One of Anthill Magazine's inaugural 30under30 Award winners, Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin thrives on creating smart solutions to every-day problems. For the past decade he has been balancing the demands of a full time Naval career, a Masters in Engineering and running personal businesses in his scant spare time. In 2009, Eckersley-Maslin returned from active duty in Iraq with a drive to storm the front line of Australian business.

To address the two most common barriers to starting a business - time and money - he demonstrated publicly that it was possible to build a viable venture in seven days and on a budget of $500. After just one week he launched AutoCarLog, an online system to manage vehicle mileage logs. Two months later he is securing joint ventures with multinational organisations and looking down the barrel of venture capital.

Now, Eckersley-Maslin runs BlueChilli - a "Venture Technology" company that builds and invests in digital start-ups by providing technology rather than cash. Through BlueChilli Eckersley-Maslin is currently launching a new online business every 2 months and has projections to increase this to 1 new start-up every month in 2012.
Eckersley-Maslin is also the inventor and co-owner of a patent on autonomous landing systems for military unmanned aircraft. This research won him the prestigious title of the top post-graduate researcher at the University of New South Wales.

Eckersley-Maslin is passionate about giving the lessons he's learned back to the entrepreneur community. In May 2010, Eckersley-Maslin was nominated as the most inspiring engineer of the year by the Institute of Engineers Australia (IEAust) and gives advice and assistance to other young entrepreneurs starting out through public speaking and his affiliations with many Sydney Entrepreneur Networks.

He is also actively involved in the Club KidPreneur project which aims to teach basic business skills to children to foster a generation of entrepreneurs.