Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Opportunist: A memoir of sea, sailing, and the making of a business mind

The Opportunist: A memoir of sea, sailing, and the making of a business mind

Owen, Anthony

Paperback

Biographies General

ISBN13: 9798197719713
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 28 2026
Pages: 236
Weight: 0.71
Height: 0.54 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

This is a book about thirty years of building and selling technology companies in Australia and the United States - from the early Australian internet to an IPO on the ASX to raising capital in Los Angeles - and the formation that produced the person who did it.

The formation started early. My teenage years were two forces pulling against each other. The harbour racing was the counterweight against all the other challenges. Something had to give. My father - a successful businessman, impossible to live with - bought the HMAV Bounty, the ship from the Mel Gibson film, and arranged without telling me that the captain would make finishing school the condition of a position on board. I packed, sat my last exam, and my mother drove me to the airport. One-way ticket to Fiji. Three hundred dollars. I was eighteen.

Nearly two years followed. Three oceans. The Southern Ocean in forty-foot seas. A war zone in Djibouti. A friend lost overboard in a storm that made rescue impossible. The fleet came through Sydney Heads on Australia Day 1988 with three thousand vessels on the harbour. I was on the deck of the Bounty. I was not the same person who left.

The sea built something specific - the ability to read conditions in real time, act before the picture was complete, and adjust when it changed. That material does not wear out.

Beneath both stories runs the family. Four generations of the same disposition. A judge who sailed from England to Australia in 1840. Sir William McMillan - Good Iron Mac - who arrived as a travelling salesman and ended up drafting the Australian Constitution. Evelyn Owen, who built a submachine gun in a shed when the army said it was for gangsters - the Owen Gun served in three wars. His brother Julian, a Rat of Tobruk, who held the desert for two hundred and forty-one days and came home broken. My father, who saved his son's life without ever being able to say so.

The business chapters cover what happened when that type met the market. The dot-com boom from the inside. The crash. Then Manalto - social media management at enterprise scale, taken to the ASX, distribution through Microsoft and Ingram, a partnership with Facebook, clients representing thousands of locations and billions in system revenue. Capital raised in Los Angeles. A fifty-person operation in Cape Town. A year on the Venice boardwalk. Then the Oscars crashed the platform on the biggest night of the year. Then a chairman took the company apart from the inside. Then seven days to leave the country.

I own the decisions that were mine. The windshift I saw and did not act on. The board I replaced too quickly. The book names all of it directly.

Fifteen years of offshore yacht racing run through the whole account - including the 1998 Sydney to Hobart, where six sailors died and we turned back when the conditions said go north.

The book's argument is that this type - the opportunist, forged by genuine consequence rather than curriculum - is becoming rarer. AI is the largest disruption any of us will see. The window to be on the right side of it is open. It will not stay open.

This is not a framework. It is an honest account of a life lived at full tilt. If something in it is useful, take it. If it just makes for a good read, that is also fine.

Also by Anthony Owen: Calibrate: Built by Consequence - available now on Amazon.

For readers of Shoe Dog, Barbarian Days, and The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

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