R.I.P Karyn Carne (Mitchell)

It was 4 years ago today that my wife Kaz took her last breath. It was 2am and I was holding her hand. She didn't want to go.

5 years ago almost to the day, I was in Isla Mujeres, Mexico. The Urban Adventures conference had just wrapped up. It was the best conference we had ever run. The business was coming off the best year it had ever had. Everything had finally clicked in & started working as we had hoped it would and thought it should, a long time before. We were 8 years into an all consuming startup. Finally everyone was starting to see the fruits of their labour. We had contacts running tours for prestigious brands like the New York Times & Lonely Planet and well progressed talks with hotel conglomerates and cruise companies. A couple of months later I was inducted into the Intrepid Hall of Fame for the work done on building out what became a 3rd strategic pillar for the Intrepid business.

It was intensely satisfying to see the hard work of many, come together. I think I got to enjoy the view from on top of the mountain for maybe one night with my colleagues, who had become my friends.

Kaz had been diagnosed with brain cancer in October 2018. I was at the Mexico conference in Feb 2019 when I got a call from home. Kaz had suffered a seizure. She was in hospital and comatose. "Get home as fast as you can". It is a long way back from Mexico with both distance and time zones. I think I got that call on the Saturday. I got home on the Tuesday. A lot of flying & sitting around time thinking about everything, but especially Kaz and my daughter who was 7 at the time.

Kaz didn't want to die. The first calls said there is no way she'd lasy until Tuesday. When I got from the airport to the hospital on Tuesday she was still alive. I was surprised she was just lying in a bed with a sheet on her. No tubes or drips or machines. As they explained, they don't do interventions with cases like this. She can't be saved. My daughter & I spent a few hours in the room with Kaz chatting to her. Jumanah was getting hungry and I needed to freshen up so we decided to go home. The doctors had said it was a miracle she had hung on this long. I needed to explain to Jumanah that mummy was going to die.

That isn't a nice conversation to have. I don't wish this experience on anyone. But we had it. I showered and made some lunch when the phone rang. It was the hospital. Here we go. The nurse on the other end said Kaz wanted to know when we were coming in? What?!! This was pretty surprising given we'd been told just an hour earlier she'd never wake up. Also a total spin out for a 7 year old who'd literally just been told her mummy was going to die, probably today. We rushed back to the hosptial and there she was, up and chatting like nothing had happened. I think she was home no more than 3 days later.

The next year was a rough ride. Brain cancer is evil. It squeezes parts of the brain that regulate different parts of our being causing irritability, irrationality, maybe a touch of insanity. Kaz also lost her sight about half way through the year. I had become Kaz's full time carer and also stayed on running Urban Adventures full time as MD. No doubt I did a pretty poor job of both. Our weekly outing was to Jumanah's netball games each Saturday. It was a mission but once we got there, there was an hour of normality amongst the other families, our friends. Having Kaz out in public meant we mostly staved off the 'out of sight, out of mind' likelihood and meant we had lots of pop ins during the week too. If you have a sick friend, go visit them! Don't feel like you are going to 'be in the way'. They need You.

Things at Urban Adventures also took a sudden and unexpected turn for the worse. We had had a great relationship with Viator and had worked extremely hard positioning ourselves to be up the top of the rankings on Trip Advisor. When these two companies joined together it should have been an even bigger boost for us, and for a while it was, hence the success of 2018. Trip Advisor however had new management in the Tours and Activity space and a new plan. They wanted all the long tail signed up. It became about quantity, not quality and they began to preference new product over estabilshed product in the rankings. We had forecast continued strong growth but instead we got stagnation and even decline. The business tanked.

By the time for the next Urban Adventures conference rolled around in mid January 2020, I debated whether I should go or not. Intrepid said it was totally up to me, there was no pressure there. There was no escaping we had a bad year and as MD I felt I needed to be there to work that through with everyone and also find the ways we can learn from what had happened and reverse it so it no ever occured again. For my own team, redundancies were inevitably coming and I didn't want to just be sitting at home for that either. I wanted to explain, comfort and help them transition. I got as far as Qatar on my way there when the phone rang on touching down. Deja vu. Kaz had had a turn and was back in hospital. I turned around (I will never forget how helpful Qatar airlines were - thanks!).

This time Kaz wouldn't be leaving hospital. She was admitted to the relatively new Peter Mac cancer ward. It is an incredible facility. Kaz didn't want to die. Again she hung in beyond all expectation. Actually after about 10 days the staff asked me if I'd consent to moving Kaz across the road to the Royal Melbourne where she had been the year prior. Kaz hated it there so I said it is up to them to decide what they need to do but I don't consent. Kaz wouldn't have survived the move. She would have lost the will. She passed away a few days later - on this day, in 2020.

If you look at that date, you might realise that COVID was already circulating, although in Feb 2020, it was still considered a China problem, not a global one. Intrepid checked my leave balance and calculated with untaken sick and personal leave plus long service across my 16 years with the company, I didn't need to come back for 12 months and my wage would just keep coming. I handed over the reins of Urban Adventures to my colleague and friend Klaudija and never returned to the business. It was a horrible way to end something. For Klaudija it was no doubt a horrible way to receive something she had worked incredibly hard to achieve. I handed her a mangled wreck.

By about April I was bored witless and said I'm ready to come back. With UA now gone, to what, was the question. I was given licence to come up with the next big thing for the Intrepid group. I started working on something that was very different & exciting. A digital product for our customers who take a year away from "adventurous" destinations to instead go exploring the UK or Canada or Ireland. Destinations where it didn't make as much sense to a have a group and a guide. Destinations where our customers told us they just get a rental car and drive around. I started to build an Intrepid style product that would still connect these travellers with local people through, first their stories, listened to whilst driving and then by meeting them as part of the journey. Storytellers were owners of wineries or bakeries or cheesmakers etc. COVID however had stopped travel, was continually interupting local testing of the product and finally we were down to just 1 day a week being covered by government subsidies. It was never going to work this way so I took a redundnacy in December 2020.

The past 3 years have been spent just figuring things out. First via a crazy detour into the world of small business restaurant, during COVID lockdowns. It was incredibly hard work but also catharic and close to home. I then took the Intrepid idea (with their blessing) to a Venture backed startup accelerator. They hated it for its percieved lack of scalability, that it was in travel and seemed affronted by its immediate cash flow potential. I did meet some really great and clever people there, especially those with technical skills.

I then went and studied Product Management. It seemed like a missing link from the digital journey I'd been on and something I needed to know more about. From there I did an internship with a Loyalty tech business focussed on the sports industry and it was in this time that GenAI came out. We were all fascinated with its potential and spent our days seeing what it could and counldnt do - especially with sports statistical data and turning that into real stories. It was mind blowing.

I wanted to know everything I could about this new tech and devoured every newsletter & Twitter account I could find on the subject. All had the occassional story about Travel and it seemed strange to me that no-one was putting that all together for the travel industry. That is how Everything AI in Travel was born.

Now I spend my days helping all sorts of different businesses understand what their potential might be either utilising new tech or via other knowledge I've acquired across the journey. And I'm taking what I've learned about what AI can do well (and can't do well) to build some products that unblock bottlenecks I've lived in the past and still remain today.

Honestly, I don't know that Kaz would approve with this new direction with its instability, lack of certainty and occasional zero income months. After working so hard to climb a mountain, why go back to the bottom again? For me I'm focussed on getting our daughter the best possible start she can have to her journey. I'm not entirely sure however that seeing her Dad on the couch tapping away on he computer when she gets home from school is maybe the best view of what work is all about, or maybe it is.

The most important thing about today however is that people know the name of Karyn Carne (Mitchell). Kaz didn't want to die. She wasn't ready and she was frightened of being forgotten. It is my duty to make sure that she isn't.

RIP Kaz. We love and miss you.