About the Author
Brian C. Solomon
Early Life & Background
Entrepreneurial Career
Community Exchanges Australia (CxA)
In the 1990s, Brian and Sue co-founded Community Exchanges Australia (CxA) with Bendigo Bank, supporting community-driven economic initiatives across the country.
Brian had long believed that internet purchasing would become transformative, and he saw an opportunity to bring local businesses into this emerging world early. Working within Bendigo Bank’s Community Bank model, he proposed creating an online buying system that would give local communities a foothold in the digital marketplace.
Acting on this vision, CxA developed an online purchasing platform for local businesses — in the early 1990s, years before eBay, Amazon, and the global online retail explosion that would soon reshape commerce. The technology was innovative and ahead of its time, but the scale and speed of international competition eventually overtook early domestic adoption.
It was during this formative period that a Bendigo Bank executive — who had lived in China and understood the scale and momentum of its rapidly emerging digital economy — approached Brian and Sue with an unexpected offer:
“I’d love to get your software into China.”
Their response was immediate, fearless, and characteristic of their entrepreneurial spirit:
“When do we go?”
Service to the Australian Government — Austrade
Around the turn of the century and into the early 2000s, Brian served on the Executive Advisory Board of Austrade, the Australian Government’s Trade and Investment Commission.
The purpose of the invitation-only board, established by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Trade, was to connect Australia’s most forward-thinking business leaders with Austrade’s international general managers to identify opportunities for expanding Australia’s trade footprint and supporting Australian companies abroad and to strengthen international trade opportunities.
Before moving to China, Brian became Austrade’s longest-serving appointed business member, contributing strategic insight during a period of major regional economic change.
iSino Ltd (Sino–Foreign Joint Venture)
In the early 2000s, Brian and Sue established iSino Ltd in partnership with the China Internet Information Center (CIIC) — one of China’s major state-run online platforms.
Official Chinese Government Announcement of iSino - a Sino / Foreign Joint Venture.
iSino became one of the first Sino–foreign joint ventures formed directly with the Chinese Government. Built on CxA’s technology, the company developed a national online registration system to replace China’s paper-based registration process for non-government organisations and enterprises — a system intended for schools, hospitals, universities, and thousands of institutions nationwide, excluding only police, political offices, and the military.
The joint venture’s long-term plan was to leverage this digital registration network to enable business-to-business connections across China and internationally. However, the 2008 financial crisis forced Bendigo Bank to withdraw, bringing the project to an early close.
First Futures — Online English Education
Following the global financial crisis, Brian and Sue co-founded HuanxunEDU (环讯科技), a Chinese WFOE, and First Futures (飛博有限公司), a Hong Kong limited company, with Sharon Ye Liang.
Building China’s First Scalable Online English-Teaching Platform
How a simple idea—and a “white label” insight—transformed thousands of schools across China.
The goal was ambitious: to build an online English-teaching business at a time when the concept of live, internet-based lessons in China was still unfamiliar. The technical side was the easy part—drawing on his decades of experience in IT, Brian developed a robust online teaching environment. The real challenge was students. How do you introduce a new model without spending millions on marketing?
Studying the education landscape, Brian identified a clear trend and an emerging problem. Across China, tens of thousands of private after-school English centres were thriving, but a rapid shift was coming. New, online-only competitors were emerging and would soon reshape the industry. These private schools had the students—but no ability to create an online platform quickly enough. First Futures had the platform—but no students.
The solution arrived unexpectedly. While visiting Australia, Brian encountered “white label” consumer products. Buying a bottle of (white-label) wine, he asked the shop assistant about the product, which is where high-quality items are sold without the manufacturer’s branding at a cheaper price to expand their market reach. During his flight back to China, he realised the same principle could be applied to online education.
He created the world’s first “White Label Website” for English language schools. With it, even small, local training centres could instantly launch their own branded online teaching service. Better still, they could offer live “Online Conversations” with native-speaking English teachers based in the USA, UK, Australia, and beyond—teachers contracted through First Futures.
The software gave each school something they had never imagined possible: their own full online presence. On the surface, every school appeared to have its own independent website—complete with its branding, teachers, courses, and local identity. Students logged in through personalised portals that looked unique to their school.
But beneath this personalised exterior lay the full strength of the First Futures platform.
Behind the scenes, First Futures operated a vast, unified system capable of managing: thousands of native-speaking teachers hundreds of thousands of students scheduling across multiple time zones real-time interactive lessons streaming directly from teachers’ homes abroad.
It was the perfect win-win-win model: students gained real access to native English speakers, schools gained a modern online extension of their business, and First Futures provided the entire technological engine that made it all possible.
This seamless integration—schools on the surface, First Futures technology beneath—was the key that unlocked nationwide scalability.
With this breakthrough, First Futures stopped chasing students directly and instead became a pioneering B2B provider, supplying native-speaking English teachers and an online classroom infrastructure to private language schools across China.
It was one of the first companies to enable brick-and-mortar schools to move online seamlessly.
The model flourished. At its peak, First Futures:
- Employed over 2,000 native English-speaking teachers worldwide
- Served more than 5,000 private and government schools across China
- Reached millions of students
This chapter of Brian and Sue’s entrepreneurial journey laid the foundation for their later work—combining innovation, curiosity, and a belief that even a single idea can reshape an entire landscape.
“A single idea can change a business. A single question can change a life.”
With First Futures established and thriving, in 2018, Brian and Sue retired back to Australia, and Brian found himself finally able to return to a question he had carried quietly for years—a question not about business, but about the universe itself. This was the moment he began turning his attention toward gravity.
Turning Toward Gravity
Where a lifelong curiosity became a serious pursuit.
With more time and space to think, Brian returned to a question that had been quietly echoing in the background of his life for decades: What is gravity really doing?
What began as a simple interest—sparked by books, documentaries, and late-night thought experiments—gradually grew into a deeper investigation. Brian found himself revisiting the images and explanations of General Relativity he had encountered over the years. Something in the standard visualisations seemed incomplete. The diagrams of stretched grids and falling balls conveyed the idea of curvature, but not the mechanics behind it. The more he studied, the more the question intensified.
Was space really being stretched?
Or could there be something happening that we weren’t seeing?
Freed from the pressures of running a business after retirement, Brian finally had the time to explore the question without distraction. He began reading widely across physics—General Relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology, and emerging frameworks like Loop Quantum Gravity and String Theory. He connected dots, built models, tested ideas, and tried to reconcile the smallest scales with the largest.
This quiet curiosity soon became a full-time pursuit, culminating in a new way of looking at spacetime itself. The result would become the foundation of his book, One Small Change to Gravity – One Giant Leap for Science, and the central idea at the core of his research: SpaceCompression and SpacePressure.
One Small Change to Gravity – One Giant Leap for Science (2025)
Brian’s book proposes an elegant, accessible idea:
that space is not only stretched into curvature but also compressed, and that this compression creates SpacePressure — the physical push we interpret as gravity.
This thought-provoking idea aims to provide a missing physical intuition behind Einstein’s geometry, bridging large-scale and quantum-scale perspectives.
A New Kind of Scientific Conversation
Brian writes not as an academic physicist but as a curious independent thinker, guided by clarity, simplicity, and the belief that profound ideas often begin outside traditional boundaries. His journey has included thousands of hours of deep exploratory dialogue with AI systems, including ChatGPT.
His goal is not to claim final answers, but to open a conversation worth having.
Personal Life
Brian has dedicated his book to his wife Sue, and that dedication say it all.
To my wife,
my love, life companion, business partner,
and very best friend.
Sue (Susan) Louise Solomon
(nee Yeates)
Sue has walked every step of this
journey with me.
Sue is my Intellectual, Moral
and Physical Inspiration in life.