I started my working life in the hospitality industry. One night the computer system crashed while I was managing a hotel. It fell to me, with no experience in IT, to work with the vendor to get the system up and running again. I must have done okay, because a couple of weeks later they…

On the face of it, Assemble is an organisation that provides end-to-end property development and management services. We buy development sites, build ‘multi-family’ (long-term rental) properties, and enable communities to develop within and around them. But more than that, we’re set up to participate and contribute positively to the new economy. The new economy is…

Predictive Hire was founded four years ago by two friends from England who have known each other since they were kids. They were both recruiters who came to realise that the recruitment process was unfair and inefficient. They found themselves making calls that affected people’s careers without having any concrete way of knowing if they…

I am on a mission to drive one of the leading telecommunications companies to new heights in my current position as the CEO of Virgin Mobile KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia). In Saudi Arabia, we are witnessing a paradigm shift in the economy. It is aligned with the endearing Saudi Vision 2030 which is framed…

At age 18 I joined the Australian Regular Army, commencing my military career at the Royal Military College Duntroon. By 19 I had graduated, been commissioned as a Lieutenant and was commanding a platoon. Not long after, I was on my first operational deployment to East Timor. It was the start of the highest operational…

I spent 16 years in risk management, living the corporate life, firstly at a big four accounting firm and then at a major bank. As a risk executive I saw two issues: the big accounting firms are very expensive, and their value is starting to erode. It’s fine being expensive. I don’t mind paying for…

I’ve always been involved in the shoe business in some way, shape, or form. I worked in the factory during Yr. 10 work experience. I accompanied Mum on sales trips during our school holidays and on weekends, helping her when she struggled working seven days a week. When I finished high school, business was tough….

At heart, I’ve always been an entrepreneur. I founded my first company at the age of 17, which made me fall in love with entrepreneurship and building businesses from the ground up. I like to create something impactful, so when I finished university I dived straight in and created Checkbox. Our ultimate purpose as a…

I’ve been building technology companies for seven years now, having founded my first tech startup back in 2011. I’ve raised money, lost money, built products that no one wanted, and had some great success. When you’re starting out as a non-technology leader trying to build a technology company, the skills gap can be quite large,…

I went through a really rough time in my late teens. I dropped out of University, got myself into a world of emotional pain, and had a form of psychosis. A psychopharmacologist I was seeing at the time helped to change my life and was soon after diagnosed with cancer. He said to me about…

In my early years in corporate finance, I worked with a lot of high-growth technology businesses. Seeing how passionate the founders were about solving problems was inspirational and helped me understand that I was more suited to working with entrepreneurs than in a large accounting firm where I was a little cog in a big…

The sense of a bargain is my biggest driver, so I created iFLYflat to enable people to fly business and first class at discounts between 40% to 90% just by using credit card points a bit smarter. There’s an emotional feeling when you know that the person behind you is paying 10 times the amount…

There are two signs on my office wall. One says, “Life is Short, Do Stuff That Matters” and another says, “Get It Done.” Both speak to what connects me to my working life and to the culture we’re building at Dtex Systems. In any job I’ve taken or investment decision I’ve made, whether I’m investing…

I like people. A lot. I like their stories. I have a couple of my own. I describe myself as a global citizen, taking a chameleon approach to my working life, proactively building a stash of rich life experiences. My career started in risk which led to Wall Street and later to McKinsey & Company,…

My main motivation for starting Lambda School – which is somewhere between a university computer science degree and a coding bootcamp – is the creation of wealth for other people, particularly those who are starting from a low-income base, lower than many people who live in San Francisco could even recognise. In a sense we…

When I was in primary school I was the kid who organised the lunchtime sports competitions. I was sports captain for my house at high school and organised team sports while at university. As an adult I’ve worked at Netball Australia, the World Swimming Championships, and the Deaflympic Games. In one form or another I’ve…

My grandmother lived a courageous and challenging life. Growing up in Russia in the 20th century, her story is one of survival. During World War II her house was occupied by the Germans and she was taken to work in a POW camp in Poland with her mother. One night, they managed to escape and…

The best thing about running a startup is you’re in control of your destiny, but it takes a lot of effort. You’ve got to push yourself. You’ve got to be ready to make sacrifices and have the mental toughness to stick it out when it feels like the walls are closing around you. As bad…

Entrepreneurs, more than anything else, tend to be people who run into a problem or encounter some friction when pursuing their dreams and then create a business because of it. When confronted with a difficult pathway we see an opportunity to capture value. For me, I always wanted to be a writer. I wanted to…

I’m originally from the UK where I worked in the Cambridge office of Ernst and Young. There’s a big tech sector in Cambridge with many startup businesses spinning out of the University, especially in biotech and health technologies. Eventually I moved to Sydney and continued to work with innovative businesses like the coworking community Tank…

In healthcare, new technology isn’t adopted just for the sake of it. It only gets adopted where a difference can be made in patient care, efficiency, or in improving access. There needs to be a positive, measurable outcome or real issue to be tackled; otherwise, it’s very hard to justify the expense within an already…

I often think that being an inventor and being a founder share common intent, groping around in a foggy vision of the future, grabbing whatever you can get your hands on and pulling it back into the present. We look at the full matrix of life and see where things are taken for granted, how…

Property, in Australia, is a massive asset class. It’s highly tangible and well understood, yet it has become inaccessible for many people. With BrickX (Brick Exchange) we’ve created a platform where people can buy and sell property in a similar way that they buy and sell shares. We’re opening up an asset class that was otherwise…

When I arrived at Europcar in 2008, the business was not performing at all well. We were losing money every month and having to request funds from head office just to pay our bills. We had to make significant people changes in the organization, not to mention strategic changes in sales, marketing, fleet, and operations….

I started FORKaiA, a startup accelerator, because I believe in full-throttle Artificial Intelligence (AI). We can take any concept and move from idea to commercialised product incredibly quickly using AI, machine learning, neural nets, and big-data algorithms. I believe that in the future there aren’t necessarily going to be businesses. There’s just going to be…

Founding With Airwallex I found something that I’m really passionate about and enjoy doing on a day-to-day basis. I get a lot of satisfaction from creating a business that can scale very quickly around the world. Every day we’re building something bigger, seeing new things, and solving larger issues. The motivation for the founders is…

Tribe is an influencer platform specialising in micro influencers, yet we didn’t build the platform to be about influence; we built it to be about content. Brands need content. Agencies need content. Social media managers need content and when they do, it doesn’t necessarily have to be highly produced, stylized, and expensive to create. It…

I’m all about growth: growth in customers, growth in staff numbers, growth in revenue, and even personal growth. I’m a lifelong learner, always trying to expand my knowledge and capabilities. Those are the things I’m passionate about and that’s what’s driven me during my three years as CEO of JCurve Solutions (ASX: JCS). Our growth…

It may be a horrible cliché but my driver for seeking a position in parliament was to make a difference. I don’t come from a political family and in fact I was the first among my relatives to finish high school. Almost everyone can name that one teacher who had the biggest impact on their…

When I started Forticode I formulated a set of goals for our technology: our solution should enable a user to access digital records or undertake a transaction of any kind while being watched by someone else, without giving away the password; equally, it had to be immune to credential details being recorded via keylog, screen…

Creating the Product: Growing up in South Africa, we’d head to the Easter Show every year. We ate carnival food, went on show rides, saw animal performances, watched woodchopping competitions and listened to live music in pavilions which were connected by cable cars running high above the action. So it’s probably fitting that at FunLab,…

I love security and I love hacking. In 1977, my school had a mainframe computer, one of the first mainframes anywhere Australia, and I hacked into it. I got into such trouble, but I found hacking interesting and exciting… even though I was banned from the mainframe for the rest of my school days! Fast…

When I speak with boards and executive teams about the future of work in a rapidly evolving workplace, the conversation quickly moves to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ‘chatbots’ and coalesces around the concept of a digital employee. Whilst initially confronting, the light-bulb moment occurs when people understand a digital employee to be a member of…

Getting Here I’ve worked in healthcare IT for close to 20 years, although I started my career programming software with IBM, straight out of college. At IBM, I did every sort of technical job you can imagine. Even when I moved into management and leadership positions, I always had a desire to remain technically strong…

Like most founders, I like building things. I’m driven by an ambition to create something of enduring value. It’s the satisfaction of building something from the ground up that motivates me, rather than being part of an established organisation. It’s not just building anything however, for me it has to be aligned to a meaningful…

At Redbubble our culture is built on values; what we call the 5Cs: Creativity, Courage, Commitment, Accountability and Compassion. I think of them as a balanced set. The most obvious is creativity which is celebrated at the heart of everything we do. It’s part of us. Creativity is demonstrated through the website, through having artists…

As a Tier 1 marketplace, the fundamental purpose of the National Stock Exchange (NSX), is capital formation; bringing together companies who require capital to fund growth, with investors who have capital and are looking for investment opportunities. By targeting companies with sub $50m market-cap, we see ourselves as funding innovation and facilitating diversification in the…

In 2001, a new recruit was drafted to the West Coast Eagles football club. He was a mature age recruit who’d played a lot of football in country WA and was seen as a bit of an unknown in AFL circles. At a pre-season meeting that year, the new players were introducing themselves and had…