Mike is an active angel investor a non-executive director of Tyro
a technology focused Australian bank
an adjunct professor at the University of New South Wales
and a mentor to the next generation of Aussie greatness
at Start Mate.
Please welcome Mike to the stage
We're an Australian company that makes software applications
that help teams around the world to
as we say, unleash their potential.
So as a company we're about 13 years old
to give you size and scale, we've got about 45,000 customers
we now have about 1600 people around the world.
So we're growing at an extremely rapid clip.
We have about 2-3 people join us every business day at the moment
so life is completely nuts inside the office.
In 10 different places around the world, I should say.
So we have a fair bit of global experience.
We've been profitable since we started.
For those business owners in the room, our initial sales goal
was a million dollars. Kind of passed that a while ago.
Then we had a goal of 10 million because that seemed like
a long way beyond that. Hit that.
The we had a goal of a hundred million and we smashed that one
and so now the goal is a billion dollars
which seems even ludicrous to say.
Big visions make a big difference.
We also are very big believers in values
and specifically our foundation. We've now changed the lives
of more than 200,000 kids and given them education
through millions of dollars of literacy, schools, libraries etc
I started to break down 13 years and say
“Well, where can I start?”
And initially I think the first key decision that we had
was actually starting in the first place.
People seem to skip straight past that step
but we had a choice, coming out of UNSW
to go to work in a consulting firm
to go to work in a big company and we thought we'd
take the big leap. Do something crazy.
Very modest initial goals. Our initial goal was
to make 45,000 dollars
which is what all our friends were getting as grad salaries.
So it wasn't like we set out to do massive things
but I think the key thing there was that we got started.
I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs and people who
were like “I really want to do something."
"I'm thinking of doing something.”
Sometimes it's about taking a first big leap
whether it's a new company, new project etc.
We made some very pragmatic decisions.
We didn't have any money.
We couldn't hire any sales people
and we didn't have any products for them to sell
so we had to start by making products and the products
kind of had to sell themselves.
I think you need to be very pragmatic
about understanding what we do have
and what we don't have in Australia
when you're building a technology company
as I assume most of you guys are of some kind.
We have a huge amount of talent,
we don't have a lot of experience.
So what we got really good at and continue to hone
our ability to get good at is
A) the ability to import the experience we don't have
and B) is to transmogrify that and grow new experience
in people that have talent.
So we almost try to bring as many people as we can from
the Amazons, the Microsofts, the Googles the,
whatever it is, European and American technology companies
and we try to seduce them by hell or high water
to come down to Sydney, spend a couple of years.
Your kids will love it, they'll learn to surf.
Whatever we can do to get them here
and then we try to put as many smart Australians
as we can all and around them and try to
extract all of that information and their 10 or 20 years
of experience because we just don't have the
experience here. We have to face up to that.
That's been our key decision.
I do believe if we'd left Australia
we'd be in a way worse place.
We have better access to talent here.
There's far less competition even though it's very
competitive in Sydney it's nothing like what
it would be if we were in San Fransisco.
If there's something we did badly in the first 10 years
is that we didn't do a very good job of celebrating the wins
In technology, the industry that we're in
can be extremely fast moving, extremely brutal.
It can be extremely creative. We make amazing products
on a daily basis
but you've got to take time as a business owner
with your staff to pause and to celebrate
and to acknowledge what you've achieved and done.
Otherwise it just seems like an endless flywheel
that you're on that's never going to be completed.
There will always be tasks for tomorrow.
And the last probably big decision that we made
early was to invest heavily in innovation.
We've always had a very strong mindset that a certain
percentage of sales should always come from things
that didn't exist two or three years ago.
We sort of use that as levers to see if we're innovating enough
because in technology you can very quickly just have
lots of old things that make lots of money for a long time
but you get hollowed out almost like
you've got termites in the house
You need to give people the time and the space.
It's great to say to your people
“We believe in innovation. We really want to innovate.”
If you don't give them the time and the space
to do that, then they just won't.
The realities of their day job will fill up 90 days a quarter
and that's what you'll get is the realities
of their day job.
Investing in innovation was
incredibly important to surviving in technology.
Ladies and gentlemen would you join me
in thanking Mike for sharing his insight.