Adrian James Campbell: the story so far

1989 · Orchard country

Adrian James Campbell was born in Shepparton in 1989. Shepparton sits in the Goulburn Valley of northern Victoria, about two hours up the Hume from Melbourne, where the Goulburn River meets the Broken and the paddocks give way to pear and apple orchards. The valley is one of Australia's great food bowls. Irrigation channels cut through it in straight lines, the cannery that began life as the Shepparton Preserving Company has processed its fruit since the First World War, and dairy, stone fruit and tomatoes fill the gaps between the orchards. It is a working town, and most families had somebody in one of those industries.

His childhood was spent outside. Dirt bikes on the river flats, fishing the Goulburn for cod and yellowbelly, camping along the Murray in the school holidays, footy on cold Saturday mornings. He barracked for Essendon then and still does, watching the Bombers from Indonesia at whatever hour the fixture demands.

He credits the town with two habits he has never dropped. People back you if you turn up and do the work. And when something breaks, you fix it yourself, because no one else is coming. Both have been tested since. Growing up in Shepparton has its own page.

2007 · A trade, and a bad employer

He left school for a plumbing apprenticeship. It was a practical choice in a practical town, and it put him on commercial building sites in his teens, including a contract at Mount Tamborine Hospital in the Gold Coast hinterland. The trade taught him how a building actually goes together: where the services run, what a slab needs underneath it, why the cheapest fitting is rarely the cheapest fitting. That knowledge turned out to matter two decades later on a construction site in Lombok, where he found himself arguing about reinforcing steel with a contractor.

In 2009, aged 19, he was working for an employer whose business turned out to involve stolen Telstra copper cable. His wages were paid by cheque, and because his name was on those cheques he was drawn into the police case that followed, heard at Wodonga Magistrates Court. He was an employee, not an owner, and he sets out exactly what happened on the record. He left that job and decided he would rather answer for his own decisions than someone else's.

2008 · Solar on the Gold Coast

The same year, at 19, he started International Solar Solutions on the Gold Coast. The timing was lucky and the location was right. In 2008 Queensland introduced its Solar Bonus Scheme, paying households 44 cents for every kilowatt-hour they fed back into the grid, and federal rebates and renewable energy certificates brought the price of a rooftop system within reach of ordinary families. Australia's rooftop solar boom had begun, and the Gold Coast, with its sun and its new estates, was one of the best places in the country to be selling it.

A young installer who could sell and could also understand the roof had an edge. The company grew to around 40 staff and installed more than 300 systems. With two related businesses, International LED Lighting Solutions, which supplied efficient lighting for public and government spaces, and Green Energy Corporation of Australia, which sold higher-efficiency systems to businesses, he is credited with more than six megawatts of generating capacity. For a 19-year-old from Shepparton it was a steep education in payroll, suppliers, regulators and customers who wanted the maths explained at the kitchen table.

In 2011 he handed the day-to-day running of the company to outside managers so he could take on a resort in Bali. That decision cost him the business. The managers ran it down, customers were signed up without systems being ordered, and by the time he returned the only honest option was to close the company and refund the customers. The Queensland Office of Fair Trading prosecuted the directors in 2015. He writes about it, and about the 36 people who lost their jobs, on the record. The company has its own page: International Solar Solutions.

2011 · Kuta, Bali

He had loved Bali since family holidays as a kid. At 22 he bought the Puri Rama Resort in Kuta and relaunched it as Troppo Zone Puri Rama Resort. Kuta is Bali's original tourist beach, a long strip of sand a few minutes from the airport with a dense grid of lanes behind it full of surf shops, bars and hotels. By 2011 it was also the capital of Australian schoolies, the annual migration of school leavers that arrives every November and December.

He refurbished all 88 rooms, built the pool bars and employed about 80 Balinese staff. For a few years Troppo Zone was one of the best-known schoolies resorts on the island, sold as an exclusive package. Running it meant learning Indonesian hospitality from the inside: how a staff of 80 is held together, what a good general manager does, what suppliers expect, how officials, neighbours and a village's temple calendar fit into the running of a hotel.

He sold the resort in 2014. It still trades, and some of the staff from his time are still there. Two things from Kuta have stayed with him: the Indonesian language, which he learned on the floor of that hotel and now speaks fluently, and a portfolio of Bali holiday villas that the same local team has run continuously since 2014, through COVID and out the other side. Read more about Troppo Zone and about Kuta.

2013 · Eco Boss

Back on the Gold Coast, Eco Boss distributed two product lines: a nanotechnology cleaning range and the Cig-Arrête tobacco smoke detectors made by a UK company, Radal Technology, which it had sold into Australian schools for two to three years. The business moved to a licensed distribution model, selling regional licences to sub-distributors, and launched it properly, with a branded trailer, a Gold Coast warehouse and launch days with the new licence holders.

In 2015 and 2016 a dispute with the UK supplier over the licence agreement, which had been signed electronically, and the exposure of wholesale pricing to the sub-distributors left the business model unworkable. He made the commercial decision to close the company rather than spend an estimated $200,000 fighting it. The regulator prosecuted the company and its directors on behalf of the licence holders, and the matter was resolved in 2018 with fines and restitution.

He describes 2015 to 2018 as the years that rebuilt how he runs companies. Written contracts, signed in ink and read by a lawyer, before money moves. Two signatories on every account. No managers he cannot supervise. The rules are collected on how he runs companies, and the full account is on the record.

2016 · Hong Kong and the markets

With partners in Hong Kong he co-founded Alan Masters, a subscription service publishing technical analysis of cryptocurrency pairs. He ran it from 2016 to 2017, through the first great run-up in crypto prices, and stepped away as the market matured and the easy edge disappeared. The work left him with a conviction that software, not people, should be making the repetitive decisions in trading, a thread that runs straight to iQuant Fund five years later.

2017 · Property and resources in Australia

From 2017 he ran Australasia Marketing, managing property development and holiday rentals across Southeast Asia from an Australian base. It was the first business built around the thing he had become unusually good at: being an Australian who could operate in Indonesia as a local.

In 2020 he became Managing Director of Prestige Pinnacle Realty, a prestige residential agency that runs exclusive sales campaigns and trains agents in advanced selling. In 2021 he became a Director of Earthcon Civil, a civil contractor whose core work is cutting and levelling house sites for new developments. The plumber's interest in what sits under a building had not gone away.

He studied as he went. He holds an Advanced Diploma of Financial Planning, a Diploma of Financial Planning, a Diploma of Credit Management and a Certificate IV in Credit Management from Mentor Education, and a Diploma of Property and real estate licences from Connect Skills Institute. In 2021 he also became Managing Partner of First Nations Mining Australia, a majority First Nations-owned exploration company working with the Yindjibarndi people in the Pilbara.

2021 · iQuant Fund

In February 2021 he co-founded iQuant Fund Ltd with Jason Noorman and served as its Chairman. The idea came from traders who were tired of juggling screens at all hours and wanted software to run their strategies for them. The company built machine-learning models for systematic equity research across more than 20 exchanges, beginning with the ASX and extending to the NASDAQ, NYSE and Hong Kong. It joined the AWS Activate and Nvidia Inception programmes, which gave it the cloud and GPU capacity to train its models, and it announced a Series A round in August 2024.

Kanebridge Quarterly ran a print feature on the business and interviewed Adrian for it. His advice in that interview, to focus on innovation and never stop learning, is about as close as he comes to a motto. iQuant served institutional clients only. More on iQuant Fund.

2021 · Kinnara

The same year he founded Kinnara with Jason Noorman, Julie Noorman and Nattaya Intarachooti. Kinnara Limited, registered in Hong Kong, spent 2022 building a property marketplace and opened it to the public in 2023. The platform pulls listings from 76 partner portals into one place and now covers homes, villas and land across 44 countries. More than 15,000 agents list on it, and it charges them no sales commission.

The problem it solves is one he had lived. An Australian looking at a villa in Bali or a condominium in Phuket had to work through a dozen local portals in languages and currencies they did not know, with no way to compare one market with another. Kinnara shows every listing in the buyer's currency and routes the enquiry to the agent who actually holds the property. Most of the buyers who use it to look at Indonesian property are Australian, which is why this site exists on a .com.au domain.

Kinnara markets property. It does not build it, and it is never a party to the sale. The marketplace has its own page: Kinnara.

2024 · Kinnara Capital and Lombok

In 2024 the same shareholders set up a separate business to develop property of their own rather than market other people's. Kinnara Capital Limited in Hong Kong and PT Kinnara Capital Indonesia, a licensed foreign-investment company, carry out the work in Indonesia. The two Kinnara businesses are commonly owned but neither owns the other, and they deal with each other under contract.

The company's first decision was where. Bali's best coastal land was taken and expensive. Lombok, the island immediately east across the Lombok Strait, had the same beaches and a fraction of the development, a government pouring money into the Mandalika Special Economic Zone and its MotoGP circuit, and new direct flights from Perth and Darwin. Kinnara Capital chose Sekotong, the quiet south-west peninsula, and the village of Buwun Mas.

Its second decision was how. Much of Lombok's coastal land has been in families for generations without modern certificates, which is why so many foreign property stories in Indonesia end badly. Kinnara Capital buys only once ownership has been confirmed through the courts and the BPN land office, and it has assembled its land one parcel at a time. Six settled plots already hold the company's site office and staff housing.

Its flagship is Saraya Beach Resort & Residences: 154 beachfront villas on 3.7 hectares, designed by KRAM Space Architect of Thailand and contracted to TSG Construction Indonesia, run as a single hotel with two restaurants, a beach club, a spa and a gym. Building the Elysian display villa at Mandalika showed that some local steel, concrete and electrical components were not good enough, and the specification was raised across every villa as a result. The plumber had become a developer, and he was still reading the engineering.

2025 · Marina Bay City

Kinnara was the marketing partner for Marina Bay City, a Lombok project developed by companies controlled by Jamie McIntyre. In October 2025 Adrian became concerned about how the developer was dealing with buyers. He reported McIntyre to the Indonesian police, refused to keep working with him and withdrew Kinnara from the project. It cost Kinnara millions in sales and set off a campaign against him online, which is now the subject of his proceedings in the Federal Court of Australia. He says he would make the same call again. His full account is the Marina Bay City statement.

2026 · A village day in Buwun Mas

On 27 June 2026 Kinnara Capital held a community day on Pengantap beach in Buwun Mas: a stage, food, music, village leaders, local officials and the contractor's team, and the handover of support for a children's playground for the hamlet of Dusun Pengantap. Adrian spoke to the village in Indonesian, without a translator, which he regards as the single most useful skill he has picked up in 15 years in the country. The photographs on this site come from that afternoon. See Community.

2026 · Today

Adrian is based in Indonesia and works across Southeast Asia. He runs Kinnara day to day and leads Kinnara Capital's work on Lombok, where Saraya is designed, priced and contracted and the contractor is ready to mobilise. He still holds his Australian directorships. He is also, in whatever hours are left, writing a novel set in the world of property sales, a subject on which he has unusual source material.

He is open that his record has failures in it as well as wins, and his position is that both belong in one story, told by him. That is what this site is for. If you want the short version, the timeline lists every year. If you want the rules he took from the hard years, they are on how he runs companies.