This really made me think because I feel like I’ve had different dream portfolio career set-ups at different times! Currently, with ongoing travel, I’d prefer a few different roles but I think in a few months, I’d like to have a whole range and really establish my portfolio career.

Would love to hear your thoughts – Darren Kirby, Pete Domican, Nicola Twiston Davies, Duncan Dalzel-Job, Silvia Janska, Zarir 'Zed' Vakil,Alex Pitt, Damien, Janis Chan, Rob Wright, Mike Richardson, Jen Whitfield, Johannes Castner, David Worrall, Nikki Eve Wallis, Jessica Heagren

Interesting question, and I guess there’s not one objective, or at least, I’d have a different objective based on a time factor. For all I’ve learned over the past month or so, I think short term, my options are open and broad and I’d like them to then narrow medium term as I focus on my key objective, and then to broaden out long term.

So short term, I’m doing a lot of agency work (for myself) mingled in with contract work where it’s available as the dayrate is fantastic, and trying to build trust and reciprocity with my network to be able to be an advisor on a board, while spending a part of my time mentoring and training. Medium term, I’d like to narrow down that set of things to focus a lot more on board advisor roles (along with an NED or two). Then finally, I’d like to broaden those board roles to a point where they are self-sufficient and manageable, while being able to take on a few ”gambles” in terms of stock options.

But my objectives are quite fluid at the moment, and largely driven by advice I’m getting here, as well as a few books I’m reading.

Can’t say I mind too much. For me, the holy grail is regular income, & to stop trading time for money. Not that fussed how it comes…!

I’ve said 3-4 because it sounds more manageable than 5+ but really my dream set-up would be so insanely flexible that my answer would be moot. In an ideal world, I would be able to monetize various talents and passions at different times based on a whole host of things including market need, my financial requirements and … Well, just how I want to spend my time!

My plan is to build a consultancy where I get more and more projects going and hire more and more portfolio careerists to handle the additional projects and sell some projects to The Intelligence Factory, which gives me 20% for any contract signed. They can be my extended team for now. Yet, it is my longer term plan to mentor people from underrepresented groups and to then involve them in my projects, which should also be all about building AI for a pluralist society. In short, I want to build a portfolio career that grows into a consulting company for sustainable and human centric AI. In addition to that, I’m in the planning stages (identifying great guests to have debates between etc) of a podcast about this topic, called “Utopias, Dystopias and Today’s Technology”. I’m also starting to get paid for speaking engagements on this topic. I’m planning on increasing the rate and frequency of such engagements. I’d eventually like to get such speaking opportunities on this same topic for my mentees who specialise on this topic as well. My long term vision is something like a media company around this topic, with multiple podcasts and speakers for hire and which is complimentary to the practice.

An AWS full time job that has been in the process of interviewing me for three months, might postpone some of these plans for a few years, if I do get past the last interview row. It would be the sort of job that would boost this sort of plan in the longer run, as it would plug me into a huge audience. It would be a sort of portfolio career at AWS global life sciences and health-tech; which is the biggest ecosystem in the world for health tech and life sciences startups.