Lachy Blake
Founder of Cinova and a follower of Christ. Building AI for the people who make things now; skyscrapers and a charity next. The whole climb, documented in the open.
The Apprenticeship
For eighteen years I knew one thing, and I knew it well. Sport. I raced triathlon and surf life saving at a high level, and it was the whole of my life, right up until COVID shut the pools and cancelled the seasons, and the only structure I had ever known simply vanished. I picked up a carpentry apprenticeship, let the training slide, and started living for the weekend like everyone around me.
It did not take long to feel the trap close. The weeks were grey and the work meant nothing to me. The blokes on site were good men, but we weren't chasing the same thing, and the conversations I actually cared about had nowhere to go. So I started reaching. A clothing line: a few grand, gone. Dropshipping, e-commerce, marketing. Each one went nowhere. I had no real execution, and I hadn't yet learned the law that governs all of it: nothing works early. At nineteen I turned a camera on myself and started filming gym vlogs and a podcast. In a small town that is not a good look, and people made sure I knew it. But a small life frightened me more than a camera ever could, so I kept going.
The camera was the thing that turned. Those hours behind it became paid work: first a shoot, then a bar, then real estate. That was the beginning of Cinova. It started as a videography business, and before long my weekends were out-earning my apprentice wage.
Somewhere in there, before I quit, I started going to church. It was the turning point of my life. It changed how I saw the work and everything around it, and through that community I found mentors, good people, and my partner. One line from those days has never left me, and I have built everything on it since. God will steer, but you must row.
For a stretch I lived in eighteen-hour days: up at 1am for five hours of my own work, ten on the tools, then the gym. The day I was signed off as a carpenter, I quit. The month that followed was harder than I expected. The structure was gone, and the discipline walked out with it, and it took time to believe that building something of my own was even allowed. Faith and routine carried me through the gap.
Travel finished the work. Melbourne, then up the coast through Sydney and Brisbane, then Tokyo. Every trip made the same truth plain: most of what I wanted was already within reach, if I was willing to take the risk. Not long after, I saw how fast AI was moving, and I went all in. Cinova grew from a videography business into a software and AI company, built for the businesses that build things, so they can run leaner and pour what they save back into their people.
The Long Game
The plan is not modest, and it isn't meant to be. Build Cinova into an eight-, then nine-figure company, and reinvest the whole way: into hard assets, businesses, education, travel, and myself. The money was never the goal. It is the tool. Everything it builds feeds two things.
Build. A high-end construction firm, and one day one of the tallest skyscrapers in Australia, with towers standing internationally.
Give it back. With my partner, a charity built on a single aim: to help as many humans and animals as one life can reach. The philosophy is the old proverb: give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach him to fish and he eats for life. We want to carry foundational knowledge to the communities that never got the opportunities a country like Australia hands out freely: shelter, water, food, money, physical and mental health. Knowledge that compounds into self-reliance. The construction firm isn't separate from this. Build shelters for people doing it tough, and put education and accountability inside the walls: how to look after yourself, how to find work, how to handle money, how to understand addiction. For animals, awareness and accountability on abuse, and homes for the street animals you see across places like Indonesia and Colombia. A roof over every head, human or animal, no matter who you are, where you come from, or what you've done.
That is why the target is so large. A ten-figure business is simply the engine that lets the charity grow as big as the problem it answers. I see all of it as stewardship. You are given much so that you can do much with it, and one day you answer for what you did.
Everything Has a Job
Everything here serves that arc. Every channel has a job.
The podcast & interviews. Conversations with serious, ambitious people: founders and directors on how they started, the challenges that nearly broke them, the philosophies they run on, and what they make of software and AI for their own businesses.
The vlogs. A documentary of the climb, kept mostly so I can look back on it, and shared for anyone who finds something in the day-to-day of actually building.
Raw. Straight to camera. No script, no cuts. Thoughts, lessons and experiences in the moment they land.
Virtue. The newsletter: short, regular doses of what's moving in AI and business, and what I'm learning as I go. Read it whenever you get the chance.
New Venture. The game I'm building for people starting their first business: you level up a real business one quest at a time, with a clan doing it alongside you. It's in development.