Adrian James Campbell: a biography

1. A country town: Shepparton, 1989

Adrian Campbell was born in 1989 in Shepparton, a farming and fruit-growing town in the Goulburn Valley of northern Victoria. Shepparton is orchard country, about two hours north of Melbourne, with the Goulburn and Broken rivers running through it. Its orchards and the SPC cannery shaped the town, and the people in it.

He grew up the way many country kids did: outside most of the day. Weekends meant motorbikes on dirt tracks, fishing on the Goulburn River, and camping trips out along the Murray. He played football, and he has been an Essendon supporter all his life. He still follows the Bombers from wherever he is in Asia.

He says the town taught him two things he still relies on. The first is that people back you if you show up and do the work. The second is that you fix your own problems, because nobody is coming to fix them for you. Read more about growing up in Shepparton.

2. A trade, and a move north

After school he trained as a plumber. As a young tradesman he worked on commercial jobs, including a contract at Mount Tamborine Hospital in Queensland.

In 2009, while working for a different employer, he was caught up in a police matter heard at Wodonga Magistrates Court. The employer's business was found to involve stolen Telstra copper cable. Adrian was an employee there. He explains what happened on the failures page.

3. Solar: International Solar Solutions (2008–2014)

In 2008, at 19, he started International Solar Solutions on the Gold Coast. It sold and installed rooftop solar at the height of the Australian solar boom. At its peak it employed around 40 people and installed more than 300 systems. Across that company and the related businesses, International LED Lighting Solutions and Green Energy Corporation of Australia, he is credited with more than 6 MW of solar generation capacity.

In 2011 he outsourced the management of the business so he could renovate a resort in Bali. The new management ran it into the ground, and he closed the company and refunded customers. The failures page tells the full story.

4. Bali: Troppo Zone Puri Rama Resort (2011–2014)

In his early twenties he bought the Puri Rama Resort in Kuta, Bali, and relaunched it as Troppo Zone Puri Rama Resort. He had loved Bali since family holidays as a boy. He refurbished its 88 rooms, built the pool bars, and employed about 80 local staff.

Troppo Zone became one of the best-known Australian schoolies destinations in Bali. He sold the resort in 2014. It still trades today, and some of the staff from his time are still there.

The resort is where he learned Indonesian, which he now speaks fluently. It also started a Bali villa rental portfolio that he has run continuously since 2014, through COVID, with the same local team.

5. Eco Boss and the lessons of 2015–2018

Eco Boss sold a nanotechnology cleaning range and Radal Technology's Cig-Arrête smoke detectors, which it had distributed in Australia for two to three years. In 2015–16 a dispute with the UK supplier over the licence agreement, and the disclosure of wholesale pricing to sub-distributors, made the business model unworkable. Adrian made the commercial decision to close the company. His account is on the failures page.

He describes 2015 to 2018 as the years that changed how he runs companies: written contracts before money, a second signatory, and no reliance on managers he can't supervise.

6. Trading and markets: Alan Masters (2016–2017)

With partners in Hong Kong he co-founded Alan Masters, a subscription service publishing technical analysis of cryptocurrency pairs, which he ran from 2016 to 2017. He exited as the market matured. The work sparked his interest in using software, rather than people, to make trading decisions.

7. Property and resources in Australia (2017–2021)

From 2017 he ran Australasia Marketing, managing property development and holiday rentals in Southeast Asia. In 2020 he became Managing Director of Prestige Pinnacle Realty, a prestige residential agency, and in 2021 a Director of Earthcon Civil, a civil works contractor. He studied along the way and holds an Advanced Diploma of Financial Planning, a Diploma of Credit Management and a Diploma of Property.

In 2021 he became Managing Partner of First Nations Mining Australia, a majority First Nations-owned explorer working with the Yindjibarndi people in the Pilbara.

8. iQuant Fund (2021)

In February 2021 he co-founded iQuant Fund Ltd with partners including Jason Noorman, and served as its Chairman. It built machine-learning models for systematic equity trading, joined the AWS Activate and Nvidia Inception programmes, and announced a Series A round in 2024. Kanebridge Quarterly featured Adrian and the business in print.

9. Kinnara (2021–today)

He founded Kinnara in 2021 with Jason Noorman, Julie Noorman and Nattaya Intarachooti. Kinnara Limited, registered in Hong Kong, runs a global property marketplace. It lists homes, villas and land across 44 countries through 76 partner portals, and more than 15,000 agents list on it. Most of its buyers of Indonesian property are Australian.

Kinnara is a marketing and listing platform, not a developer. It charges agents no sales commission and helps buyers with search, matching and settlement support.

10. Kinnara Capital and Lombok (2024–today)

In 2024 the same shareholders set up a separate development business. Kinnara Capital Limited in Hong Kong and PT Kinnara Capital Indonesia, a foreign-investment (PMA) company, carry out development in Indonesia. They are commonly owned with Kinnara Limited but are not its subsidiaries; the businesses work together under contract.

Its flagship is Saraya Beach Resort & Residences: 154 beachfront villas on a 3.7-hectare site in Sekotong, West Lombok. It was designed by KRAM Space Architect of Thailand, and TSG Construction Indonesia was appointed as contractor. Land around Buwun Mas has been assembled parcel by parcel, including six adjacent plots now used for staff housing and the site office. See Saraya and Buwun Mas and Sekotong.

11. Marina Bay City: standing up for investors

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 treating buyers. He reported McIntyre to the Indonesian police, refused to keep working alongside him, and withdrew from the project. That decision cost Kinnara millions in sales and triggered a smear campaign against Adrian, but he says he would make it again.

Kinnara Capital still holds multi-million-dollar land holdings in West Lombok, entirely separate from Marina Bay City, which it will develop under its own governance. The full statement is on the Marina Bay City page.

12. 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. He is also writing a novel set in the world of property sales.

He is candid that his record includes failures as well as wins. His view is that both belong in the same story, told by him.