My Base Case Is Their Bull Case

The Job I Didn't Need

In 2022, during my first year at university in Sydney, I got a job at Albee's Kitchen in Kingsford. A Malaysian restaurant. Casual shifts: Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Clearing tables. Carrying dishes. Standing for hours under fluorescent light while the kitchen ran hot behind me.

I didn't need the money. My parents gave me more than enough to live on. I took the job because I wanted to understand how a restaurant actually works from the inside. The back-of-house rhythm, the way orders move, how a small business like that stays alive week to week. Learning was the whole point.

I lasted a little over a month. When the owner needed a full-timer and I couldn't commit because of classes, they found someone who could. No hard feelings. That was the deal.

But something happened in that month that I didn't anticipate. And it's still running in the background of almost every decision I make today.

The Habit I Picked Up Without Trying

The pay was $20 an hour. And the work was genuinely hard in a way that a lot of work isn't. Not intellectually hard. Physically, repetitively hard. The kind of tired that settles into your legs and stays there.

Somewhere in those shifts, I developed a habit I didn't consciously choose. Whenever I see something expensive, something I want to buy, I convert the price into hours. Not my current earnings. The $20-an-hour version of myself, carrying hot dishes on a Friday night.

I think about how I felt at the end of one shift. Then I multiply that by however many shifts it would take. Suddenly the decision looks very different.

This habit made me more conservative on consumption. Luxury purchases, lifestyle upgrades, things bought just to feel a certain way. I pause on all of those. But it didn't make me conservative about investment. If spending money creates something, produces returns, builds capability, I'll commit. The distinction between spending and investing became very clear to me, not as a concept, but as a felt sense.

What the Job Was Actually Teaching Me

The money lesson was real. But it wasn't the deepest thing.

The deeper thing was this: I started meeting people for whom that $20 an hour wasn't a learning exercise. It was the point. It was how rent got paid. How food got bought. There was no university on the other side of the weekend. No parents topping up the account if things got tight. No exit.

I had an exit. I had always had an exit. I just hadn't noticed it before, because I had never stood somewhere long enough to see it clearly.

Studying abroad accelerated this. The more people I met from different places and circumstances, the more I started to see the shape of my own starting position. Things I had always taken as ordinary, as the default state of the world, were not ordinary at all. They were outcomes that other people spent years working toward, if they could reach them at all.

My base case is their bull case.

I didn't feel guilty about this. Guilt would have been self-indulgent, a way of making the realisation about my own feelings rather than about what it actually meant. What I felt was something closer to responsibility. A quiet, private kind. Not the performative "I want to give back" kind. The kind that says: don't waste this. Don't treat what you were given as ordinary when it isn't. Do something with it that justifies the luck.

What This Has to Do With Building

I think about this a lot now that I'm building Dodeez and running the consulting side of things.

When I sit across from a business owner talking about their operations, or walk into an SME trying to understand how they work, I'm not coming in from a case study. I've been on the floor. Not for long, and not because I had to be. But long enough that it recalibrated something in me. I understand, in a way I couldn't have otherwise, what it feels like to do work that is invisible until something goes wrong.

The waiter who moves fast and never spills a dish. The cleaner who finishes before anyone notices the work happened. This kind of contribution doesn't announce itself. And because it doesn't announce itself, it's easy to undervalue. I try not to do that anymore. Not in how I talk about other people's work, and not in how I think about the unglamorous parts of building something.

Unfair Advantage Is a Responsibility

The phrase "unfair advantage" gets used in startup circles as a kind of boast. What you have that others don't. What makes you the right person to build this thing.

I think about it differently now. Yes, I have advantages. Resources, networks, the ability to take risks without the floor falling out from under me if they don't work. These are real. I didn't earn them. I was born into circumstances that made them available, and I happened to go to the right place at the right time to understand what they were.

But the question that actually drives me isn't "what's my unfair advantage." It's: what am I doing with it. Because the gap between my starting point and someone else's is not a trophy. It's an obligation. To build well. To not take shortcuts I don't need to take. To treat the resources around me, including the people, as something worth protecting and not just deploying.

I still think about those shifts. Even now, when things look very different, I still go back to that restaurant floor in Sydney. The weight of the dishes. The end-of-night tired. The $20 an hour.

Not to feel humble. Not to perform gratitude. Just to remember what it actually took, and to not pretend otherwise.