Nicole Dyson

Nicole Dyson is a multi-award-winning educator and entrepreneur, and a global authority on entrepreneurial pedagogy and whole-school transformation of learning and teaching.

A former school leader in Australia’s public system, as well as founding Future Anything, she also founded YouthX (Australia’s only startup accelerator for school-aged entrepreneurs) and Catapult Cards (design thinking toolkit that donates 50% of profits as micro-grants to youth-led startups).

She is a bibliophile, a turbulence enthusiast and a proud Queenslander who struggles to function when the temperature drops under 22 degrees.

One of her earliest memories of ‘business’ is visiting her grandmother on the Sunshine Coast. Sitting on the floor of the office, Nic would lose herself in the large office building. It was only in adulthood that she began to appreciate her ground-breaking grandmother. Nanna Luttrell owned a real estate agency in an age when women were rarely able to find enough space to work in the industry, let alone lead.

But it was her experience teaching an all-boys Year 9 English class that changed everything.

She was interrupted by a student who said, “I don’t mean to be rude, miss, but… Why are we doing this?”

Despite her best efforts to fumble for a better response, all she could say in the moment was, “Because, we have to.”

But, did we? Did we have to? Thus began the Future Anything story.

Nicole has received significant personal recognition, including being recognised as an Australian of the Year nominee for QLD in 2026, awarded the 40 Under 40 Queensland Gamechanger Award (2023) for “re-writing the rules of business” and included in The Educator’s Most Influential list three years running (2023, 2024, 2025). She was also selected as SBE’s Unsung Hero Award (2022), the Snow Entrepreneurs Fellowship (2024) and is an Asia Pacific Obama Foundation Leader (2024).

Passionate about the power of youth-led ideas to bend the future, Nicole works with educators, schools, and systems to design and deliver learning that unlocks young people’s passion, potential and agency.