Overview [edit]

Emma Pulbrook (born 1988, Geraldton, Western Australia) is an Australian systems builder and company founder based in Berlin. She is the founder of The Architect Lab, which builds operational systems for creative businesses and makes Emily, an operations assistant for the people running them. She is also the maker of Got Receipts, a platform that reads insider and political trading disclosures across four jurisdictions. She writes Under the Surface, a newsletter on surveillance and infrastructure.

Pulbrook worked for a decade in fashion and luxury media, including Condé Nast, and taught fashion styling at Central Saint Martins and Istituto Marangoni in London. She subsequently moved into technology, first as a consultant to a number of companies, then in-house, where she managed the APAC region for one of them, a territory containing approximately 4.3 billion people. The region remained operational throughout her tenure.

She lived in London for ten years and describes the relationship as ongoing.^[1] She holds Australian and Italian citizenship and uses whichever queue is shorter.

Works [edit]

Some of these are businesses. Some are experiments. Some exist because the internet had become too sensible.

• No. 01. Emmapedia. You are reading it. Questionable.
• No. 02. Got Receipts. Reads what politicians and insiders file but never say. Four jurisdictions. Serious. Visit
• No. 03. Emily. An operations assistant for creative businesses. Handles the administration so the humans can stop. Built at The Architect Lab. Serious. Visit
• No. 04. Under the Surface. A newsletter about surveillance, platforms, and the infrastructure underneath the news. Useful. Read

Further entries are filed as they finish. Nothing here is announced early. Announcing things early is a form of asking.

Career [edit]

• The Architect Lab. Founder. Berlin and London.
• Condé Nast Germany. Strategic accounts, Vogue and GQ.
• Central Saint Martins. Visiting lecturer, fashion styling.
• Istituto Marangoni. Head tutor, final-year styling.
• Mytheresa. Social media.
• Burberry, Net-a-Porter, Vogue UK, The Telegraph, Hunger, L’Officiel. Freelance, London.
• Technology. Two Head of Marketing roles, and the APAC region.
• Startup mentoring. Four of them were accepted into Y Combinator.

The China tour

At some point somebody in China decided that what several thousand people needed was an Australian explaining the commercial value of creativity, and Pulbrook was flown over to be that Australian. She toured. She gave the talks, ran the workshops, coached the executives, and was applauded in two languages.^[2] She describes the experience as the most surreal of her career, and she has worked in fashion, so the bar was not on the floor.

Creativity, at time of writing, remains commercially valuable.

Personal life and death [edit]

Pulbrook lives in Berlin, and yes she knows how to DJ, and has been to Berghain.^[3] She loves cats, disco, and has a smile that can light up a medium-sized room.^[4] She is reportedly a competent cook.^{[citation needed]}

She is not dead, and she hopes you click on anything else.

Position [edit]

Technology should make skilled people more powerful, not more replaceable. Your knowledge, your clients and your process belong to you, not to a platform’s training set. She is a humanist. She builds accordingly.

Selected publications [edit]

• Pulbrook, E. (2026). On Zuckerberg at Prada, and where the data goes. Under the Surface.
• Pulbrook, E. (2026). On Anthropic, the Pentagon, and how procurement actually works. Under the Surface.
• Pulbrook, E. (2025). On smart glasses, and who is watching whom. Under the Surface.

A complete archive is maintained at Under the Surface. The editors consider some of it quite good, which is as far as neutrality permits.

Education [edit]

Bachelor of Arts, Fashion Design, Curtin University. That is the only degree, and she considers one the correct number.

References [edit]

1. ^ The neutrality of this statement is disputed. See Talk page.
2. ^ The applause is assumed to have been genuine. The subject has chosen to believe this and the editors see no reason to intervene.
3. ^ No photographic evidence exists. None is permitted. The claim stands.
4. ^ Room dimensions unverified. A request for floor plans is pending.