Kane grew up in Melbourne's eastern suburbs, the son of an automotive spray-painter and a loans officer who left school early and worked their way to retirement. His mother, who grew up poor, worked hard to send him to Camberwell Grammar — for the education she'd never had. Kane is grateful for the privilege, and he hated every bit of his time there: a school that failed, almost completely, to provide a supportive experience for a child who was not the adult it celebrated making. It taught him two things anyway — that he didn't fit in, and that he had a knack for writing and challenging things. He's been doing both ever since.
That experience is why his perspective lands with audiences ready to face the systems that don't include them or make space for them — and why he's devoted his life to work that welcomes more people. Not just people like him. And not just people he likes.
Friday nights on the St Vincent de Paul soup van changed the direction of his life. They left him with a hatred of injustice that leads to human pain — and a conviction that unintended inefficiency is a bigger enemy to fairness than intentional evil ever is.
Kane studied psychology, then health science, and trained as an Advanced Life Support paramedic. While at university he trained as an Officer in the Australian Army — he'd tried to enlist as a private; his aptitude testing had other ideas.
Paramedicine taught him the lesson that shaped everything after: half the patients paramedics attend wouldn't need one at all if the socio-economic system treated them more fairly. And that system — and all the health and wellbeing it touches — starts with financial services.
So he went into finance. In 2014 he started his first fintech, registering Australia's first mobile-app-based retail derivative fund — the first fully managed retail investment product on the Apple and Google app stores. What he learned from its members — that people were paying just to feel safe in an industry built to confuse them — became the seed of Maslow.
Maslow
Maslow is a software and systems company building HAPPI — the Human Alliance for People and Planetary Infrastructure: shared digital infrastructure for the world's 88,000 member-owned financial institutions, the 400 million people they serve across 118 countries, and the billion people who are members of a cooperative. Credit unions, co-ops and mutuals are the only financial infrastructure built to keep wealth in the communities that create it — and they are consolidating out of existence for want of a shared operating layer. Maslow exists to connect them: shared technology, coordination standards and governance, with profits capped by constitution and a company designed to dissolve into the HAPPI Foundation when the build is complete.
Maslow began as a consumer challenge to the finance industry — cost-price financial products, capped investor returns, ownership designed to end up with the society it serves. What Kane and his collaborators learned building that is what led to the bigger work. The mission has carried him from Melbourne to the Systemic Investing Summit in London, a 48-day global systems-change research tour, and daily collaboration with economists, scientists and practitioners across five continents building the post-extractive economy.
Along the way: 6.1 million organic impressions in a year, thousands on the waitlist without a cent of marketing spend, a crowdfund of $410,000 from 288 believers — and an offer document that famously opened with the words "Maslow is far more likely to fail than to succeed", because honesty is the whole point.
Byron Fellowship — 2025 Fellow
Selected for the international fellowship supporting leaders building regenerative, purpose-driven futures — one of a cohort of sixteen.
SXSW Sydney — Session Select
Panel proposal chosen from more than 1,400 submissions for the inaugural SXSW Sydney; convened and appeared on "Finance Industry Emergency: A Threat To Our Future".
Government bravery award
For coming to the aid of two policewomen under brutal attack.
Lord Somers Camp & Power House
Participant and volunteer staff — Camp Diversity, Very Special Kids, SAILaway.
Community service
A long history across homelessness, drug & alcohol support, disability and LGBTQIA+ youth.
Steward — Council for Inclusive Capitalism
A global movement to make economies fairer, more inclusive and sustainable.
Strategic Advisor — Our Kinds
Helping end single-use cups globally — advising on capital, commercialisation and comms.
Board Member & Treasurer — Minus18 Foundation
Australia's charity for LGBTQIA+ youth — the organisation he wishes had existed when he was young.
Strategic Advisor — Home EfficientC
Innovation and commercialisation advisory for the Sydney sustainability company.
Investor & advisor
To companies in financial services and sustainability, alongside board roles with other not-for-profits over the years.
Kane is gay, autistic and Jewish — three things that made a boys' school hard and a life of challenging power inevitable. He gardens for grounding, quotes Mark Twain when cornered, and is marrying a public school teacher, which he considers entirely consistent with everything above.
None of it is about the spotlight. Kane has no interest in centering himself: his work is drawing out the stories behind other people's journeys, and his own gets told only where it might give someone else cover to access an opportunity, a learning, or a little more room to be themselves.
"If you're going to claim the moral high ground, please ensure you understand the geography there." — him
