From Advising HBO's Silicon Valley to Selling Startups to Big Tech

Mike basically wanted the technology to be as accurate on Silicon Valley as the chemistry on Breaking Bad. I've been coding for 50 years and trust me dudes I vi no vibe coding back then. I just saw an opportunity and ran at it and somebody later told me hey you're an entrepreneur. I'm like no I just need to pay the bills.

And those were disabled and team went on silent and then years later Apple revealed that it was basically part of the the infrastructure for iCloud.

What do you mean it can't be done? Hold my beer. There isn't a single company or venture organization in Australia who can drop $400 million into anything to create a category. We're just here to be available and to have fun and and frankly we we all don't want you to make all the mistakes that we made. We we made a lot of them.

Just go and do it and see what happens.

Ideas are worth like jack [ __ ] Absolute jack [ __ ] If you can't execute, there's nothing.

Just take that initiative to actually take whatever crazy ideas that they might have and just try to see what comes of it.

Don't be afraid of ambition. Chase it. Love it. wrap your arms around it and and say it out loud.

New Zealanders don't know any better. They will just get up and give it a shot. That's why we were first to get to the top of Mount Everest. Go to dream that ultimate dream like what is it that you ultimately want to do? And it's all achievable. All right, Andrew, thank you so much for joining us on TechMates. Glad to be here.

Amazing. Yeah, we looked at your CV. There's so much going on on your CV that I think we can't fit it all into this one hour, but we'll try to get the highlights. One of the things that really stood out to me is that you and it's a bit of a random one, but you advised the HBO series Silicon Valley. Is that correct?

Yeah, I did. Yeah, I did. I uh I worked on uh HBO Silicon Valley for five seasons as a technical adviser to the production and uh it was a whole lot of fun actually. There's uh quite the backstory as to why but uh

yeah would love to would love to start with that actually. How how did you get into it and uh what was it like?

Well, it was I was working with a very good friend of mine uh who was an adviser to India's um second largest retailer and ran all their digital properties and e-commerce capabilities over there. and uh he he relocated back to LA and had been in the entertainment industry and uh hooked up with three um hooked up with the studio and you gave me a call one weekend and said, "Hey, I got a guy on the you know guy on the loan that wants to talk to you." I you know I'd known Jonathan for a long time and I'm like yeah I trust you. It turns out that guy was Mike Judge. Uh basically said yeah you've got the gig. I said well I didn't think I was interviewing. what it what it was was um Mike basically wanted the technology to be as accurate on Silicon Valley as the chemistry on Breaking Bad. Um because there was uh quite a riff if you like between Hollywood and um

Hollywood and Silicon Valley and Mike's actually an engineer himself. Um that's kind of what motivated him to do office space way back when and he was adamant that you know the tech had to be correct and we loved that and I said yeah so that means I can pull the writers up and get it accurate. He said absolutely. So uh yeah we we basically had a lot of fun. We did a lot of really cool things. I could probably do an entire podcast on the stuff we did. Uh we had all sorts of fun breaking the four walls, getting out on the internet. We put uh all sorts of fun stuff everywhere out there on the internet as well. So it was uh quite the fun thing. Yeah, everybody needs to have something fun on their resume like that. Right.

That is a very fun geek. Yeah.

And I'm in the IMDb database for 50 episodes.

I think Mark doesn't know about Silicon Valley because he's not he's not in pop culture at all, but he had a startup actually that was called Piper. I'm not sure if that had anything to do with the with the HBO series.

Yeah. I'd have to check with the legal folks in New York at HBO, you know, with Pi Piper, we we made sure we had all sorts of coverage there.

Yeah, I think Yeah, Mark, did did did that have anything to do with the Silicon Valley series on HBO or

uh No, no, no, it didn't. We actually started the company before the show actually came out and um but obviously the show was a lot more popular than um a lot more people knew about the show than about our startup. So, so every time, you know, we'd we'd go anywhere, people would ask us if we if we name the company after the show or if we're related to the show in any way. But there there's obviously like other pipers, right? There's DA Piper, a law firm, and there's like Piper Airplane.

Yeah, there's there's a lot of, as we learned, there's a lot of different pipers.

Yes, there is.

Yeah. Andrew, you you spent 28 years in the US before you moved back to Melbourne only recently. And as I said, there's many many exits in that time, many different roles. But I want to start with what prompted you kind of what prompted you to move to the US. Well, I um it's probably not not well documented on my uh you know, my resume for the reason that I don't like filling it out anymore and I don't want to break LinkedIn, but I first went to the US actually in in the uh the mid80s when I was actually I was with Arthur Anderson way back when and I did a stint in uh Chicago and my now wife was a broker in New York and we kind of got a taste for the US in the mid 80s.

Both of us were over there on six months of conments and we really enjoyed it and then had the opportunity when I I built in the mid 90s early to mid 90s Australia probably one of Australia's largest uh niche SAP integrators and we uh grew that from you know 0 to 300 team members and sold that to Deote and then Deote actually asked me to come to the US. So it wasn't really a you know I'm dying to go to the US um and I've got to get there at all costs. it was, you know, a convenient acquisition and then, you know, hey, by the way, can you come and run, can you run a global practice here and uh we'll relocate you in Silicon Valley and that was a pretty quick yes. Actually, the alternative was actually to go up to Asia and be chief operating officer for Asia Pack. And I said, done a bunch of time up there. How about I go to the US? And uh that was actually what got me over there.

Uh so it wasn't really the aspiration just to be in Silicon Valley for the sake of being in Silicon Valley. was purely commercial and uh was very deep in the tech industry and in Silicon Valley and it was a frankly great time to be there in the mid to late 90s.

Yeah. What what was that like coming from I guess Australia to Silicon Valley? Did that feel very different in terms of the tech that you would see there?

Yeah. First of all, it was a really huge adjustment. You know, I I really feel like my grandfather on the porch now, you know, giving old stories of what it used to be like, right? It it literally, you know, back in the 80s and '90s, there wasn't that much of a tech industry. Austral was, you know, largely what I call a, you know, a branch office or, you know, a sales subsidiary for, you know, global tech. Now, that's a little unfair. There was some cool tech that was coming together back then, but there wasn't anywhere near the ecosystem, the scale, u the connection. So, to literally go from what I call a branch office mentality to front row center in Silicon Valley was just wow. You know, it was truly incredible.

you know, you could be, you know, just go and have coffee in University A in Palo Alto and you've literally got big icons of the industry just sitting there having a cup of coffee as you might imagine. Uh, and I think there was, you know, it was really buzzing very very early. You know, the massive scale that has grown to now is just beyond comprehension relative to then. Uh, but it was really exciting to be there and actually, you know, be able to walk up and down the street or, you know, frankly, drive up and down 101, which is probably a lot closer. you can't really walk around there. Um but uh yeah, getting to know getting to know the area, getting to understand the culture, which was very open and collaborative um and very welcoming actually. It was uh very exciting to be there.

Did you have a sense of the scale that the internet industry was going to become back in the day?

I think the you know, as we sort of went to, you know, the first big historical bubble, it was clearly very very hyped. Things were growing very quickly. a lot of new uh internet and e-commerce and other businesses were coming through um you know big big names like excited home and actually with fabulous Aussies who were there as well Tony Certis who's now back in Sydney who was the GM of commerce for Yahoo and a few others you know we would literally watch what was happening and it was a rocket and you know lot you know what was felt like a lot of money going into the companies back then which today is borderline comical how small the amount of money but it's at the time it was you know someone just raised 20 million, you know, and now we're doing a hundred million and $200 million, you know, raisings.

And, you know, you know, if you roll forward the AI type scenario we have at the moment where, you know, companies are being started with multi-billion dollar valuations on day one with, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars being dropped in on the on a concept or an idea. So, you know, by comparing contrasting, yeah, very very different. But, uh, back then you could actually measure it by driving up and down 101. You could see the buildings coming up uh because it was think of it as an old industrial not manufacturing type but old sort of industrial just these massive big buildings coming up and down.

you could see them as you were driving through Redwood City and other places just uh that was if you like the measure back then because you were putting together all the teams, all the staff, putting together big headquarters and it was transitioning from the client server and hardware world where the hardware was king, the big players like Sun Microsystems and and the earlier players um you know moving into you know software and then SAS and similar yeah I think the thing if I had one recollection it was just how quickly it happened and you know just the critical mass that gets behind something just so quickly. Uh and that's just accelerated frankly.

Andrew and and um I'm curious maybe if we just go back to like your early days and you you had a company that you sold to Deote from what I understand, right? Um and that was sort of how you got into the whole ERP space.

I was actually in the ERP space before that. Uh I worked I worked at a little company called Oracle and uh I joke that I I lasted their 13 quarters. If you've ever worked at Oracle, you understand what I mean. Uh but I did my 13 quarters at Oracle and went to quota club every three all three of those years and um I was working with Oracle applications early in Australia and actually that was what got me into the SAP tech cuz I saw SAP coming through and thinking wow where's this coming from um and then I jumped in to do that. So I've been doing ERP for probably four or five years uh before we built that um and then sold it to Deote. I sort of right that was the first you know the first wave to the beach of the subsequent waves to follow of all the different tech I've worked with was in and around ERP.

So I did Oracle TP and then actually Deote brought me to the US and said there's this emerging stuff called Barn Ban uh which is a manufacturing space can you lead that practice worldwide and I did and then I actually left Deote to actually go and run half the revenue worldwide at Barn company and actually said I really want to go into the I prefer to be in the software industry. I'm I'm a you know it's not that I don't like Deoid it's it's a wonderful firm. I was just as my wife reminds me if you'd stayed there you'd have be a partner for 30 years by now. I said thank you darling. um she likes to remind me but I was a software guy. I just wanted to go play in the software industry.

Yes, I did my you know probably the better part of uh just under 10 years in the whole ERP thing and that was a massive first um movement in the tech industry and then spawned off a lot of the other stuff as well. Uh so a lot of the you know you know the veterans and the pros actually did work in and around the ERP industry and you know SAP is still a giant today and you know what became you know Salesforce and what Salesforce has become now is a giant cuz that spawned off the CRM curve then the supply chain and all the others. So it was all of the the core technology which was consolidating at that time become to become the backbones and then was really the front end of what became all the SAS SAS platforms as well. It was kind of fun to be there historically and um you know know know the players and know what went on.

In fact I joke I worked with Beni off u Mark Beni off way back at Oracle when we were um under a billion in revenue way back when um on a global basis and u marks in his sales force and then we had fun parodying him on HBO Silicon Valley. I'll get into trouble I get into trouble for that one. It wasn't directly Mark Beni off, but maybe an abstract of the character.

Andrew, for folks, I mean, a lot of the folks who listen to our podcast, they're entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs, and we hope to inspire kind of local Kiwi and Aussie aspiring entrepreneurs to start companies. A lot of them, they they gravitate towards companies or ideas or tech that is immediately applicable to what they know, consumer apps, solving problems maybe for small businesses. the whole ERP space and and that that whole enterprise angle. Most people don't know what that even what that is. Could you could you maybe in a nutshell explain quickly what ERP was and also kind of how you saw that whole industry evolve and what what made it interesting for you?

Yes. So to me um the simplest way to explain you know the literal ERP is enterprise resource planning. It was a bunch of marketers who needed to say something sexier than accounting and back office, right? Um but it was you to to signify the scale. What it really was was that for the first time you could fit an entire application on a server. In the past you had an accounts receivable application, a manufacturing application, the general ledger. So it was the first time that all of the applications could be fully integrated into a single application and instance. Um and that was you know big big deal way back then. So, you know, think of uh you know, it was even, you know, obviously pre- internet where it was just the ability to see if you can get something onto one machine rather than multiple multiple expensive machines to be able to just do your back office and administration.

Massive task. Um today, you know, I feel free to roll out the hey boomer what are you talking about sort of jokes, but you know, we were constrained by the hardware back then. You know, roll forward to today. We're not cons constrained by cloud server, compute, any of those sort of things. today we had back then. So therefore you were you know inventing delivering and executing on just a different type of tech but ultimately you learned all of the problems that you had to do. We still had the you know we still had the security the file system all of the other problems but it's um it was it was foundational because if someone like Coca-Cola or Boeing worldwide wanted to put in one big worldwide global instance to run their business globally, you couldn't do it in the past. It was that it was that simple.

And your initial your your first degree was in commerce from what I understand, right? So why was this stuff interesting to you? How did you get into it in the first place?

Well, I you know I to give you the full history, I did my first start startup 38 years ago that I sold 36 years ago. Um and to give you the really really old story, my father was a head of quality engineering out of Philips here in Australia. And uh he would used to bring home printed circuit boards and we'd just goof around and I'd build digital m digital dice or all sorts of things. So, I was kind of goofing off and hacking around down at the printed surf printed circuit board level when I was about eight or nine years old. Um, then I got access to uh some uh mainframe mainframes. Uh, in fact, they called them mainframes. I think it was like a deck um PDP11 to be blunt.

Um but uh for those of those who are old enough and nerdy enough uh but I you know I was doing programming and software and developing software you know when I was 12 or 13 years old and I'm 63 now so I've been coding for 50 years and trust me dudes no vi no vibe coding back then zero zero we kind of had to do it the hard way and was like carving it out of a rock

you have you have you tried vibe coding now just I do I I hacked together something on the weekend that I needed to do for one of my companies it took me 15 minutes and then I took you know, then I went for a walk. It was beautiful. I could never have done that could never have done that 50 years ago. But we um now my my history sort of goes all the way back and I had this sort of I always love software. I always love software. I then became a chartered accountant. You went to Arthur Anderson, but I had this nagging I love software. I love what software can do. My aha moment when I started my first business was actually I can speak fluent nerd and actually fluent bean counter. There's actually not many of those sort of folks.

And um I built a business very quickly um around that and sold that a couple of years later actually to another accounting firm that actually wanted that as part of their business because it increased the valuation if the head systems advisory you know roll forward to today. Oh, look, Accenture is pretty valuable, right? Who knew? But I was around in the very front end of that. And then I just I found that I just love software because the ability to create something from nothing, literally. Here's a problem. Here's how I can solve it with software. It was just we got to try and figure out what to do with this. And equally, I didn't realize I was an entrepreneur. I just saw an opportunity and ran at it. And somebody later told me, "Hey, you're an entrepreneur." I'm like, "No, I just need to pay the bills. I just need to pay the bills." And turns out I'm really not that good to manage.

I'm pretty strong willed and I want to kind of go in a certain direction. But yeah, look, I I didn't really realize, you know, whether I could sell or couldn't sell, but I just love working with customers, love solving problems and could convert that through using software and said, "Okay, that's for me." Uh, and every time I get into a big company and they try and put me in a big role, and I've done a bunch of those globally, I've run public companies. I've run hundreds of millions. I'm like, "Yeah, but my gravity is early stage. Let me get companies off the ground and do that." and and solve some really curious new big problems. You know, after doing it long enough, um I was then lucky enough just to connect with friends and do all sorts of different things. Yep. I did do the e-commerce thing.

We did I did do, you know, I chief operating officer of Broadvision public company there which had blown up after the bubble and had to get in and take that clean that up and turn it around. It was, you know, quarter of a billion dollars in cost structure and 110 million in revenue. uh for those of you who are quick on math. We were losing 140 million a year and we need to clean that up and turn it around and we did that and you know uh got the company where we needed it to to get to and stabilize. But I then learned that I can run companies, I can come up with ideas, but my center of gravity's always been but let's go find a new idea. Um and as a result of that we uh we worked on the first real-time web analytics and ultimately sold that one twice actually.

the first time to a company called Webside Story and we said oops I think we might need to change the name of that because we do web channel and call channel and and the company was visual visual sciences so we reversed the public brand it became visual sciences the public brand and we then sold it to omnature

and then Adobe acquired Omnature and that technology is still alive underneath the Adobe stack today after

yeah you you had a number of kind of really good exits Apple eBay companies that then got acquired by bigger companies and you had different roles in these, right? Sometimes you were the CEO, sometimes you had the CEO, sometimes you were the um SVP. What was the biggest

actually? So, you're raising a good point. I mean, this is the other thing I realized. There was times I said, "Look, I don't have to be the founder and the king. I the founder and the CEO. I'm good." Like, a couple of those companies were just friends of mine that we've been doing businesses together now for 20 years. It's like, "All right, Andrew, you know, you're good at the go to market and selling and all that sort of stuff." And you know, I'm like, fine, don't make me write the code. I'm good, but don't make me write the code. It's it's going to be a mess.

What was your biggest commercial success out of all of these different adventures?

I frankly, all of them were successful for different reasons. Um, you know, the visual sciences was a wonderful exit, selling it twice and knowing that it is still in production today after 25 years as part of the Adobe stack. That's pretty cool. Um, I was pulled in at GSI Commerce when it was just prior to it being acquired by eBay.

that was my friend who also started um one of the co-founders of visual sciences and Jim was then doing some advisory work over at uh with my uncle Ruben at GSI Commerce and said can you come on over and I said yeah sure cuz we love working together and there was a lovely little project in background that was ultimately was foundation DB which was acquired by Apple that was going through two or three years worth of just tech build and there was nothing to sell while we were doing that so we jumped over and said okay let's go do this other thing so a lot of my career has actually been just building on, you know, ultimately I, you know, I've got a pretty good network now.

Um, and mostly work with just a lot of friends and so sometimes it was friends, sometimes it was starting my own thing, sometimes it was as a operating partner in a private equity firm where we do diligence on something and pick one. You know, the one recently which we had a fabulous uh exit on was, you know, we had this uh deal came around about um hacking iPhones for the law enforcement intelligence community and everybody didn't want to touch the deal and I was like, "Hang on, I'm actually involved in a business at the moment with law enforcement agencies." So, I had uh I was helped a private equity firm in LA, one of their last portfolio companies they just couldn't figure out what to do with said, "Andrew, can you look at this one?" And it was actually uh company called propertyroom.com which was kind of a interesting one for me.

It is an e-commerce reverse liquidity marketplace but it's ostensibly uh eBay for ste seized and stolen goods. We take all the seiz stolen and abandoned goods out of law enforcement agencies in the US aggregate them and auction them back to public. You know $40 million a year business. Very cool little business. But we had to sort of figure that out and get that cleaned up for the private equity firm. But the reason for the story was I got to know the law enforcement leadership pretty well and when this deal came through it was easy to do the diligence and say have you seen this new stuff called gray shift and are you using it? We spoke to a number of um you know some of the you know kind of the commissioners of very large places like you know LAPD, NYPD etc. And they said yeah this stuff is incredible.

um the ability for us to solve crimes um and you know pull the forensics uh off the device um is just unmatched and nobody else had actually done it. So you know I got back with the private equity team and the diligence team. I said actually I think there's a real pony in this one. We we ultimately invested uh we exited that company a little under three years later to Toma Bravo. It's very large private equity firm and uh that one continues to grow and I can't disclose the numbers but it's um because I'm still subject to NDA and still a shareholder

but it's like 30 to 50 times the revenue than when we invested about four years ago. So the reason for the story is I had the ability to either start, be around, be part of, be a board member, be an operating partner, be my own v, you know, have my own venture firm, be a venture. So I got then sort of flipped into, okay, how do we build, grow companies andor partner with other people? And so for me, it was just, you know, you could say you're a serial entrepreneur. I'm just, no, I've just worked in and around the industry for over 40 years now and seen so much stuff. David Sharer was probably the most brilliant engineer I've ever worked with and he still is and he's still doing stuff. He's just incredible. And his business partner David Rosenthal who had come up with this idea uh of Foundation DB.

And to give you the shortest possible version of what we were going after when we did visual sciences, we were just so frustrated with all the database vendors who wanted to just charge us ridiculous amounts of money for the data storage. You know, we just didn't see there was that much value in what they did.

And then fortunately when you know with the visual sciences exit the guys had time to sit down and think you know after the exit about what would you really go after next and we all kind of laughed you know number one on the list was database um and at the time um the no SQL movement was coming through um and you couldn't really rely on that and then the shortest version I can tell you is the guys put together this massive spreadsheet and evaluated every single database worldwide and what it boiled down to was it became obvious once you did all the analysis it's like every single database has made a particular set of decisions about storage structure, data model, API or language level interface. So you know Oracle is you know SQL relational however you whether they're doing the fully distributed or non-distributed database at the storage level.

So it became clear, well why do all three things have to be together? And that was kind of the aha moment because if you could somehow separate the the storage layer and create a massively scalable and persistent storage substrate, then you could actually do any model on top of that or multiple models on top of that and then abstract out of that and then at the API at the language level integrate with that and set about that. The project took about 6 years. So it wasn't it was a heavy engineering long life cycle idea and basically everybody said it just couldn't be done. It was uh Wner Vogels who was the CTO of uh Amazon at the time. If you have a look there was a thing called the cap theorem and the cap and the cap theorem was you can have two of consistency, availability or petition tolerance. You cannot have all three. Us being cheeky now say you understand the word theorem.

It's like it's a theory. So what we really went after first uh was actually the the persistent data storage. You know basically make sure the ones and zeros have all the asset transaction capabilities and do that first. And there was some clever technology including consensus protocols if you know PAX consensus protocols and other sort of stuff if you want to get nerdy and dive deep. But we the way to think about it we went at it layer after layer after layer. The other thing that did and the guys were just genius and I love this. They actually said let's never ever rely on hardware. So let's get the worst possible hardware and we'll go test it on the worst possible hardware. You know, so back in the day in the US that meant literally going to Radio Shack and buying commodity stuff and literally plugging it together with wires and then pulling it apart and see what happened.

But ultimately uh what the what the guys did and this is the next startup. I'm not part of you know working with these guys now. The next startup's called antithesis if you look it up. What they then created was um synthetic engine testing to actually figure out all of the things that could, you know, go wrong and create millions of combinations of permutation actually and kind of recreate synthetically the internet at scale. So you could actually test this. That company has now raised hundreds of millions of dollars and it's the same crew that was foundation of BD is now doing antithesis. And I tell this story because this is a lot of how the industry works. you know, you work with people you've worked with before. You come up with the next idea. You go after another problem. You pull together the teams and the capabilities.

And I think this is one of the things I'm excited about Australia and New Zealand. We're starting to see the second and third time entrepreneurs now inside of this ecosystem. And that's one of the things that's very core to the United States Silicon Valley

um is that you've got 40 plus years of that happening and the capital and the teams being recycled into the different plays. Now I will tell you very well, let me just tell you quickly about Foundation DB as well. The hardest product in the world to sell. So just think we're selling the promise that we can do SQL on top of NoSQL. Now after everybody's falling off their chair laughing and then you're actually competing against IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and everybody who's got a massive database, massive scalable database making the claims that we could do what we do. Try selling that without coming up against seven Oracle salespeople who are just going to destroy you.

So the point you made earlier, yeah, we made a very deliberate decision to keep the company very quiet and just really work it actually through the u you know the the developer community and really work it down that way rather than big bold website, big bold marketing claims. But it was very hard actually. I mean try going to Bank of America or Goldman Sachs and trying to pitch what we do. They just fall off their chair laughing. Now we did get audiences. We did get there. Um I'll tell you the deal to get done with Apple was nearly 2 years and the being in the first meeting there the jaw kind of hit the ground and they loved it and then they did it acquired it.

A lot of people don't know today that the storage substrate and foundation DB sits underneath things like snowflake and tigress and so it was actually a very transformational technology to and it was basically one of those things that everybody said it couldn't be done and it's you know it's what I call the hold my beer moment. What do you mean it can't be done? Hold my beer. Let's take a shot at that one.

And the Apple acquisition, how did that how did that go down? Can you share anything about that?

Yeah. Broadly, it became obvious that they were very very interested over time just with the the depth and but I can tell you it was a very very very long process working deep with the technical teams and part of the acquisition was they acquired the entire engineering team and um they moved to California. We were based we were based on the east coast. Uh, turns out I joke in that transaction. I'm a non-engineer. I wasn't useful, but yeah, my job my job was, you know, sort of help you in the front end of, you know, the sales and services and getting it all off the ground. But yeah, that was just an incredible it was an incredible experience because it was very hardcore and you had to strongly believe in what you were doing and just passionately go after it. Um, and I've never seen such a wall of no in my go to market career ever. It was just wow.

Okay, let me just get torn down tend torn down by every single prospect. But we got there.

Can I just ask so across all the and you alluded a little bit to it, but you had the all these opportunities to work on all these different projects in different capacities, right? Sometimes you would kind of be the one initiating it. Sometimes you would be part of an acquisition that then turned into something and you would be a shareholder. How do you do you think about prioritizing what you want to do? If you had a, you know, all these different options of what you could build, how do you prioritize your time? Well, for that for the folks who know me really well, they know that I'm just a hot mess and an energy ball and I chase a lot of things and I've got a good nose for what's going to work and what's not going to work. So, I'm probably I joke to everybody, I'm the worst person in the world to ask that question because I'm always co-founding companies or investing in companies.

So, said differently, I just got comfortable with the plurality of all the different things that I'm working on. So, effective today, I'm you know an angel investor in two sustainability plays. one around curved robot curved robotic concrete and looking at geopolymers and chemistry. Um I'm in um a sustainability play where we're taking sorry I should name the company it's curve spun out of the University of Melbourne and then another one which is doing basically we're taking crumb rubber which is recycled tires grigate and a binding agent and putting together porous pavement all the way through to we're launching a company in a couple of weeks called lighten lab which is working on mental and co cognitive load and I decided you know after 42 years I need to start yet another company called impact Yeah, we're going to talk about that. But so the

we'll talk about that we'll talk about that a little bit later. But uh but what I I found that um I I choose and work now in the things that really interest me. It's what I call the portfolio part of the career which becomes very important to say what are the things that interest you um and how can you actually capture and add value. And I learned that me going and working for someone full-time is probably about the craziest thing I could ever do. So now I'm just, you know, an investor, a co-founder, a board member, venture partner, and as I jerk every Friday night, I grab a small bourbon and say, "Yep, got through this week's work every single week."

Andrew, I want to I want to ask maybe a bit about um your work at Confirm and Trulio and about kind of your work on digital personas and an identity and you know in that world that we had before AI the problem or the attack vector was basically like stolen passwords or fish credentials and it was sort of like a bad actor who was who's stealing somebody else's information whereas today now with AI you can generate a true humanlike representation voice visual etc of somebody else and that idea of like a true identity, it's becoming really hard to understand what that what that even means. How do you think about where we're going? Do we need new protocols and a new way of thinking about um what it means to be an identity online um and how we track that in in in today's world?

Well, first of all, I think we've always had the problem. I don't think it's a new problem relative to AI. I think we've always had the problem and and my favorite way of expressing this cuz I did a lot of personalization work was that you know essentially the IP address to the house was the assumption of who was actually at the house. So I'm like, but seven people live there and you've got mom, you've got dad, you've got the kids, you got varying ages, grandma's visiting, and then more importantly now if you just talk to, you know, mom, well, mom also has this job and this other persona is. So we've always had a multiplicity of personas independent of identity.

I think what we're starting to see now is the fact that the that just the the ridiculous sort of context switching and you know the the context relevance now to the persona and the identity is now hitting a stage where it's like okay this is out of control how do I really capture uh and then what is identity and you know now if you if you're using like a one password or you know any one of those password managers if you haven't got 500 to a,000 passwords in there you're probably not playing hard enough and we've got this whole new how do we deal with everything and how do I you know you you know deal with new layers of trust and authentication and I think it's for me I think the first time we we're actually talking about it um around models like MCP and identity around MCP and the AI because it's not just you know password and login anymore or just credentials anymore it's like you know it's literally it's context um and the context in you know I'll use it here we're on a podcast podcast now has a different context and in about you know half an hour's time where I'm driving out to a client and then sitting in meetings all afternoon I'm in a different persona and a different set of execution and using different tools and capability and that's just me independent of all of the other machines and other things are actually working out there.

So I do think we we will have a different control plane and we are going to have to spend a lot more time thinking about this and it absolutely requires standards. I think it was great to see how quickly uh the industry got around MCP standards to say, "Okay, this is APIs on steroids and we better figure this out because it took us forever just to do APIs and docs and documentation over the past 30 years. We better get we better get this

in your in your opinion is the bedrock of digital trust in this world, this new world that we're going to be living in. Do you have any thoughts on that?"

Oh, no. I'm um I I believe it's actually going to evolve because I don't think we've experienced yet the level of trust we're going to have to secure for. And what I mean by that, we are going to have some, you know, big problems, some catastrophic failures. It's going to be a little bit more than just, you know, hacking databases and pulling down credit card numbers. Um, and then we're going to start to think more and more. So, yeah, I'm very excited for where we're going in the future. I think our ability to organize and resolve uh is getting way quicker. So, my view is let the future figure itself out.

Makes sense.

That's a good motto.

The other kind of thing I I'm curious about is you've exited a lot of companies. you were kind of in the sea level of a lot of them. It almost kind of reading your biography feels like, you know, you sort of have a 10 out of 10 um kind of performance in terms of

I'll take I'll take five out of 10, but you're very kind of you.

Um

do you want me to talk about the ones that I've blown up?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that I would love to learn about that. But what did you learn? I mean, I guess you clearly got this down to to a science in some ways, right? Mergers, acquisitions, doing deals, understanding what kinds of companies are needed at the right time. So, I think a big part of what I've learned kind of being an investor is uh it's not just important to be right, but it's important to be right in the in the right time. Maybe the thing you're betting on will be true in 50 years, but if your horizon is 10 years, then you're going to fail. What What are some things I guess that you some some strategies or heristics that you picked up along the way to help you have such a high batting average?

Yeah. So, so first of all, as an entrepreneur, I banish the word from I'm going to build the next billion dollar company or the concept I'm going to build the next billion dollar company on day one. If you're a if you're a student and just study the market, the majority of all companies get sold in trade sales. 80 to 90% of all early stage companies don't make it. Um and then the ones that are very successful actually hit the market at the right time um with the right set of capability and you know to be acquired or or similar. They were just the right place at the right time. There were very very few u you know the big category winners um you know just couple of handfuls. you know, you're not going to be one of those.

So, if you engineer a company to build and scale, uh this is one of the things I do in a lot of the venture investing I do now is on day one, um who are you going to sell the company to? How are you going to IPO? How are you going to do this? It's like who are you? Who are your potential acquirers? Who are your buyers? And I did one in 2000. Actually, 2000 was fun for me. I did a one-1 draw. Um talking failure uh in around the bubble. I started one shot one. Uh we raised 12 million on that puppy. And uh that was a painful shot. uh shut down. At exactly the same time, I was kind of doing another one with a buddy of mine up in Boston where we built a 0 to 70 staff and sold a content management systems integration firm to a Canadian company 9 months later. Now, that one was very and actually that one was deliberate because we said there's a massive shortage of that skill in the market.

Let's just put 60 or 70 people in one place and it'll be attractive and it was and it was acquired. It was it was in many respects that simple. So, versus the oh, I'm going to build a massive huge company. That one didn't make it.

Yeah. And can I just ask um because you're also an LP, right? And you meet GPS all the time that probably tell you, oh, we only invest in the next category winners. Do like how do you think about that when people tell you that?

Uh well, you know, my reaction is, you know, I'm an old, you know, I'm an old wise dude that, you know, everyone's got a thesis, but you know, who who specifically are you betting on and what specifically are you, you know, betting in and around? You know, it's the micro thesis is what's important to me. Uh cuz I still see a lot, you know, is the same as you guys. I probably see five to 10 companies a week, which you know again enforces the fact that I've failed at retirement. But the uh but it's um it's interesting because everyone you got to have sort of a macro thesis which is great but you know I tend to lean into the entrepreneur you know and I am a bet the jockey not the horse sort of a guy. There are people who are bet the horse not the jockey. That's fine. Both will work.

Yeah. But, you know, I what I tend to do is I tend to work with, you know, with the entrepreneur to find the entrepreneur that's literally going to walk through a brick wall and be so passionate about what they want to do and they're going to they got the resilience to figure it all out. They also have to have a good idea and a great market opportunity and, you know, some humility to figure out here's what might work, here's what might not work. And turns out there's dozens and dozens and dozens of those opportunities on a regular basis. So, there are some folks who can pick well and execute well. Turns out if you got a billion dollar fund, it's easy to pick something than if you got a $25 million fund. Go figure. Isn't it amazing how that economics works?

Is it It's interesting because because you mentioned, you know, you don't think about it like was going to be the billion dollar company, but I think in the valley, I think the culture in the valley is that, you know, you kind of go for broke, you go for the billion dollar company or and everyone reinforces that, right? That's that's the culture there. So, I'm actually surprised given the time you spend there that that you have kind of the opposite approach of just like, hey, like we're just we're just going to go hit singles and doubles and that'll be good enough.

No. So, actually, you're raising a really good point. It's like um first of all, I'm a big believer in singles and doubles and it's put nice expensive German cars in my garage. I'm good. You know, I'm okay with that. The more important piece is um look at the context of the market. I'm back in Australia and New Zealand. Now, if I'm in Silicon Valley and I've got Andre and Horowits who can drop $400 million into a category and just create a category out of the ground, that's the unfair advantage of Silicon Valley in the US. There isn't a single company or venture organization in Australia who can drop $400 million into anything to create a category.

you know, this is, you know, I'd love to uh take that same level of execution, but what I have is that same level of understanding and context to say, okay, and I use the example if, you know, A16Z drops 200 million into an area, it's like they're going to go after running after this piece. Well, my immediate brain goes to, huh, that means they're probably going to need this little piece of infrastructure or software in and around that. Let me build one of those and see whether that's interesting to them. So, it's just a different way of thinking about the problem. I I' I'd love to import that big um that big thinking into this market market structure and we're probably going to be there in the next 10 or 20 years as well.

Yeah.

But maybe that's that stage of sort of market development, right?

Yeah. That's probably a good segue to talk about a what prompted your move back to us. Um you're now back in Melbourne and B what are you going to do with your non-retirement here?

Two very good questions. Uh I think it was just uh we I'd sold another company at the back end of 2023 and it was one of those reflection times. Okay, what do we do next? And it was starting to think about do we retire uh in the US or go to Europe um or similar you know my wife and I came to conclusion the the whole family actually said let's go back to Australia. We have family down there. We really enjoyed it. Uh and you know basically it was time. I'd also spent a lot of time at the University of Melbourne. I've been lead mentor on the tram program for seven years and had worked with 35 cohort companies and had really

what's the tram program?

So translating research at Melbourne. So it's research commercialization probably one of the it's sort of the capstone of any researcher who's to spin out and do the commercialization and that was where I worked with curve on the curved robotic concrete and porous lane with the pavement and quite a number of other companies and I really enjoyed that. I I on personal reflection I think I wanted to get back in the giving back phase. I had scholarships at the university and I wanted to see if I can help on the entrepreneurship side because that was one of the areas I felt I had the most to give. I can look having done this and being that having the networks and the connections um if I can give back and just do that. Um and I did that was what I came back to do and I realized that there's as much opportunity now in Australia as there's ever been if not more and got very excited about that.

And then that then said okay let me do a startup to uh we are launching in the next couple of months. It's been pretty stealthy but you know um we've already won a lot of customers already. It's a company called Oustral impact. The Oustral is actually the southern winds that go from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere. So whether we're taking Australian companies to North America or to Asia or wherever it's stroll and the impact of the OS region

to take what we do. Had a bit of fun with the logo as well. when you'll see the logo, it's it's on a 24° tilt or 23 and 1/2 degree tilt, which is the axis of the Earth. And turns out that up and to the right at 23 and 1/2° is a hell of a number of a growth curve for revenues. We tied all that idea together. The idea for Austral impact was we found there was a whole bunch of uh really incredible Australian entrepreneurs who are coming back to Australia that if we could pull together in a team and make available for the local ecosystems and work closely with the universities, the venture capital firms, the private equity firms and the ecosystem in general, we could um infuse that experience to bring that narrative and network back to Australia to then help us elevate and most of the team members who come back.

There was another good friend of mine, Guy Daly, who 28 years, exact 28 years in in the US at the same time and he saw an LinkedIn post and he said, "Are you back?" And I sent back to him say, "Are you back as well?" You know, and guy, I was at Cisco, Riverbed, BMC, and Infoblocks in product and corp dev and just incredible roles. And he's back here in Adelaide. I said, "Well, guy, why don't we put something together?"

And uh we have you know a couple of you know my co-founder Simon Wilkins who's been at the University of Melbourne then branded capital and then ran the mesh generator with 15 plus years of commercialization expertise in deep tech said well why don't we co-ound and put this company together and when we launch we'll have about a dozen folks like that and we're putting them all in one place to be yeah to be well we're trying to create then the concept of a virtual ecosystem that's available for everybody because It's hard enough to find these sort of folks, but you know, we know who we are and we know each other. We already are in each other's networks and we're trying to now leverage that. And as you've seen, I've joined as a venture partner with Black Nova and um Pacific Channel. I'm also on the investment committee at Advanced VC, which is a fund secondary.

So, it was like, okay, let me get more involved and see what we can do. Uh we will actually be um helping incubate and grow companies as well. We will announce our first one in about a month's time. that uh took us less than six months to get out of the ground and get that one built get that one built as well. So, we want to bring a little bit of that energy and experience to the market. Um we're not here to teach anybody whatever. We're just here to be available and to have fun and and frankly we we all don't want you to make all the mistakes that we made. We we made a lot of them.

You you um you mentioned Oustral and and Lighthouse infrastructure and you're doing sounds like more a lot of the more deep tech and hardware stuff now than than before. I mean, is that is part of that because you feel like with generative AI, um, it's much harder to build really generational software companies and it sort of maybe doesn't even make sense to build software companies anymore or how do you think about maybe generative AI and what that means?

Well, so two questions there. Let me look past them a little. I've decided, you know, probably about 10 years or so ago that I wanted to learn more than just the software industry. It's not that I'd mastered it.

I just have an intellectual curiosity and I wanted to go learn about all sorts of other things which is why I've jumped into medtech and bio and sustainability and materials because I just I was like could you apply the same sort of you know entrepreneurial principles it turns out it's a little trickier and longer cycle you know but you can do similar things so it was there you yeah on the AI I'm actually doubling down almost all the other things that I do in and around software around AI actually I've co-ounded a company called chemo kmu where we we saw another one I've called the picks and shovels problems which is around we're building all these models and if you buy the thesis actually one or two elements of a thesis that number one models are going to be revised almost real time and they're going to have to be you know the the data and the execution thereof has got to be redeployed and provisioned and versioned almost real time.

um a lot of this is actually going to get deployed at the edge and we're going to see edge compute because certain things are not going to be deployed and you know roundtpping to the cloud and then it's going to be more you know just a whole lot more pervasive which requires new tooling okay just generating the code and doing the work and I and I've seen you know the majority of the stuff that I've seen so far around LLMs and models and rag is here's all the work and then it gets wrapped in Python um and if you've ever built apps in Python it's really not the best thing to build with right so we looked at it and saying is there a way that we can actually orchestrate uh automate and orchestrate from that point forward and version and yeah that was a piece of technology that we've been building for the past four years and we're probably going to raise money for it this year and scale it but no I'm still thinking about and thinking about those sort of problems but I always want to look at the second and third order problems when we go through these massive technology shifts because I've had the benefit of seeing it over 40 years like okay when this happens that means you're going to have to do this you know it's something as simple as when CRM went through you had a a massive data cleansing problem because no one can ever get the data to be correct.

Um so data cleanse platforms became pretty powerful. Um you know when she started to do data lakes now I needed data observability in you know data genesis um as a tooling set of problems. I'm an investor in a company that's doing that for the past seven years. So I'm tend to sort of look at and invest in the areas that are coming um rather than you know what's here today. Sure, I could build another couple of companies and launch them tomorrow, but I I don't have the energy or patience for it anymore. There are a lot a lot of really smart folks who can do that.

Yeah, that that sounds like one of your key um mental models and it sounds like it's gotten you really far is looking the second and third order consequences of whatever is going on. Are there any others that you see with the AI generative AI that that are really interesting for today's entrepreneurs to think about? Yeah, I think the I think the real opportunity lay in agentic AI and actually pulling together what I would call clusters of agentic AI rather than just tooling for the sake of tooling. I think I'm sort of watching with a little the whole malt book thing this week and you know agents generating the agents and talking to themselves. I'm like I love that sort of stuff. That's a cool experiment.

But I think you know at the end of the day um any at the in order to monetize and create value with any piece of software you have to create value for someone and it turns out companies are still organized into industries and sections and functionality and capabilities. So you need to solve a real problem for a real person today. So focus on the things that you can do for real. So you know people like Heidi here in Australia crushed it just by doing transcription for physicians. Okay, that was a clever use. And is there anything specific that Australian and New Zealand entrepreneurs should focus on? Um, or are these all like global problems now? And it doesn't matter if you're building in Silicon Valley versus here.

So many are global, but I more often than not encourage entrepreneurs to focus on solving something in the Australian market first. Don't necessarily think that the next step is to go to America. There are other markets. There's Asia, which is an enormous market. Europe and the UK is enormous. So think about what you do next, but don't necessarily just come up with an idea and then run for the US. Now the converse of that, I'm like, yeah, if you want to do that, go do it. US is an amazing market. I'm a I'm a dual citizen. You know, I'm very very kind to me. I loved it over there. But it's a commitment. It's not a go over there for 3 to 6 months and give it a shot. It's, you know, it's if you really want to do it, go and do it and go and get immersed, but you know, mentally think about 3 to 5 years

and set up shop there. Don't do it from there.

And yeah. Yeah. And what what impact that is for you personally and your family and everybody else as well. They're very very welcoming. The US is incredibly welcome. Welcoming from entrepreneurs all over the world.

So uh for property room, what was the single strangest, weirdest, most inexplicable item that you guys auctioned off?

Probably the bell the was a bell helicopter that was bought in from the West Nile virus to do the parks and gardens in New York and we sold that to a shack cropper down in Alabama. What was um did you correct Mike Judge and Silicon Valley uh when he was scripting the show and what what did you correct him? How did you correct him?

So, first of all, never corrected Mike. Mike's the boss. Uh the writers on plenty of stuff and the writers would just try and make up names of technology and we're like, "Nope, doesn't exist. We'll get called out on that." But I think that the main one was uh we because they were doing data and data and database driven thing and I was doing foundation DB at the time. were very accurate on large scale distributed databases including

if you were 23 today. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

Go ahead. By the way, yeah, including

If you're 23 today, what would you what would knowing everything you know now, what would you focus on? What would you spend all your time on?

I would run harder and faster and I would do the one thing that I didn't do, which is uh build a team a lot earlier. No matter what it is I'm going after, just put a really great team of people who can then go and do it together because that will get you there even quicker.

Cool. Awesome. Andrew, thank you so much for your time.

Awesome. On the dot. Thanks so much for joining us and we're very excited about Austria Impact and yeah, looking forward to staying in touch with you.

It' be great. Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Hendrickk. Really enjoyed it.

Awesome. Thanks. See you.

Thanks, guys.

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