Emma Pulbrook

This article is related to the systems builder and founder. To stalk other areas of Emma's life see, Emma Pulbrook.

Overview

Emma Pulbrook is an Australian systems builder, founder and cat whisperer (pronounced ˈprɒb.ləm.ˈsɒl.və, or alternatively, ˈθæt.ˌwɪərd.ɔː.ˈstreɪ.li.ən.ɪn.ˈbɜː.lɪn) based in Berlin. She builds operational software for industries where the expertise is entirely real and the infrastructure is a woman called Sarah who is currently on annual leave.

She spent twelve years in fashion and came away with the view that the interesting part of a company is not what it sells but where it keeps things. She has been told this is an unusual thing to take from fashion.

She moved to Berlin from London for reasons described at the time as professional.

She is described by former colleagues as direct,^[1] by clients as the only person in the room who had read the contract,^{[citation needed]} by one former employer as "a lot, in the good way", and by at least one Berlin door person as "the Australian". She has a smile capable of lighting a medium-sized room and a tolerance for corporate jargon measured, under laboratory conditions, in seconds.

She is fluent in German in restaurants and nowhere else. She answers email at hours she declines to confirm. She keeps notes on everyone and has never denied it.

Works

Published

Unreleased

Pulbrook maintains an unverified number of unfinished products, including grain price intelligence for Western Australian growers, a relationship tracker for people who will never maintain a CRM, a skin diary that refuses on principle to diagnose anybody, and a preventative health service for women in Berlin. None are linked here, because none of them work yet, and Emmapedia declines to participate in the industry convention of describing a landing page as a launch.

The figure changes weekly and no reliable count exists.^{[citation needed]}

Position

Technology should make skilled people more powerful, not more replaceable.

This is printed here because the products obey it, which is the only defensible reason to print anything. Emily drafts and a human sends. Got Receipts calls a signal a research lead rather than advice. The skin diary will not tell you what you have. Nothing in the portfolio makes the decision on your behalf, partly on principle and partly because the alternative is a lawsuit with an interesting discovery phase.

Your client relationships, your processes and your institutional memory belong to you and not to somebody's training corpus. A system built the other way is not a cure for burnout. It is a handover with better onboarding.

Career

Years	Organisation	Role
2023 –	The Architect Lab, Berlin	Founder
2020 – 2021	Condé Nast Germany, Munich	Strategic accounts. Vogue and GQ, which is two jobs pretending to be one
2018 – 2019	Mytheresa, Munich	Social and digital
2016 – 2018	Central Saint Martins and Istituto Marangoni, London	Taught fashion styling to students who were significantly cooler than the lecturer
2012 – 2018	Freelance, London	Burberry, Net-a-Porter, Vogue UK, The Telegraph

Between 2019 and 2023 she led marketing at CODE University, WOW Tech Group and M1 Med Beauty in Berlin, the last of which is why she now knows considerably more about skin than she set out to. The complete employment history is available on LinkedIn, which is where complete versions belong.

Education and Qualifications

• Artificial Intelligence Programme (Online)
  University of Oxford | 2024
• Marketing Analytics MicroMasters (Online)
  University of California, Berkeley | 2017-2018
• Bachelor of Arts, Fashion Design
  Curtin University, Australia | 2006-2009

The last one is not a clerical error. It is the reason the interfaces look like that.

Personal Life and Death

Born in Geraldton, Western Australia. Ten years in London, survived. Currently Berlin, where she DJs, which she describes as the only remaining format in which a large room agrees on anything.

A dedicated cat whisperer and an occasional dog enthusiast. Writes Under the Surface, a newsletter about surveillance and infrastructure, largely at hours nobody recommends. Excellent taste in espresso and ramen. Mediocre taste in hours.

She is a humanist. She builds accordingly.

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

See Also

• The Architect Lab
• Got Receipts
• Contact, a form that now, historically, sends things

References

1. "She's fine, she just says it like that." Former colleague, London, 2016.
2. The Architect Lab approval gate. Enforced at the database layer and covered by a passing test, a sentence written specifically for the one reader who will check.
3. Got Receipts API. Every date field carries a provenance string, for example "SEC filing date (Form 4)".
4. There is no fourth reference. It is here for symmetry.