by renting unused school computers and making it work, because mobile internet wasn’t a thing and journalists needed a place to file their stories.
Then Rhodes: computer science… and the College House pub, where he ran it like a business (spreadsheets, inventory, beer counts) and learned early that “running something” teaches you things lectures don’t.
But one of the most defining moments is surprisingly simple: Dawid describes his mum giving him permission to play with the family computer to “break it,” get it fixed, and learn by doing. That permission became a way of operating: resourcefulness, curiosity, and tinkering over overthinking.
From there, the arc keeps unfolding: a restart at James Cook University, hard work on his dad’s prawn farm in North Queensland, a finance detour (including passing CFA Level 1) before taking a big leap, a 50% pay cut to move into tech at Accenture, then Cloud Sherpas, then back to Accenture where he became a Managing Director.
And then the moment that changed his direction again: ChatGPT. Dawid shares the “tinkering” story that sparked Pathfinder, using AI to make sense of legacy code and turning a painful, slow documentation task into something dramatically faster.
For him, “AI for good” is not a slogan. It’s practical: AI as a universal tutor and a way for anyone, anywhere, in any language, to learn faster and better.
If you’re building a business (or thinking about it), Dawid’s advice is refreshingly direct: create demand first, make it easy for people to “window shop,” and become known in a niche by translating AI into something specific and useful for real people doing real jobs.
If tinkering is the real edge, what would you start testing this week?
🎧 Listen to Episode 23 of A Stranger, A Suitcase, and A Story at https://3spod.com
Also on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.
View all episodes
By Anton and BenWhat if the advantage isn’t being the smartest person in the room… but being willing to break things until they work?
Anton speak to Dawid Naudé, whose story moves back and forth between Australia and South Africa with five years of childhood in Australia, then back to the Eastern Cape, and later a deliberate return to Australia on his own terms.
This episode starts in the real places that shape a person: Grahamstown and the National Arts Festival, where Dawid helped turn a local computer shop into an internet café by renting unused school computers and making it work, because mobile internet wasn’t a thing and journalists needed a place to file their stories.
Then Rhodes: computer science… and the College House pub, where he ran it like a business (spreadsheets, inventory, beer counts) and learned early that “running something” teaches you things lectures don’t.
But one of the most defining moments is surprisingly simple: Dawid describes his mum giving him permission to play with the family computer to “break it,” get it fixed, and learn by doing. That permission became a way of operating: resourcefulness, curiosity, and tinkering over overthinking.
From there, the arc keeps unfolding: a restart at James Cook University, hard work on his dad’s prawn farm in North Queensland, a finance detour (including passing CFA Level 1) before taking a big leap, a 50% pay cut to move into tech at Accenture, then Cloud Sherpas, then back to Accenture where he became a Managing Director.
And then the moment that changed his direction again: ChatGPT. Dawid shares the “tinkering” story that sparked Pathfinder, using AI to make sense of legacy code and turning a painful, slow documentation task into something dramatically faster.
For him, “AI for good” is not a slogan. It’s practical: AI as a universal tutor and a way for anyone, anywhere, in any language, to learn faster and better.
If you’re building a business (or thinking about it), Dawid’s advice is refreshingly direct: create demand first, make it easy for people to “window shop,” and become known in a niche by translating AI into something specific and useful for real people doing real jobs.
If tinkering is the real edge, what would you start testing this week?
🎧 Listen to Episode 23 of A Stranger, A Suitcase, and A Story at https://3spod.com
Also on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.