I am a founder and futurist. I build companies. I also write, podcast and produce video under the Golden Age banner. My aim is to inspire more people to build a brighter future.
This is the real story. Not the polished version.
Where it started
I grew up in a middle-class household that came apart through divorce when I was young. My teens were roguish. I skipped school, got into trouble and was eventually evicted from home. I couch-surfed, worked odd jobs and started my first business shortly after finishing school.
In 2007, at twenty-one, I launched Young Media. The concept was simple: build a classifieds website targeting Gen Y consumers who were going online to find local businesses before the search engines had figured that out. I had no money and no office. I printed a marketing presentation and sign-up forms and walked every commercial street in Melbourne door to door. I sold advertising space on a website that did not exist yet, collected the cash, then used it to build the site. I launched a rock poster campaign through Mr Moto and the website took off. I built it out to other cities and sold the business.
I went door to door selling space on a website that did not exist. The lesson from Young Media has never left me: sell first, build second.
Building and losing
Using proceeds from Young Media I invested in properties and housing developments and launched into recruitment, placing hundreds of candidates per month. That grew into migration services when we saw how much agencies charged for a service we were already providing. I acquired restaurants, expanded the portfolio and by my mid-twenties had a net worth of approximately twenty million dollars.
Then family court began.
Proceedings with my former partner ran from 2017 to 2020. During that time the presiding judge issued freezing orders against every account I held, every property and every business, directing all rents to her solicitors and giving her power of attorney to sell my properties. Paying any business bill required legal approval. Running a company under those conditions is effectively impossible. The companies failed not from mismanagement but from being strangled by the court process.
At the same time the Australian Federal Police charged me with thirteen counts of migration fraud relating to the recruitment business we ran in 2013. In 2023, I was charged with providing false testimony in the family court proceedings about the timing of proceeds from the Young Media sale — conduct that had occurred in 2018.
In 2020, with the family court resolved against me, the businesses gone and debt remaining, I was declared bankrupt. I was starting from zero in a small flat, renting with help from a friend.
The rebuild
In early 2020 I started paying attention to news coming out of China about a novel coronavirus. We saw an opportunity to provide testing solutions to a world that was not prepared for a pandemic. We secured distribution rights for an antibody test kit across Australia, Europe and the Americas. The market, it turned out, did not want a test for whether you had already had the virus. It wanted a test for whether you had the virus now. There were no antigen tests ready for SARS-CoV-2.
We sold our Canadian distribution rights for cash and shares, which gave us capital to work with. I used that to redesign the cassette-style test into something I had been working on: a sleek all-in-one testing pen that carried buffer fluid in its cap. A user could open the pen, use the tip to sample, push it back into the cap to activate the test and read the result. Simple. Accessible. No training required.
In July 2021 the Department of Health called for an emergency meeting. They needed to know our supply capacity. Within a month we had a supply agreement. In 2021 and 2022 the company did one hundred and thirty million dollars in sales.
I was bankrupt when I designed the pen. I had nothing left to protect. That is probably why I could see the opportunity clearly.
What came next
The business was running. Government contracts were landing. $130 million in sales. Then there was a knock at the door.
I pleaded guilty to migration-related charges as the director of the company — responsible for what happens under my watch, full stop. A community corrections order was the outcome. A migration compliance matter. Nothing to do with financial crime. Nothing resembling the film.
The press called me the Wolf of Wall Street anyway.
In 2025 the false testimony charge was sentenced. On 3 April 2025 I was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment — six months in prison, followed by 12 months on a Recognisance Release Order suspended for three years. I served the six months. I used the time to write, plan and build.
ASIC then moved to ban me from being a director for three years, citing the company failures that had resulted from the family court freezing orders. We promoted a CEO from within each division and restructured accordingly.
I want to be clear about one thing the public record does not make obvious: I did not lose other people's money. The companies lost my own capital. The only external debt was to the ATO — which has since been repaid many times over through the taxes paid by the new ventures. There were no outside investors who lost a cent.
What I am building now
These are the companies I am currently building:
Wallace Biotechnologies
Biotechnology to enhance humanity and our environment.
Wallace Biotechnologies develops technologies to harness biology to enhance human health and our environment. Alongside Wallace Biotechnologies Health, a global healthcare system aimed at extending the health span of every human.
Terraform Technologies
Harnessing free fusion energy (the sun) to produce cheap resources at scale, anywhere.
Terraform Technologies harnesses fusion reactors to produce cheap resources at scale. Named for the Kardashev classification of a civilisation that commands all the energy of its planet.
Tau is the Greek symbol for the golden ratio: optimal structure. Optimus is Latin for the best possible. Together they are a standard I hold every decision to. I fall short of it regularly. That is the point of having a standard.
Golden Age
The podcast, the writing and the videos are all called Golden Age because that is what I believe we are living in. Not metaphorically. The most capable, connected and resourced moment in human history is happening right now. The question is whether you are building in it or just consuming it.
I write for people who are young and directionless, who are ambitious but do not have a map, who have failed at something and are not sure what comes next. I write the content I needed and did not have at twenty. Real tools. Honest frameworks. No filler.
Get in touch
Email: hello@jamessackl.com · Press: Qwoted · Follow: X, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok.