In Episode 8, Tracy Thompson, CEO of Hackhunter gives us great tips on meeting the challenges of changing careers head-on. 

“My husband Mike, came up with an idea for a water meter and he's like, this is going to be it, right? This is going to be great. We can upbeat and open-source it and it means that everybody worldwide will be able to make their own water meter for five bucks and then they'll know if their water is leaking and it's going to save water and it's going to help save the ... So I said to him, I don't think anyone's going to buy it. And anyway, I said, there's a market fair, which is where hobbyists get together in Adelaide. 

“So we walk up there, we walk in the first batch of stands, there's a guy who's selling the exact same water meter. So we said, oh, this is awesome. How many have you sold? And he says four. And he said people are just not interested. And I went, yes. And Mike went, aah. 

“So we went back to the place where we were staying and he was and he'd used a particular, it was a new microprocessor. And so he just started thinking about what can I do with this microprocessor? And at the same time, he looked on a bulletin board and saw there was a security guy who thought his wifi was being hacked by his neighbour, but he couldn't prove it. And all these IT guys were on there saying, there's no way you can tell, you can't work out where it is. And Mike's like, I'm sure that you can do this. I'm sure you can work out where the WiFi's coming from. 

“He started playing with the microcontroller and he came up with the solution and that's what we've been working on ever since. So for us, what made us take this entrepreneurial path was the fact that number one, we didn't want to retire. I guess we made the choice to take this path because we wanted to achieve more. 

Tracy shared a powerful story about Hackhunter’s ability to save lives. 

“last year, two FBI special agents lost their lives and three of their colleagues were very seriously injured when they went to serve a warrant on a guy for child pornography and he basically shot them through his door, his front door. 

“He knew they were coming because he had a wifi camera in his front door. So what our products can do, what HackHunter does is we locate wifi. So we know if there's a wifi camera around and then we can actually find it and say, this is exactly where it is.”

Tom and Will discuss the challenges they faced changing their careers. 

Tune in to hear the full interview.