Creative director, digital strategist, venture operator, writer and builder. One person, five disciplines, working as one.
Subject: Walshe, S.
Location: Melbourne, VIC
Practice: Creative · Digital · Venture
Status: Available for the right story
Creative and digital executive who connects creative vision, emerging technology and commercial strategy. I've sat on the executive team of a 40+ person national not-for-profit, served as General Manager and Creative Director of a venture capital firm, led multidisciplinary teams of 10+ (including team leads with their own reports) and owned $500K+ budgets. I also build: a proprietary investment platform with more than $500M in deals evaluated on it, and an AI-enabled 19-series fiction network. I bring what a Chief Creative & Digital Officer needs in one person: the creative vision, the business case behind it and the ability to get it shipped.
Four arcs, one through-line: creative work that pays its way.
A career across screen, design, venture capital and code.
Steve Walshe has directed film, designed brands, sat on an executive team, run the creative engine of a venture capital fund, written serialized fiction and built AI platforms from the server up.
Polymath, n.
Most careers stay in one lane. Steve's is built on the crossings. Story shapes his strategy, design shapes the products, and the technology gets put to work for the story. He can sit with a board in the morning, direct a shoot in the afternoon and ship working software by midnight.
What he brings to an executive table is translation. He takes an abstract idea, finds the commercial shape inside it and gets it in front of an audience fast. Then he measures what happened and keeps what worked.
Every role played by the same person. That's the point.
Hundreds of video and photo shoots, from pre-production to final grade and VFX. Brand films, cinema ads, documentary and campaign content for national audiences.
Builds the plan that links creative output to revenue. Positioning, channels, audience growth and the numbers that show whether it worked.
Former General Manager inside a venture fund. He screened startups, shaped their stories for investors and helped them raise their next round.
Writes serialized fiction across six genres on a weekly release schedule. Each story world is a canon he built and keeps consistent.
Designs and ships production platforms with AI as a working crew member, covering web apps, data pipelines, automated publishing and investor tools.
Trained graphic designer and illustrator. He draws comic pages and character studies most nights, sometimes in the margins of old novels.
Each season raises the stakes, and every one ships something.
Ventures & advisory
Proprietary deal-evaluation and market-intelligence platform with a live market terminal and a 3D globe that maps companies by geography. More than $500M in deals evaluated on it.
Advisor to an edge-AI company now valued at $5M. Shaped its investor narrative, pitch deck and interactive education. Its ternary-precision models run about 20× smaller on cheap, private hardware.
A serialized-fiction network with six genre imprints, timed-access membership tiers, a weekly release engine and an AI writing studio grounded in each story's canon. Story, art direction and platform, with 40 episodes published across 19 series so far.
Pitch Venture Capital
Venture capital firm. The fund is now maturing and returning capital to its investors.
The IPA
National not-for-profit public policy institute, 40+ staff.
Flip Switch Media
Video and creative production company.
The Gordon · Deakin University
The problem, the insight, the call and what came of it.
If everybody loves your work you're playing it much too safe. — David Carson
Graded for the series. Hover to restore the original colour.
Eight rules I run creative and digital teams by.
Ideas are cheap. Shipped ideas compound. Every concept I back gets a date, an owner and an audience.
Creative freedom and commercial discipline sit on the same page. We decide up front what success looks like and when we stop.
Debate is how good work gets better. Once the call is made, the team moves as one.
Differentiation doesn't come from a slide. It comes from a hundred small decisions made by people who care.
I use AI every day to write, build and produce. It makes small teams fast. Judgment and point of view stay human.
Independent thinkers make the best teams. My job is to give them room, clear briefs and cover.
Collaboration without bureaucracy. Fewer sign-offs and more ownership, with accountability attached.
The technology changes monthly. The leader who stops learning becomes the bottleneck.
“Think outside the box, just like Schrödinger's cat wished it could have.”Unknown · pinned above my desk
How a Chief Creative & Digital Officer earns the room.
Deliverable: a one-page map of what's working, what isn't and what we haven't tried.
Deliverable: live results and a clear call on what to scale or stop.
Deliverable: a roadmap the board can fund and a team that wants to build it.
I don't have an off switch, and I've stopped looking for one. When the workday ends I'm drawing comic pages, inking character studies or filling the margins of an old novel with sketches. Then I'm writing the next episode or building the next thing. That creative energy runs seven days a week, and it's the same drive I bring to a team: more ideas than we need, the stamina to finish the best ones and the restlessness to make the next one better.
@steve_w_artist ↗
