Kane grew up in Melbourne's eastern suburbs, the son of a mechanic and a loans officer who left school early and worked their way to retirement. School — Camberwell Grammar, on his mum's hard-earned savings — taught him two things: that he didn't fit in, and that he had a knack for writing and challenging things. He's been doing both ever since.
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 retail-managed derivative fund and 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 building a new financial industry that advocates for, serves, and is owned by billions of people. Cost-price financial products, a Netflix-style membership, capped investor returns, and a structure designed to hand ownership to the society it serves. The mission has carried Kane 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.
Government bravery award
For intervening in a violent attack on two women.
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.
Kane holds and has held board positions with several not-for-profits, and is an investor and advisor to companies in financial services and sustainability.
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.
"If you're going to claim the moral high ground, please ensure you understand the geography there." — him