WEBVTT

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StoryWork is brought to you in partnership with Slingshot.

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Slingshot are Australia's creative media experts

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and having worked successfully with them for years,

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I'm thrilled to have them on board.

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You're listening to a DM podcast.

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If you replaced Disney with Bendigo Bag

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and Pixar with Ferocia,

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that's exactly how up was Crab.

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Things aren't all going great.

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You've got family tragedy.

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You've got all sorts of rocks thrown in your way.

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But through that, you are resilient and you keep moving forward and you keep seeing a future.

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I have a lot of money, but I don't have enough money to change the entire venture startup ecosystem in Australia.

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I was able to bring billions and billions of dollars to the Australian tech ecosystem.

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It's leverage.

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It's amplification.

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It's impact, as you say.

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Did you really think, is this the best place for my skill set?

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Or did you just think this is an exciting thing to do?

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Because it must have been a big band-aid to rip off.

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And so I felt like the biggest impact I could have is to use that capital to help create more Doms.

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As an investor and a mentor and someone who's got the most extraordinary track record,

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what do you look for in great founders and great founding teams?

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Well, hi there.

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I'm Matt Jones and welcome to StoryWork.

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It is fantastic to have you with me and it is difficult to do justice to the achievements of my guest on the podcast today.

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Dom Pym, a fintech founder, an angel investor, and just a fascinating human being, had the most extraordinary conversation with me.

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I couldn't cover everything he's done from founding UpBank to building a record label to his efforts in philanthropy.

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But everything that made it into the podcast, you need to listen to.

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Because I caught Dom when he was reflecting on his life after a period of illness that stopped him very temporarily in his very fast tracks.

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And when you listen to Dom, you're getting this view into the matrix that is his mind.

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It's extraordinary the way he thinks.

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It's extraordinary the passion and the genius he has for entrepreneurship, for innovation,

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for technology, for finance.

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But it's also extraordinary how he combines these beliefs with a passion for design and

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storytelling and creativity and trusting brilliant, often maverick people to do amazing things

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in really divergent industries.

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and he's done all this after a childhood that was full of setbacks and challenges.

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People who

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endured an early life like Dom's are not normally the kind of people we see using a hundred million

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dollars of their own money to back entrepreneurship and yet here he is today, one of the people doing

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more than anyone to build the next Australian dream and make our country a world leader in

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innovation and possibility.

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I think this is a really special conversation.

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Listen in.

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Don Pym, welcome to StoryWorks.

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Thanks for joining me.

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Thank you for having me.

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Mate, I know you've not been super well for a little while.

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And how are you feeling?

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And did you manage to at some stage come out of the worst of being ill

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and actually sort of enjoy that period of maybe being forced to slow down for a bit?

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That's a good question because a lot of the time you're going 100 miles an hour

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and you forget to slow down.

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So I had bacterial pneumonia and I was in bed for about 10 weeks.

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You're fine, you just can't breathe.

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And if you don't get oxygen to your brain, it's hard to think.

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So you sort of just lay there like a bit of a zombie.

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And that's the first big insight on this podcast,

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the importance of oxygen, that will be the title.

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Very important.

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You pretty much just laze about the place.

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So I watched a bit of Netflix.

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But while I was in bed, I started writing a book.

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And I found all my old hard disks.

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And I've got this old RAID array.

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And it actually worked.

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I booted it up.

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It was 33 years worth of data.

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Every year it's sorted in little folders.

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I was very fastidious back then.

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I'm fascinated by the process of writing a book.

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I wrote a book called Lessons from Gene about my sort of gene journey.

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And I sort of reflected a bit on my upbringing.

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and it really, it turned out that it only started getting relevant

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when I went into the world of work.

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And my first job was in military intelligence

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and luckily nothing bad was happening in the world at the time

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because I wasn't very good at it,

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but I learned how good I was with words and language and storytelling.

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So I pretty quickly got out of the intelligence bit

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and just into the communications bit.

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What do you think your childhood gave you?

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How did it shape you in ways that were then relevant?

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Absolutely formative.

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My 13th year was extraordinary.

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so many ridiculously amazing but also destructive and crazy things happened when I was 13.

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I'm in the process of writing it all down, but like death and destruction and police and

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sickness and like just all sorts of horrible things were going on in my life.

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At the same time,

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it was so formative.

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And a lot of the storytelling for me comes from my grandparents.

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And one of my

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grandparents would drop into their house every day on the way home from school and do woodwork

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and he'd tell us stories of the good old days.

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And he used to be a policeman, so he had plenty

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of stories.

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And then our other grandpa, we used to ride our bikes all the way over town.

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He was

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across the other side of Melbourne.

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And we'd stay over there and he'd teach us to play cards.

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And

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he was a great storyteller.

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So he always had a yarn and he was sort of Irish background and sort

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of had lots of sayings and sort of Cockney English and all this sort of stuff.

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And he was just a

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real character.

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And so I think between the two grandpas particularly, and then I had two favorite

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uncles, one on my mum's side and one on my dad's side.

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And when I reflect back and think about my

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childhood, those two uncles were very formative.

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One of them was a mechanic, the other one was an

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Olympian and a bricklayer.

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Where did your appetite for risk come from?

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I think the AFR once referred

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to you as crazy.

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Where did that risk appetite come from?

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Yeah.

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I think that those formative

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years 13 14 like i was um working in a printing factory in a book binding factory underage i

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didn't know it at the time um and disaster struck um you know i was uh using a um i think it's a

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two ton or a four ton um uh book press that gave me an appreciation of excellence and design and

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things like this but what it does is it crushes the binding of the book to give it the curve that

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you see on those old legal books and things like that and of course i stuck my hands in it and it

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crush my fingers and it was pretty devastating end up at the hospital and all this stuff you

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can sort of see i've got like crazy fingers like this one's crazy but this one actually i've had

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surgeries being rebuilt but you know but these these experiences they sort of they shape you

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and playing football was another one like we i was in a team where i won best and fairest three

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years in a row but we never won a game and so when you're losing all the time you're striving to win

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you're very competitive uh it's about leadership and camaraderie and culture and so i think some

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of those experience that happened around 13 14 15 they totally gave me an appreciation for how

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hard life is um and how hard you got to fight to win um i think that that that helped form this

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idea of risk but a lot of other crazy things happen like um i had a pet duck um and he died

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i had to bring him back to life mouth to beak resuscitation um you know my mum died like she

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had an allergic reaction to medications and penicillin and my brother and I had to do CPR

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and bring her back to life those sort of things change you I mean you know we sort of at one point

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we lost everything lost the house lost the car we sort of lost everything there's a great photo

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that I have of my dad riding my BMX and when I think about that photo I just he was out looking

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for a job or doing the shopping or whatever and you know we didn't have the car and I think about

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that um and you know i was i was a bit of a um a strange sort of eccentric unit because i was ducks

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of the year level uh you know i win the maths and spelling competition and all that sort of stuff

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but i was also captain of the footy team and i'd win the cross country and the little athletics

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and all that sort of stuff so very overachieving in academia in computers and technology as well

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as in just general um curiosity uh but at the same time very sporty and and very fit and healthy and

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And so I had like everything in life going for me,

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but everything was going wrong.

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So I think that teaches you resilience.

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And I often say that you need curiosity and confidence.

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And I had those two things in spades.

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But I think the thing that I learned was resilience,

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this sort of ability to push through and be positive.

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Like I'm a very positive person.

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Like I surround myself with positive people.

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And I think the ability to see something in the future,

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30,000 foot and dream about what could be better and then actually just go and build it like that's

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that's something that it's almost innate it's hard to learn that there's such a balance though

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isn't it because one of the things that that i find sometimes exhausting about this modern world

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we're in and i think a lot about linkedin as i say this there is almost this cult of toxic

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positivity and i think there's an art to being incredibly positive and incredibly optimistic

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and be able to dream the future, but also recognize that not everything goes right.

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And so sometimes when you see people who are down, not just to assume that they weren't

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positive enough, but to recognize as happened to you at different stages, that sometimes

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life's just got a different plan for you.

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We had a crazy, crazy time.

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And people see something like Up and they think, oh my God, privilege, amazing.

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Look at this hard working, it's so cool.

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and actually fighting from nothing to create something of value.

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It's partly why I spend a lot of my time now helping others

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and giving back and trying to elevate the Australian ecosystem

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because I just want others to have the same opportunities

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and sort of chance to be successful that I managed to create really for myself.

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I didn't have others around me making it happen.

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It wasn't given to me.

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It was something I had to work extremely hard for.

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Well, let's rip into that.

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So obviously I was incredibly thrilled that you were able to come on because Up, I think, is one of the most extraordinary brands built in Australia in the last 10, 20 years.

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But your story is so much more than Up.

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So let's start there.

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I've read you talk about yourself as a 30-year overnight success story.

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What do people like me miss when we just look at Up and we go, oh, my God, out of nowhere, suddenly this extraordinary brand and extraordinary business emerged?

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What backstory do we miss?

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Yeah, well, my first like serious company, like Splat Printing and Computing was, you know, it was a real company, but a bit of a hobby.

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And it was sort of the beginning.

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But there was a company called Zudio.

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So when I was 19, I got a job with SAP, which was the second largest software company in the world.

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And I worked there for about seven years-ish all over the world with Fortune 500s.

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I call it the baptism of fire.

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I mean, there'll be a chapter of that in the book.

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It's outrageous.

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and that experience working with all these big enterprises,

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big brands that you know all over the world,

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big governments, military, all sorts of aerospace

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and automotive, all sorts of crazy things,

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it gave me this unrealistic expectation

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of what the world is about.

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Living in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom

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and then the dot-com bust,

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you can't write it.

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You can't imagine.

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I was in a plane crash,

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the first Qantas plane crash in Bangkok in 99.

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all these crazy things were happening in my life and I just wanted to come back home to Australia

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and I did I came back and I bumped into there was a fellow that I met in the elevator on my first

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day at SAP and I'm an undergraduate they're never employed an undergraduate before so there was no

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undergraduate program I'm the first one in the world and the youngest employee ever so and I you

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know I applied to all the big tech companies you know your IBM's your Microsoft's your Oracle's

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your SAP's everybody and I sort of played them off against each other took the job at SAP because I

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thought, you know, they power all the brands that I love.

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So imagine if I worked with them,

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I'd get a chance to work with all these other brands.

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Anyway, the guy that was in the elevator

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on the very first day that I worked at SAP, when I'd moved back seven years later, after living in

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Singapore and South Korea and Silicon Valley and the UK and all this other stuff, he said to me,

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oh, you know, I've got a band, you know, and I want to quit SAP and start a record label.

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so i would say that that record label was foundational to everything we've done it up

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like two of the people that i recruited at that record label that we recruited out of university

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worked it up they followed me through five or six different companies you know they both still work

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in dom sort of enterprise you know euphemia funded companies now um and a lot of the um i would call

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them ferocious alumni that ferocious the company the software company that built up so we call it

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ferocious uh the ferocious alumni or the ferocious mafia you know and we that's what sort of everyone

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knows ferocious and up but actually it started at zudio you know like these two people for example

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that worked with me for 22 years across that whole journey um and they sort of um became

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foundational to the culture so when i look back i've been trying to lately map who's who in the

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zoo who are all these people that worked at pin payments or worked at zudio or worked at saratoga

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or worked at Clear Grain Exchange and all these sort of –

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the journey before we got to Up.

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So, for example, we built the largest independent record label

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in Australia.

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Then we built the largest music school in Australia.

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Then we built the world's first grain exchange.

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I just want to briefly go back to your mate at SAP.

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He's in a band and he says to you, hey, Dom, I know you're, you know,

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this incredibly successful young graduate who showed up at SAP

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and you're working at the heart of the technology and the software

235
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that's powering the planet, come and start a record label with me.

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That feels like a real signed deals moment.

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And I'm interested because I hope a lot of people listening

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to this podcast are reflecting on something that I think is going

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to be really important for all of us, which is what's the story

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of our career and our skill set?

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Because the world's going to get very odd in the next few years.

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And I'm interested, in that moment, did you look and go,

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is there an entrepreneurial role for me to play, me, Dom,

244
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in this tech company, or is there a tech role for me to play?

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Like, did you really think, is this the best place for my skill set?

246
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Or did you just think this is an exciting thing to do?

247
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Because it must have been a big band-aid to rip off to leave SAP and that global exposure and go into the record industry.

248
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Yeah, it also made me broke.

249
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You know, like it's a massive leap of faith.

250
00:14:22.300 --> 00:14:25.637
And you know what was happening at that time in the early 2000s?

251
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So I was living in Singapore at the time when they first suggested this idea.

252
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I decided to relocate back to Australia so I could start the record label.

253
00:14:33.700 --> 00:14:38.180
but I spent six months doing SAP and building the software engineering team in Australia.

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They'd only had software engineering teams in Germany, the US, and then Japan.

255
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So it was a

256
00:14:43.081 --> 00:14:45.129
brand new thing to build that in Australia.

257
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So I did that for a while.

258
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And then actually,

259
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he was in a band and he was a songwriter.

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And so he was traveling around Australia,

261
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playing gigs and recording albums and things like this.

262
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And so really what they needed was a manager.

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But while I was in Singapore, I couldn't manage them because I was in Singapore,

264
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they were in Australia.

265
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And so we hired a manager.

266
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He was from Microsoft.

267
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And he was like the national

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sales manager from Microsoft.

269
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And take someone out of the software industry and get them to manage a

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band.

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It was outrageous.

272
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We become that band called Gus and Frank.

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It became the largest

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independent Australian rock band at the time.

275
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You know, had number one hits and all sorts of,

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you know, high rotation on radio and on TV and video hits and all that.

277
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And I was in Singapore

278
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building the website because that was something I could do from Singapore.

279
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And I hurt my back.

280
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I can't remember how.

281
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And I remember lying on the floor with my laptop building this website,

282
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and it was outrageous.

283
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We're talking maybe 2002, 2003,

284
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and I'm building a website where you could sign up to the website.

285
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We were building a fan base.

286
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You could order merch.

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You could cruise the gallery of all their gigs and all their photos.

288
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You could get access to their music.

289
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So at this time, Apple would just release this thing.

290
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You might have heard of it called iTunes,

291
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and it disrupted the entire music industry.

292
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And so at this moment when he said,

293
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do you want to start a record label,

294
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everything was moving from CDs and cassettes and LPs to digital

295
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and it was completely disrupted.

296
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So what we did is we went out on a limb when I moved back to Australia

297
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and became the second iTunes content aggregator in the world.

298
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So the first one was Amped, the Orchard Group in New York,

299
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and then we became the first in Australia,

300
00:16:20.180 --> 00:16:21.040
obviously second in the world.

301
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And we started helping build an ecosystem in Australia

302
00:16:24.421 --> 00:16:28.700
where we'd get young people from, you know, primary school, high school,

303
00:16:29.140 --> 00:16:33.120
teach them how to sing, play drums, guitar, and we had bought a warehouse.

304
00:16:33.660 --> 00:16:35.439
And we'd go play in the warehouse and we'd record them

305
00:16:35.902 --> 00:16:39.400
and then they'd do a Christmas sort of concert for their parents or whatever.

306
00:16:39.740 --> 00:16:43.040
And then the good ones, we would record and release and publish their music

307
00:16:43.465 --> 00:16:44.759
and then we'd take them on tour with us.

308
00:16:45.240 --> 00:16:48.640
And we toured with Jimmy Barnes and John Farnham and Delta Goodrum

309
00:16:48.761 --> 00:16:51.180
and I don't know, whoever, the Whitlams, Missy Higgins,

310
00:16:51.280 --> 00:16:52.980
all these different artists at the time.

311
00:16:53.560 --> 00:16:56.160
And so we were touring around Australia taking these young artists

312
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and we ended up creating an entire ecosystem.

313
00:16:58.260 --> 00:17:02.660
What I think I hear you saying there, and in some modest way I felt

314
00:17:03.203 --> 00:17:06.840
I saw this with Four Pillars, was this opportunity of digital

315
00:17:06.981 --> 00:17:10.960
and then social technology to close the gap between people

316
00:17:11.403 --> 00:17:13.860
and the brands and the bands they loved and to create this sense

317
00:17:13.920 --> 00:17:17.339
of intimacy and relationship, sometimes offline, sometimes online.

318
00:17:18.024 --> 00:17:20.080
And it was an extraordinary opportunity, wasn't it,

319
00:17:20.100 --> 00:17:21.020
from sort of the early 2000s.

320
00:17:21.164 --> 00:17:21.659
It's outrageous.

321
00:17:21.861 --> 00:17:25.939
then into the rise of social media, which hopefully is a good pivot into Up.

322
00:17:26.360 --> 00:17:29.160
So what did you think you were building at the beginning?

323
00:17:29.280 --> 00:17:34.420
Were you trying to build a bank or were you trying to create something that changed people's

324
00:17:34.460 --> 00:17:35.380
relationship with money?

325
00:17:36.563 --> 00:17:38.300
Up was never trying to be a bank.

326
00:17:38.420 --> 00:17:41.900
It was always trying to help the next generation of Australians with financial literacy.

327
00:17:42.402 --> 00:17:44.540
That's what we wrote on the whiteboard and that's what we did.

328
00:17:44.641 --> 00:17:47.940
We wanted to have great people in a great environment, building great things.

329
00:17:48.787 --> 00:17:49.515
That was our mission.

330
00:17:50.100 --> 00:17:50.700
It was our goal.

331
00:17:51.161 --> 00:17:57.800
My very first commercial software that I built, I was about 16, 17, and it was a live data feed to the Australian Stock Exchange.

332
00:17:58.300 --> 00:18:04.377
And then I built a share market simulation program when Windows had come out, Windows 95.

333
00:18:06.000 --> 00:18:11.239
And then just after that, I think the first version was with Windows 3.1, and then we moved to Windows 95.

334
00:18:12.000 --> 00:18:18.680
And it was software that came in a box on a CD, originally on disk, and then on a CD, and it was available for you to buy in the shop.

335
00:18:18.780 --> 00:18:25.180
So my first fintech was actually built when I was 16, and it was a commercial software package.

336
00:18:25.280 --> 00:18:29.880
I then built a game, and it was a game for kids so that they could trade pork bellies.

337
00:18:30.200 --> 00:18:34.140
And what they didn't realize is it was using that live data feed, this time to the US market.

338
00:18:34.740 --> 00:18:44.220
And people who clocked the game, like one of my mates from kindergarten, the one who had the dad at the CSIRO, he clocked my game, and it was called the money machine.

339
00:18:44.781 --> 00:18:47.200
And what he didn't realize was he was trading with real data.

340
00:18:47.444 --> 00:18:48.379
He actually made a million bucks.

341
00:18:48.700 --> 00:18:50.200
But, you know, we never executed the trades.

342
00:18:50.580 --> 00:18:51.200
The theoretical million.

343
00:18:51.260 --> 00:18:53.280
The theoretical million bucks because it was simulation, right?

344
00:18:53.684 --> 00:18:55.240
And so I did that in my teens.

345
00:18:55.460 --> 00:18:56.415
Then I went and did all the SAP stuff.

346
00:18:56.840 --> 00:18:59.740
Then we had the record label and then moving into the grand exchange

347
00:18:59.963 --> 00:19:01.260
and other things that we did along the way.

348
00:19:02.241 --> 00:19:06.540
One thing that we did just before Up, we built some of the world's first apps.

349
00:19:07.081 --> 00:19:08.760
Okay, I'm just going to jump in here really fast,

350
00:19:08.981 --> 00:19:12.300
as I will do from time to time throughout the StoryWorks series.

351
00:19:12.901 --> 00:19:16.040
You get this sense here of someone who didn't just have an extraordinary

352
00:19:16.261 --> 00:19:21.400
early family life, but a really extraordinary early founder journey from the music business

353
00:19:21.581 --> 00:19:22.626
into the payment space.

354
00:19:23.008 --> 00:19:25.640
Don was responsible for more than half a dozen different businesses.

355
00:19:26.421 --> 00:19:30.735
We could not keep every story, every business in the edit.

356
00:19:31.036 --> 00:19:32.280
That's going to be on the sub stack.

357
00:19:32.580 --> 00:19:35.980
But for now, I really wanted to drill down into the foundation of Up.

358
00:19:37.481 --> 00:19:41.176
I've been doing fintech since before it was called fintech.

359
00:19:41.196 --> 00:19:42.220
When I was building that live

360
00:19:42.280 --> 00:19:44.994
data exchange, that live data feed to the Australian Stock Exchange.

361
00:19:45.436 --> 00:19:46.140
No one was doing that.

362
00:19:46.200 --> 00:19:48.572
There's a company that came out of that now, a few companies.

363
00:19:49.035 --> 00:19:50.000
One of them is called Norgate,

364
00:19:50.160 --> 00:19:51.867
another one's called Paratech.

365
00:19:51.927 --> 00:19:55.280
These guys were early pioneers and I was working with them at

366
00:19:55.320 --> 00:19:55.682
the time.

367
00:19:55.722 --> 00:19:57.489
They went on to create great data companies.

368
00:19:58.212 --> 00:19:59.980
So I feel like in answer to your

369
00:20:00.060 --> 00:20:03.860
question, it's all of those great people that I surrounded myself with from multimedia,

370
00:20:04.120 --> 00:20:09.560
graphic designers, product people, engineers, user experience designers, video production,

371
00:20:09.721 --> 00:20:13.997
special effects, engineers writing software, like all these incredible people.

372
00:20:14.279 --> 00:20:14.600
And we all

373
00:20:14.700 --> 00:20:16.246
coalesced at Ferocia.

374
00:20:16.627 --> 00:20:20.280
And it was the bringing together of that greatness that made Up so

375
00:20:20.360 --> 00:20:22.891
extraordinary, because we'd worked together for so long.

376
00:20:23.313 --> 00:20:24.217
We all had a dream.

377
00:20:24.298 --> 00:20:24.780
The dream was,

378
00:20:25.000 --> 00:20:30.940
how do you, being frustrated with banking, how do you take a leaf from other amazing Australians?

379
00:20:31.020 --> 00:20:31.604
I've got to tell you this.

380
00:20:31.684 --> 00:20:33.113
I know I'm rambling a bit, but I've got to say this.

381
00:20:33.777 --> 00:20:34.340
We traveled around

382
00:20:34.380 --> 00:20:36.108
the world looking at all the digital banks.

383
00:20:36.770 --> 00:20:39.040
And three of the very first, very early digital banks

384
00:20:39.121 --> 00:20:41.100
in the world and one of them is still around today.

385
00:20:42.121 --> 00:20:43.834
There was Moven by Brett King.

386
00:20:45.081 --> 00:20:47.300
There was Simple by Josh Reich.

387
00:20:47.880 --> 00:20:51.660
And then there was Monzo and Simon was one of the co-founders.

388
00:20:52.021 --> 00:20:53.020
All three of them are Australian.

389
00:20:53.420 --> 00:20:55.980
They were the three first and greatest.

390
00:20:56.141 --> 00:20:56.879
So Simple was the first.

391
00:20:57.340 --> 00:20:58.839
Moven was one of the most well-known.

392
00:20:59.140 --> 00:21:01.060
And then obviously Monzo is still going today.

393
00:21:01.221 --> 00:21:01.898
Back then it was Mondo.

394
00:21:02.901 --> 00:21:07.720
Those three Aussies were founders, co-founders in those three amazing digital banks.

395
00:21:08.021 --> 00:21:17.000
And I'm back here in Australia with all my 20, 30 years of experience saying, how can Australians be disrupting the world, but there's no disruption happening at home?

396
00:21:17.505 --> 00:21:18.300
So we had an impetus.

397
00:21:18.500 --> 00:21:20.100
We had a reason to do it.

398
00:21:20.462 --> 00:21:22.600
And we were just surrounded by these incredible people.

399
00:21:22.860 --> 00:21:40.240
The brand is so amazing because the storytelling, the engineering effort that went into it, the illustration, the animation, the colors, the design, the feel, thinking about what you wanted to convey, the emotion, all of that stuff was the people.

400
00:21:40.660 --> 00:21:50.800
Fundamentally, you're in this category where people could be very excited by a brand and very engaged by a brand, but then they'd go, do I trust you with my money, with my loan, with my livelihood?

401
00:21:51.263 --> 00:21:54.020
how much did you have to be conscious of that balancing act?

402
00:21:55.750 --> 00:21:56.420
I remember the day.

403
00:21:56.660 --> 00:21:59.060
I remember the moment, the minute that that sunk in.

404
00:21:59.980 --> 00:22:02.700
So there were a bunch of incredible people.

405
00:22:02.840 --> 00:22:04.960
One was the head of design, Werner,

406
00:22:05.643 --> 00:22:07.300
and another was what I called our chief imaginer,

407
00:22:07.440 --> 00:22:09.260
who was our head of product, which is Anson.

408
00:22:10.301 --> 00:22:12.560
Anson and Werner were working hard.

409
00:22:12.760 --> 00:22:15.140
The first version of Up, so a couple of things.

410
00:22:15.641 --> 00:22:17.119
Anson, we weren't called Up.

411
00:22:17.260 --> 00:22:20.220
We were called Alt originally, and we couldn't use that.

412
00:22:20.320 --> 00:22:24.600
You know, alt.com was a BDSM website, and, you know, the bank and the regulators probably didn't think that was very cool.

413
00:22:24.701 --> 00:22:25.279
We thought it was cool.

414
00:22:25.420 --> 00:22:26.260
Our customers thought it was cool.

415
00:22:26.840 --> 00:22:33.980
But, you know, we were making T-shirts and hats, and, you know, we needed to think about the brand.

416
00:22:34.060 --> 00:22:37.600
So we did a branding exercise, and we were trying to come up with a name.

417
00:22:37.660 --> 00:22:42.800
And the hilarious thing is a lot of other digital banks that came along later used some of those names that we, you know, that we came up with.

418
00:22:43.181 --> 00:22:45.540
But the one that stuck was Up.

419
00:22:46.041 --> 00:22:48.580
And Anson came back from one weekend of thinking.

420
00:22:48.580 --> 00:22:49.700
Remember, he's our chief imaginer.

421
00:22:49.842 --> 00:22:50.740
We pay him to think.

422
00:22:51.400 --> 00:22:53.760
And he goes away for the weekend, has a glass of wine,

423
00:22:54.181 --> 00:22:57.720
goes for a swim or whatever, and has this epiphany.

424
00:22:58.381 --> 00:23:01.000
He comes back and he goes, oh, you know, the domain name's available.

425
00:23:01.740 --> 00:23:02.379
Well, it's for sale.

426
00:23:02.983 --> 00:23:05.620
We hadn't secured it yet, but like to get a two-letter domain name.

427
00:23:06.081 --> 00:23:08.540
You can't protect the name up like the two letters.

428
00:23:08.760 --> 00:23:11.860
It's a common word and it's actually the example that's used up,

429
00:23:12.000 --> 00:23:15.200
yes and no, are the three words they use in the IP Act

430
00:23:15.703 --> 00:23:17.880
to say the words you can't protect.

431
00:23:18.480 --> 00:23:21.180
I think yes might have been yes, no, and up.

432
00:23:21.581 --> 00:23:23.560
And then we thought Optus did a really good job with yes.

433
00:23:24.000 --> 00:23:26.600
Maybe you don't have to protect it, but we could do a really good job with up.

434
00:23:26.681 --> 00:23:28.120
Anyway, we ended up buying the domain name.

435
00:23:28.160 --> 00:23:28.637
It was very expensive.

436
00:23:29.520 --> 00:23:32.380
And he came with this little paper, and he said, you know, I've got this thing.

437
00:23:32.720 --> 00:23:36.980
So the first version, the first logo was me and Anson just hacking around, you know,

438
00:23:37.161 --> 00:23:38.880
and I've still got the original files.

439
00:23:39.000 --> 00:23:40.580
It's amazing to look at all the different things we tried.

440
00:23:40.923 --> 00:23:42.900
And we had a designer, Hannah, who was helping us.

441
00:23:42.940 --> 00:23:43.740
She was our first designer.

442
00:23:44.320 --> 00:23:46.420
And then Werner came along, and I remember that moment.

443
00:23:46.540 --> 00:23:47.060
I'll put you a question.

444
00:23:47.120 --> 00:23:55.420
I remember the moment I'm standing at the whiteboard and Werner said to me, if we're going to build trust, we need to be thinking differently.

445
00:23:56.662 --> 00:23:59.600
We've done a partnership with Bendigo and people trust Bendigo.

446
00:23:59.720 --> 00:24:03.660
They've won for many, many years, maybe 10 years in a row, Australia's most trusted bank.

447
00:24:04.020 --> 00:24:06.060
So we think, well, people will trust us by osmosis.

448
00:24:07.182 --> 00:24:08.479
There's a baked in this through that partnership.

449
00:24:08.520 --> 00:24:09.440
Yeah, because we have this partnership.

450
00:24:09.821 --> 00:24:12.320
But how do you gain trust for a new brand like Up?

451
00:24:12.962 --> 00:24:16.400
And I just want to jump ahead and I'll come back to answer the question.

452
00:24:16.923 --> 00:24:19.700
is I met, I think, the head of strategy

453
00:24:20.568 --> 00:24:21.780
or something like head of innovation

454
00:24:21.901 --> 00:24:23.379
or something like that at Qantas one day.

455
00:24:24.243 --> 00:24:25.480
And this is 10 years later.

456
00:24:25.963 --> 00:24:26.678
And he said to me,

457
00:24:27.826 --> 00:24:29.080
I love what you guys have done with Up.

458
00:24:29.721 --> 00:24:32.880
To me, it's on par with Qantas

459
00:24:34.146 --> 00:24:37.320
in the Australian sort of zeitgeist

460
00:24:37.723 --> 00:24:39.660
as one of the great brands to come out of this country.

461
00:24:39.941 --> 00:24:41.780
I'm paraphrasing, but essentially those words.

462
00:24:42.206 --> 00:24:43.079
I was nearly in tears

463
00:24:43.643 --> 00:24:47.200
because Qantas is the spirit of Australia.

464
00:24:47.942 --> 00:24:50.840
How could up a brand that we'd only created 10 years earlier

465
00:24:51.726 --> 00:24:53.840
be so well-loved and so well-recognized?

466
00:24:53.900 --> 00:24:56.880
Anyway, so I'm at the whiteboard and building up to that moment

467
00:24:56.962 --> 00:24:57.679
and no one knew up.

468
00:24:58.140 --> 00:24:59.140
We hadn't launched the app.

469
00:24:59.521 --> 00:25:00.659
No one cared about it.

470
00:25:01.482 --> 00:25:04.480
And he wrote on the board, people love their apps.

471
00:25:05.501 --> 00:25:10.880
People love Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, Google, Facebook.

472
00:25:11.282 --> 00:25:12.120
People love those apps.

473
00:25:12.181 --> 00:25:13.820
They put them on the homepage of their phone.

474
00:25:14.282 --> 00:25:15.280
He was our head of design.

475
00:25:15.700 --> 00:25:16.980
They put them on the homepage of their phone,

476
00:25:17.342 --> 00:25:19.700
and those apps have something special,

477
00:25:20.300 --> 00:25:22.820
which is a user experience that's second to none.

478
00:25:22.940 --> 00:25:26.320
They put all their energy and effort into building these extraordinary user experiences

479
00:25:26.461 --> 00:25:29.340
that are addictive and that people really, really love.

480
00:25:29.661 --> 00:25:31.860
Once you start getting involved with an app like that,

481
00:25:31.920 --> 00:25:34.200
whatever the app is that you put on your homepage back in these days,

482
00:25:34.260 --> 00:25:36.529
in 2017, 2018, once you put an app on your homepage,

483
00:25:39.841 --> 00:25:45.140
that's the app that you click on 20 30 50 times a day and so he the insight was he said to me

484
00:25:45.381 --> 00:25:50.060
if you want people to trust us they don't need to trust us as a bank they need to trust us as a

485
00:25:50.140 --> 00:25:57.460
brand and we're not benchmarking ourselves against ComBank, ANZ, Westpac, NAB, ING, Macquarie we're

486
00:25:57.480 --> 00:26:05.160
benchmarking ourselves against Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok suddenly the brand up came alive and it

487
00:26:05.180 --> 00:26:08.435
came alive because we were no longer thinking that it would be a bank.

488
00:26:08.897 --> 00:26:09.480
We were thinking that

489
00:26:09.480 --> 00:26:12.250
it would be a brand and it would be a brand that people would love.

490
00:26:13.776 --> 00:26:15.000
This is in a way the whole

491
00:26:15.100 --> 00:26:15.603
podcast.

492
00:26:15.623 --> 00:26:19.360
This was such an exciting moment when you want a guest to say something and then they

493
00:26:19.561 --> 00:26:20.344
actually say it.

494
00:26:20.404 --> 00:26:24.440
Here was a guy trying to build a bank brand that wasn't just anchored in trust

495
00:26:24.701 --> 00:26:29.700
and in respect, but aiming for something higher that frankly for most people would be completely

496
00:26:29.861 --> 00:26:31.728
unrealistic to get people to love their bank.

497
00:26:31.748 --> 00:26:33.715
And yet that's exactly what Up did.

498
00:26:34.378 --> 00:26:35.040
What I then found

499
00:26:35.080 --> 00:26:37.512
really fascinating was what does it take to do that?

500
00:26:37.532 --> 00:26:39.040
What kind of culture do you need to build?

501
00:26:39.140 --> 00:26:40.989
What kind of people do you need to attract?

502
00:26:41.009 --> 00:26:43.320
You think about banking as a career, it attracts

503
00:26:43.420 --> 00:26:46.051
people who want to manage money and manage risk.

504
00:26:46.091 --> 00:26:48.220
And now we need to attract people who want to

505
00:26:48.300 --> 00:26:50.508
tell stories and who want to take risks.

506
00:26:51.772 --> 00:26:53.558
I mean, this is so exciting.

507
00:26:53.719 --> 00:26:54.020
Like, you know,

508
00:26:54.060 --> 00:26:56.368
we have a full-time illustrator on team.

509
00:26:57.031 --> 00:26:59.700
You know, we have a full team that are just doing design.

510
00:27:00.483 --> 00:27:05.800
we have a team that just do merch as the team grew it's so exciting and and and i would say

511
00:27:05.860 --> 00:27:10.720
there's a bunch of elements my business partner and i were very different and i'm like the

512
00:27:10.740 --> 00:27:16.220
infectious enthusiasm sort of the entrepreneur crazy eccentric you know creative and and he was

513
00:27:16.461 --> 00:27:21.400
very focused on culture and strategy and you know i i love tomo and there's so much about our

514
00:27:21.440 --> 00:27:26.340
relationship over those 15 years that we were i would say we were the yin and the yang and and so

515
00:27:26.420 --> 00:27:35.540
So Tomo and I were so welcoming and creating such an extraordinary team and extraordinary culture that it was infectious and it dragged people in the slipstream.

516
00:27:35.900 --> 00:27:36.779
And nobody wanted to leave.

517
00:27:36.940 --> 00:27:37.820
Everyone wanted to work there.

518
00:27:37.900 --> 00:27:40.080
People would say it was like Google in South Melbourne.

519
00:27:40.904 --> 00:27:42.120
We had a fantastic office.

520
00:27:42.600 --> 00:27:46.020
Tomo would take us down to his farm on the Great Ocean Road and put on a spit roast.

521
00:27:46.761 --> 00:27:48.760
It was just the culture was the main thing.

522
00:27:48.981 --> 00:27:52.920
And that culture, that love, that passion manifested in the product and the brand.

523
00:27:53.321 --> 00:28:00.120
And so if I take, for example, Pete, Pete Johnson, the brand father, you know, he is an extraordinary human being.

524
00:28:00.561 --> 00:28:07.820
But you look at the influences of the up brand and it's surfing and skateboarding and music and anti-culture.

525
00:28:08.702 --> 00:28:12.080
And I remember the first presentation he did, there was him and another guy called Josh.

526
00:28:12.140 --> 00:28:15.240
And Josh had come from Quicksilver and those two guys pitched us.

527
00:28:15.560 --> 00:28:17.180
And Tomo had found them through one of his mates.

528
00:28:18.100 --> 00:28:19.240
Tomo is extremely well connected.

529
00:28:20.123 --> 00:28:25.740
and they got up and they put this slide up on the screen and it didn't talk about banking it didn't

530
00:28:25.780 --> 00:28:30.900
talk about competitors it didn't talk about the color blue or the color black it talked about

531
00:28:31.140 --> 00:28:39.940
heart and soul they said the culture here the people the team this is what creates a brand

532
00:28:41.063 --> 00:28:46.900
and when they put that up on the screen they had some thoughts and ideas they said dom you know

533
00:28:46.900 --> 00:28:51.500
you're a creative, you're a founder, you're a technologist, you're a designer.

534
00:28:53.362 --> 00:28:54.548
What do you call someone like that?

535
00:28:55.191 --> 00:28:57.060
And he said, this is not for external facing,

536
00:28:57.641 --> 00:29:01.872
but internally, you're like the God founder.

537
00:29:02.634 --> 00:29:05.140
You're like a founder that people look up to.

538
00:29:05.701 --> 00:29:07.730
People are inspired by, people will follow you.

539
00:29:07.750 --> 00:29:08.675
You've got disciples.

540
00:29:08.956 --> 00:29:09.820
You've got this incredible

541
00:29:10.322 --> 00:29:12.390
team of people that want to create.

542
00:29:13.213 --> 00:29:14.960
And when he positioned it like that, and he started talking

543
00:29:15.000 --> 00:29:17.489
about what is the heart of this brand?

544
00:29:17.910 --> 00:29:20.520
What are we trying to achieve and what does it mean for us

545
00:29:21.142 --> 00:29:25.280
to reciprocate love, to manifest that love through the product, through the app,

546
00:29:25.640 --> 00:29:29.320
through the website, through our merch, through our brand out on a billboard,

547
00:29:29.840 --> 00:29:32.887
and then to have people bring that back tenfold.

548
00:29:33.929 --> 00:29:38.960
Our largest growth sort of vector for us was word

549
00:29:39.000 --> 00:29:41.069
of mouth, over 80% word of mouth.

550
00:29:41.150 --> 00:29:43.540
People who just loved it would tell their mates how much they

551
00:29:43.620 --> 00:29:43.922
loved it.

552
00:29:44.324 --> 00:29:45.309
So then what's the soul?

553
00:29:45.510 --> 00:29:46.153
What is our mission?

554
00:29:46.194 --> 00:29:46.978
What is our objective?

555
00:29:46.998 --> 00:29:47.420
What are we trying

556
00:29:47.420 --> 00:29:47.882
to achieve?

557
00:29:47.902 --> 00:29:49.308
What are we on this earth to do?

558
00:29:49.870 --> 00:29:52.080
And we're on this earth to help the next generation

559
00:29:52.221 --> 00:29:53.828
of Australians with financial literacy.

560
00:29:54.410 --> 00:29:56.620
We wanted the next generation of Australians to have what we

561
00:29:56.700 --> 00:29:57.122
didn't have.

562
00:29:57.544 --> 00:30:00.195
And there were so many crazy things happening.

563
00:30:00.396 --> 00:30:01.360
Well, what was happening for us?

564
00:30:01.800 --> 00:30:03.026
There'd been the Royal Commission.

565
00:30:03.468 --> 00:30:06.100
There was this hatred, this tall poppy syndrome of the big banks.

566
00:30:06.940 --> 00:30:09.790
People were rapidly building brands online.

567
00:30:09.810 --> 00:30:10.653
There were apps.

568
00:30:11.716 --> 00:30:12.820
Technology was changing.

569
00:30:12.840 --> 00:30:15.980
You know, Silicon Valley had had the boom and the bust, and everything was changing.

570
00:30:16.120 --> 00:30:21.180
We had this moment in time where we could build something extraordinary, and we could

571
00:30:21.220 --> 00:30:24.060
build a brand that helped people to be literate.

572
00:30:24.140 --> 00:30:28.140
Now, the big thing that was happening in money land was tangible money was going away.

573
00:30:28.480 --> 00:30:32.280
And what we used to say was that, imagine when I was a kid, we had the money purse,

574
00:30:32.680 --> 00:30:34.960
a little pink purse, a gold purse that sat on the-

575
00:30:35.020 --> 00:30:37.279
I had my Paddington Bear money box.

576
00:30:37.560 --> 00:30:40.840
And you had one from Paddington, or you had one from the Commonwealth Bank, or like your

577
00:30:40.840 --> 00:30:46.000
dolomites account whatever and you'd put your coins in it and then you'd carry a roll of notes

578
00:30:46.080 --> 00:30:50.580
in your pocket or you'd have a money clip and and money was tangible and when you hand money over

579
00:30:50.901 --> 00:30:55.800
you can feel the pain of losing that money giving it to the shopkeeper or whatever it is and when

580
00:30:55.800 --> 00:31:00.220
you carry it in your pocket it's heavy now this next generation of australians that would use up

581
00:31:00.701 --> 00:31:06.020
would never experience that they only knew money as digital and when they would send money to

582
00:31:07.144 --> 00:31:11.560
a shopkeeper or when they would buy a skateboard or when they would buy a coffee or when they would

583
00:31:12.203 --> 00:31:15.440
you know put money into an online gambling account you know when they would that money

584
00:31:15.480 --> 00:31:18.960
would just disappear and it was just frictionlessness of the completely gone there

585
00:31:19.020 --> 00:31:25.240
was nothing there so we went about thinking how do you use your senses to understand money so

586
00:31:25.260 --> 00:31:30.980
there's you growing through word of mouth growing through sort of almost like anti-establishment

587
00:31:31.100 --> 00:31:36.320
storytelling and design were you helped by the fact that ultimately you just had to answer to

588
00:31:36.340 --> 00:31:41.980
yourselves i mean i think in hindsight yes like we didn't know it at the time uh maybe tomo did

589
00:31:42.060 --> 00:31:48.000
tomo's 20 years older than me so i learned a lot from tomo he he is an extraordinary he's led an

590
00:31:48.040 --> 00:31:53.700
extraordinary life and he used to be in you know afl football coaching and so to him culture was

591
00:31:53.820 --> 00:31:59.640
everything and the culture of the brand the culture of the team the culture of the industry the culture

592
00:31:59.720 --> 00:32:03.220
of Australia, the culture of what we're doing, the disruption, the culture of disruption.

593
00:32:03.765 --> 00:32:04.620
That was everything to Tom.

594
00:32:04.680 --> 00:32:06.300
I spent a lot of time thinking about that.

595
00:32:06.680 --> 00:32:07.800
So many, so many things.

596
00:32:08.822 --> 00:32:13.020
Just reflecting on the relationship that we developed, we're friends for life.

597
00:32:14.200 --> 00:32:19.160
I think there's something to be said for using your own money, for bootstrapping.

598
00:32:20.040 --> 00:32:24.740
And Up was this extraordinary success, one of the great successes of the fintech, any

599
00:32:25.387 --> 00:32:26.500
technology company in Australia.

600
00:32:27.865 --> 00:32:32.500
you know some people ask me did we exit too early tom i had this um philosophy that always leave

601
00:32:32.580 --> 00:32:36.140
something on the table for the next one you know for the next company the next person the next

602
00:32:36.180 --> 00:32:40.780
people always leave something um i think you know we exited at the right time for us we'd

603
00:32:40.800 --> 00:32:45.160
mortgaged our houses so many times we'd begged borrowed and stole from so many friends and

604
00:32:45.200 --> 00:32:50.860
family and you know we'd we'd funded that business in the only way we knew how which was

605
00:32:50.860 --> 00:32:54.060
was blood, sweat and tears, hard work.

606
00:32:55.042 --> 00:32:58.160
Every dollar that we made went back into the team.

607
00:32:59.502 --> 00:33:00.739
A lot of people took pay cuts.

608
00:33:01.000 --> 00:33:04.120
A lot of people worked late nights, worked weekends, public holidays.

609
00:33:05.020 --> 00:33:06.480
I mean, it was a real slug.

610
00:33:06.880 --> 00:33:09.040
And there were so many moments a dozen times

611
00:33:09.161 --> 00:33:11.240
where we might not have come out the other end.

612
00:33:11.820 --> 00:33:14.880
And if it wasn't for that relationship with Tomo

613
00:33:15.586 --> 00:33:16.879
and the trust between us,

614
00:33:17.342 --> 00:33:21.620
A lot of that love and passion and trust manifested also in the product.

615
00:33:22.501 --> 00:33:26.380
I think that the brand has an enormous part of it, but the brand is a manifestation of that.

616
00:33:28.222 --> 00:33:42.600
The camaraderie in the team, the passion for excellence, the excellence of everything, the best engineers and designers in the world, you know, the best multimedia and graphic and visual designers, illustrators, animators, like all these amazing, like it's like ILM.

617
00:33:42.600 --> 00:33:44.229
I don't know if you've ever seen the TV series,

618
00:33:46.340 --> 00:33:48.340
the documentary of Industrial Light and Magic.

619
00:33:48.984 --> 00:33:49.360
Oh, my God.

620
00:33:49.460 --> 00:33:50.179
Like, you've got to watch it.

621
00:33:50.560 --> 00:33:53.918
But like the story of Pixar or the story of ILM, you know,

622
00:33:54.300 --> 00:33:56.300
building Star Wars or building Toy Story.

623
00:33:56.942 --> 00:34:00.660
And I read not too long ago, I forgot the name of the book now,

624
00:34:00.760 --> 00:34:04.120
but, you know, the founding of Pixar and the acquisition by Disney

625
00:34:04.426 --> 00:34:05.120
and all this sort of stuff.

626
00:34:05.721 --> 00:34:16.100
And if you replaced Disney with Bendigo Bank and Pixar with Ferocia, that's exactly how Up was created.

627
00:34:16.520 --> 00:34:22.966
I think there's two wonderful sort of acts of, I'd call it almost like entrepreneurial humility that you've described.

628
00:34:23.147 --> 00:34:27.170
One is to go, you know what, we don't have to be great at the boring side of banking.

629
00:34:27.631 --> 00:34:29.393
We can partner with someone who's good at that.

630
00:34:29.493 --> 00:34:36.339
And that bakes in trust and sort of those tentacles into community and that sense of authority.

631
00:34:36.359 --> 00:34:37.320
And we get that from Bendigo.

632
00:34:37.380 --> 00:34:46.940
And that means we can then focus as an up team on the extraordinary edge that we can build through culture, through storytelling, through design that no one out of traditional banking can.

633
00:34:47.000 --> 00:34:48.520
I think that's really clever.

634
00:34:48.660 --> 00:34:52.900
I think a lot of people in your position would have gone almost greedily, we need to build it all.

635
00:34:52.980 --> 00:34:54.340
We need to do it all our own way.

636
00:34:54.400 --> 00:34:59.140
And I think that partnership play was really impressive and really visionary of you.

637
00:34:59.460 --> 00:35:01.200
And then I think, you know, I get asked the same question.

638
00:35:01.280 --> 00:35:02.860
Did you exit four pillars too soon?

639
00:35:02.920 --> 00:35:11.250
And I sort of say, well, look, there was a point at which our risk appetite as founders, we'd mortgaged our homes, we'd done everything to give the business the best chance of success.

640
00:35:11.270 --> 00:35:13.373
And you're like, it's someone else's turn now.

641
00:35:13.413 --> 00:35:19.640
There's a next, you know, the whistle's gone on the game, but the next game is already beginning and we're kind of puffed.

642
00:35:20.002 --> 00:35:23.540
And what I love about what you've done, though, is you didn't exit and then walk away.

643
00:35:23.660 --> 00:35:34.140
You've exited up, but then you've gone straight back into the game and started to, as you've always done, reinvest and keep building and keep trying to create platforms for others to build.

644
00:35:34.300 --> 00:35:43.420
So talk a bit about what you are now building in terms of the funds you're building and the next ecosystem of innovation.

645
00:35:43.860 --> 00:35:45.480
I didn't just sell Ferocia up.

646
00:35:47.166 --> 00:35:48.540
I sold three companies during COVID.

647
00:35:48.863 --> 00:35:50.940
and one was ferocious to Bendigo Bank

648
00:35:50.980 --> 00:35:53.320
and I couldn't think of a better custodian for it

649
00:35:53.340 --> 00:35:55.460
than our business partner who helped us to create it.

650
00:35:56.323 --> 00:35:58.120
It was a wonderful transition.

651
00:35:58.260 --> 00:36:00.140
I got to sit on the advisory board for three years.

652
00:36:00.260 --> 00:36:03.220
It was an extraordinary thing and I still am so proud.

653
00:36:03.925 --> 00:36:04.899
I see up all the time.

654
00:36:05.802 --> 00:36:08.080
Is there things I'd do differently or things I think I could do better?

655
00:36:08.160 --> 00:36:11.778
Of course, but I look at it fondly rather than critically

656
00:36:13.047 --> 00:36:14.760
and I'm so proud when I'm walking down the street

657
00:36:14.760 --> 00:36:17.479
and someone comes up and wants a selfie or a high five and whatever.

658
00:36:18.200 --> 00:36:18.900
It's amazing.

659
00:36:19.000 --> 00:36:19.540
It's a great feeling.

660
00:36:20.062 --> 00:36:22.820
So each of those businesses created a pool of capital.

661
00:36:23.300 --> 00:36:26.000
The pool of capital meant I could, what they call a family office,

662
00:36:26.181 --> 00:36:27.440
I could make investments and so on.

663
00:36:27.781 --> 00:36:29.880
And with that pool of capital, I felt very privileged

664
00:36:30.162 --> 00:36:33.140
and very grateful for the opportunity to come out of COVID,

665
00:36:33.541 --> 00:36:35.000
all the lockdowns and all that sort of stuff,

666
00:36:35.422 --> 00:36:36.539
with a whole pile of cash.

667
00:36:37.161 --> 00:36:39.700
And what I did with that money was to reinvest it back

668
00:36:39.760 --> 00:36:41.520
into the industry that helped create me.

669
00:36:42.281 --> 00:36:43.800
I don't know what else you could do with it,

670
00:36:43.940 --> 00:36:46.440
like buy a yacht, buy a helicopter, I don't know,

671
00:36:46.520 --> 00:36:47.985
like, you know, go traveling, whatever.

672
00:36:48.607 --> 00:36:52.720
For me, having a family and, you know, spending time with

673
00:36:52.760 --> 00:36:56.055
my dog and riding my bicycle, these are the things, that's what life's about.

674
00:36:56.517 --> 00:36:57.099
So it wasn't

675
00:36:57.340 --> 00:36:59.672
like very materialistic and thinking, what is it that I can buy?

676
00:36:59.692 --> 00:37:01.400
So what I did instead is I've

677
00:37:01.460 --> 00:37:05.174
invested about a hundred million into the Australian ecosystem.

678
00:37:05.997 --> 00:37:06.920
And we backed mostly,

679
00:37:07.320 --> 00:37:09.028
this is through the family office, Euphemia at school.

680
00:37:09.048 --> 00:37:11.840
Now Euphemia is, again, it's a moment in

681
00:37:11.880 --> 00:37:12.221
time.

682
00:37:12.724 --> 00:37:14.029
AI is disrupting everything.

683
00:37:14.330 --> 00:37:16.680
The Australian venture capital industry is on a precipice.

684
00:37:17.160 --> 00:37:18.688
You know, it's 17 billion in size.

685
00:37:18.728 --> 00:37:19.512
It needs to be 170, 1.7 trillion.

686
00:37:19.552 --> 00:37:19.834
You know,

687
00:37:21.360 --> 00:37:23.228
it needs to complete globally.

688
00:37:23.269 --> 00:37:24.313
There's laws changing.

689
00:37:24.534 --> 00:37:25.338
We're losing talent.

690
00:37:25.358 --> 00:37:25.679
There's this,

691
00:37:26.200 --> 00:37:30.380
so like with the grain exchange, like with the record label, like with Up, there's this moment

692
00:37:30.480 --> 00:37:37.500
in time where right now feels like my job is to help elevate the Australian startup ecosystem.

693
00:37:37.920 --> 00:37:39.168
I can do that through storytelling.

694
00:37:39.248 --> 00:37:40.214
I can do that through branding.

695
00:37:40.275 --> 00:37:41.160
I can do that through investing.

696
00:37:41.601 --> 00:37:42.600
I can do that through mentorship.

697
00:37:42.800 --> 00:37:44.020
I can do that through public policy.

698
00:37:44.720 --> 00:37:49.660
You know, I met with Treasury yesterday because of all this chaos that's going on with the new budget.

699
00:37:49.861 --> 00:37:52.900
And, you know, on the weekend in my spare time, I wrote a policy.

700
00:37:54.046 --> 00:37:54.799
And I'm not a politician.

701
00:37:55.020 --> 00:37:55.820
I'm not a policy writer.

702
00:37:55.901 --> 00:37:58.440
But there's this moment in time where everything's changing.

703
00:37:58.860 --> 00:38:10.660
And so I felt like the biggest impact I could have is to use that capital to help create more DOMs, to help create more four pillars, to help create more ups, more Canvas, more Atlassians, more Envato's.

704
00:38:11.260 --> 00:38:17.400
You know, more culture amps, more – these entrepreneurial spirit, the Australian spirit.

705
00:38:17.860 --> 00:38:24.040
I have a lot of money, but I don't have enough money to change the entire venture startup ecosystem in Australia.

706
00:38:24.604 --> 00:38:25.660
It needs to be a group effort.

707
00:38:25.800 --> 00:38:27.300
We need to have a cultural movement.

708
00:38:27.860 --> 00:38:29.760
We need all the venture capitalists to work together.

709
00:38:30.101 --> 00:38:31.100
We need all the private equity.

710
00:38:31.200 --> 00:38:32.020
We need the debt funders.

711
00:38:32.080 --> 00:38:32.960
We need the crowd funders.

712
00:38:33.040 --> 00:38:33.940
We need the angel investors.

713
00:38:34.060 --> 00:38:35.520
We need everybody to rally together.

714
00:38:35.961 --> 00:38:39.380
So suddenly the Startup Network represented this opportunity to expand nationally.

715
00:38:39.862 --> 00:38:45.100
and I've been making investments in women, female founders, female allocators, FinTech,

716
00:38:45.220 --> 00:38:45.923
because I'm Mr. FinTech.

717
00:38:45.943 --> 00:38:48.374
I won FinTech leader of the year three times.

718
00:38:48.414 --> 00:38:49.760
So I was investing in FinTech

719
00:38:49.760 --> 00:38:50.544
because that's what I knew.

720
00:38:50.907 --> 00:38:53.240
Climate tech, I've been investing in climate tech for 30 years,

721
00:38:53.581 --> 00:38:54.505
25 years, I think at the time.

722
00:38:54.927 --> 00:38:58.000
So we're five years into the journey and we deployed all my capital.

723
00:38:58.140 --> 00:38:59.308
Then we suddenly thought, well, you know what?

724
00:38:59.328 --> 00:39:00.355
We've got to deploy other capital.

725
00:39:00.376 --> 00:39:00.980
So I've invested

726
00:39:01.662 --> 00:39:06.860
into 23, mostly Australian venture capital funds, but not just venture capital, private equity,

727
00:39:07.101 --> 00:39:14.920
venture capital, crowdfunding, angel investing, debt funding, every type of capital that fuels

728
00:39:15.061 --> 00:39:17.431
the Australian innovation disruption ecosystem.

729
00:39:17.832 --> 00:39:19.580
You want creativity, you want venture capital,

730
00:39:19.720 --> 00:39:21.128
you want entrepreneurship, you need money.

731
00:39:21.631 --> 00:39:23.300
So I put all the money into all those different things.

732
00:39:23.500 --> 00:39:24.424
That creates leverage.

733
00:39:24.665 --> 00:39:28.320
Every one of those 23 funds, we're in 32 vintages, and a vintage is

734
00:39:28.340 --> 00:39:29.885
just another year of the same fund.

735
00:39:30.266 --> 00:39:33.276
So 32 funds out there I've invested in.

736
00:39:33.878 --> 00:39:34.640
Each one of them has

737
00:39:34.700 --> 00:39:35.927
invested in 100 companies.

738
00:39:35.947 --> 00:39:38.460
You multiply that out, there's thousands of companies now that I've

739
00:39:38.480 --> 00:39:38.882
invested in.

740
00:39:39.183 --> 00:39:43.040
Through the family office directly, we were able to invest in 60, 70 companies.

741
00:39:44.685 --> 00:39:47.400
Through leverage, through these funds, we've been able to invest in many, many more.

742
00:39:47.880 --> 00:39:49.067
Then we started co-investing.

743
00:39:49.208 --> 00:39:51.320
We would lead an investment and I would say, okay, we're going to

744
00:39:51.340 --> 00:39:52.946
invest in this little company called Buildkite.

745
00:39:53.368 --> 00:39:54.632
It just spun out of pin payments.

746
00:39:55.475 --> 00:39:56.700
Ferocia Up was

747
00:39:56.760 --> 00:39:57.462
the first customer.

748
00:39:57.843 --> 00:40:04.380
Now it powers Uber, Airbnb, SpaceX, Reddit, Anthropic, OpenAI, every company

749
00:40:04.420 --> 00:40:05.749
you can think of Shopify, Spotify.

750
00:40:05.789 --> 00:40:07.460
Now it powers every great brand in the world,

751
00:40:07.841 --> 00:40:09.587
but it started in Perth.

752
00:40:09.727 --> 00:40:11.413
Co. sort of has an office in Melbourne.

753
00:40:12.055 --> 00:40:13.480
It's a small team that

754
00:40:13.540 --> 00:40:14.426
are going on to greatness.

755
00:40:14.446 --> 00:40:16.480
They're getting close to a hundred million per year in revenue.

756
00:40:17.481 --> 00:40:21.658
And so I would lead around into Buildkite, but I can only put in a million bucks.

757
00:40:21.678 --> 00:40:22.100
That's as much

758
00:40:22.160 --> 00:40:23.286
as I can afford to put in.

759
00:40:23.306 --> 00:40:25.134
I don't have more than that.

760
00:40:25.275 --> 00:40:26.320
I've already deployed a hundred million.

761
00:40:27.442 --> 00:40:31.380
I then introduced them to Airtree and Airtree would come in and they might be able to put 10

762
00:40:31.500 --> 00:40:33.086
million or 20 million or 30 million.

763
00:40:33.107 --> 00:40:36.520
So we did Zepto, we did Constantinople, we did Billkite,

764
00:40:36.580 --> 00:40:41.020
we did all these amazing businesses where we would co-invest with Square Peg, Airtree, Blackbird,

765
00:40:41.380 --> 00:40:45.800
Main Sequence, all these different artesian, you know, these different Australian venture capital

766
00:40:45.860 --> 00:40:46.041
firms.

767
00:40:46.282 --> 00:40:50.080
So not only are we investing in the venture capital firms, but then we're co-investing in

768
00:40:50.100 --> 00:40:50.220
them.

769
00:40:50.240 --> 00:40:56.180
So the amount of capital impact that I can have as one human, and by the way, I didn't have

770
00:40:56.260 --> 00:40:56.682
100 million.

771
00:40:56.983 --> 00:40:57.886
I borrowed a lot of that money.

772
00:40:58.749 --> 00:41:01.559
So maybe 100 million would be my cap.

773
00:41:01.579 --> 00:41:01.820
That's the

774
00:41:01.920 --> 00:41:02.904
most impact I can have.

775
00:41:03.306 --> 00:41:07.000
But by co-investing, by leading rounds and bringing other people in,

776
00:41:07.320 --> 00:41:10.499
by building syndicates, we built a syndicate network and we got all these high net worths

777
00:41:10.821 --> 00:41:11.946
and we run syndicate deals.

778
00:41:11.966 --> 00:41:15.180
We oversubscribed every single, except for one, every single

779
00:41:15.300 --> 00:41:16.284
syndicate deal we ever did.

780
00:41:17.328 --> 00:41:20.860
I was able to bring billions and billions of dollars to the Australian

781
00:41:21.000 --> 00:41:26.500
tech against leverage it's amplification it's it's impact as you say you're you're having an

782
00:41:26.580 --> 00:41:30.980
extraordinary individual impact but it's having an impact beyond any one anything i could do

783
00:41:32.043 --> 00:41:37.960
two questions i asked them both at the same time what do you as an investor and a mentor

784
00:41:38.241 --> 00:41:43.480
and and someone who's got the most extraordinary track record what do you look for in great

785
00:41:43.580 --> 00:41:49.780
founders and great founding teams and also as an australian and as someone who has dare i say

786
00:41:49.880 --> 00:41:56.420
brought an Australian and maybe even a Melburnian sort of personality and sort of zest and energy

787
00:41:56.561 --> 00:41:57.445
to the world of banking.

788
00:41:57.827 --> 00:42:00.700
Are there particular types of businesses that you think Australians

789
00:42:00.982 --> 00:42:02.349
are particularly good at building?

790
00:42:02.791 --> 00:42:03.395
Yeah.

791
00:42:03.435 --> 00:42:04.340
Australians and New Zealanders have

792
00:42:04.360 --> 00:42:10.360
always been inventors, curiosity, creative entrepreneurs, eccentric, a little bit different,

793
00:42:10.780 --> 00:42:13.430
thinking about the world or seeing it with a different lens.

794
00:42:14.112 --> 00:42:16.200
And I reflect on my mate with

795
00:42:16.200 --> 00:42:20.836
his dad at the CSIRO, he invented paint, the polymer in plastic paint.

796
00:42:21.438 --> 00:42:22.020
Anything in the world

797
00:42:22.040 --> 00:42:23.787
that's painted, invented here in Australia.

798
00:42:24.630 --> 00:42:26.357
Carbon fiber, invented here in Australia.

799
00:42:26.678 --> 00:42:27.060
Wi-Fi,

800
00:42:27.300 --> 00:42:27.983
invented here in Australia.

801
00:42:28.003 --> 00:42:29.229
There's so many amazing things.

802
00:42:29.510 --> 00:42:31.580
What we're not good at is scaling

803
00:42:31.700 --> 00:42:33.025
and commercializing that.

804
00:42:33.105 --> 00:42:37.440
So the CSIRO is possibly funded now by the royalties from Wi-Fi, if not

805
00:42:37.701 --> 00:42:39.067
fully in part.

806
00:42:39.147 --> 00:42:41.356
And that's a good success story and everyone knows that one.

807
00:42:41.718 --> 00:42:42.260
But does anyone know

808
00:42:42.320 --> 00:42:43.103
about plastic money?

809
00:42:43.445 --> 00:42:47.100
Does anyone know about satellites and airplanes and Formula One cars

810
00:42:47.100 --> 00:42:48.624
and anything built out of carbon fiber?

811
00:42:49.928 --> 00:42:54.040
The battery cells for the Tesla Powerwall invented

812
00:42:54.140 --> 00:42:55.686
in Canberra.

813
00:42:55.867 --> 00:42:57.352
Google Maps invented in Sydney.

814
00:42:58.155 --> 00:42:59.640
There's all these amazing things that Australia

815
00:42:59.720 --> 00:43:00.143
has to do.

816
00:43:00.344 --> 00:43:03.280
So my view is that Australians are very, very good at financial services,

817
00:43:03.920 --> 00:43:09.297
very, very good at innovation and creativity, very good at software engineering.

818
00:43:09.899 --> 00:43:10.200
People that

819
00:43:10.240 --> 00:43:10.721
recognize it.

820
00:43:10.782 --> 00:43:17.120
Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, these people know how good Australians

821
00:43:17.200 --> 00:43:20.170
and New Zealanders are, and they recruit us.

822
00:43:20.672 --> 00:43:23.040
And so a lot of people will be working at Tesla or

823
00:43:23.140 --> 00:43:29.055
SpaceX or Amazon or AWS have been brutal in recruiting Australian talent.

824
00:43:29.958 --> 00:43:30.880
Google, Apple,

825
00:43:31.581 --> 00:43:35.415
Facebook, Instagram, all these companies are recruiting Australian talent.

826
00:43:35.836 --> 00:43:36.840
And so what I like

827
00:43:36.900 --> 00:43:39.932
to do is think about what we call boomerangs.

828
00:43:39.952 --> 00:43:42.020
You can't stop an Australian from being successful,

829
00:43:42.200 --> 00:43:43.647
and they're just going to go for it, right?

830
00:43:43.969 --> 00:43:46.220
And so you want to encourage them to be successful.

831
00:43:46.400 --> 00:43:53.240
Go overseas, learn new things, build new networks, learn different cultures, experience the world,

832
00:43:53.461 --> 00:43:54.244
but then come back.

833
00:43:54.325 --> 00:43:54.988
That's a boomerang.

834
00:43:55.128 --> 00:43:56.756
Someone who leaves and comes back.

835
00:43:56.977 --> 00:43:57.620
When they come back,

836
00:43:57.660 --> 00:43:58.546
we want to leverage that.

837
00:43:58.566 --> 00:43:59.874
I've got two last questions.

838
00:44:00.297 --> 00:44:00.760
The first is,

839
00:44:00.820 --> 00:44:05.280
we've maybe broken the all-time podcast record for getting this far and still not talking about

840
00:44:05.340 --> 00:44:05.883
the t-shirt.

841
00:44:06.184 --> 00:44:08.635
So you've got a t-shirt that says Triple Bubble.

842
00:44:08.956 --> 00:44:09.760
Tell me about Triple Bubble.

843
00:44:09.960 --> 00:44:10.101
Yeah.

844
00:44:10.121 --> 00:44:14.135
So Triple Bubble is Australia's first dedicated fintech fund of its kind.

845
00:44:14.155 --> 00:44:14.657
There's

846
00:44:15.560 --> 00:44:19.400
lots of other people that have invested in fintech, but there's a peculiarity in the

847
00:44:19.520 --> 00:44:23.637
regulations in Australia where the financial services regulation is very strict.

848
00:44:23.657 --> 00:44:24.260
You've got

849
00:44:24.280 --> 00:44:26.532
to be licensed to do most of the things in financial services.

850
00:44:27.456 --> 00:44:28.180
And there's this little

851
00:44:28.301 --> 00:44:32.820
quirk that says if you're an ESVCLP, which is an early stage venture capital limited partnership.

852
00:44:32.960 --> 00:44:40.800
So if you're a venture capitalist, you can't invest in a regulated company, a company that is regulated, unless you get permission from the government, you get an exemption.

853
00:44:41.540 --> 00:44:47.120
And then if something goes wrong, you don't just lose the tax benefit for that one investment.

854
00:44:47.682 --> 00:44:49.860
You lose the tax benefit for your entire portfolio.

855
00:44:50.060 --> 00:44:56.660
So there's an enormous amount of risk in Australian venture startup funders investing in fintech.

856
00:44:57.100 --> 00:44:58.280
And so to me, it's the same thing.

857
00:44:58.340 --> 00:45:02.140
I'm coalescing around that opportunity and saying, well, I can try and change the law,

858
00:45:02.540 --> 00:45:04.360
which is what I'm doing, trying to get the regulations changed.

859
00:45:04.860 --> 00:45:10.560
At the same time, the new budgets come out and they've got new ideas about what they

860
00:45:10.560 --> 00:45:10.835
want to do.

861
00:45:10.980 --> 00:45:15.460
And there's a carve out in the new budget that says, we'll consult with the startup

862
00:45:15.585 --> 00:45:15.939
ecosystem.

863
00:45:16.081 --> 00:45:19.160
I've been working with the tech council, working with FinTech Australia, talking to

864
00:45:19.220 --> 00:45:21.200
Treasury, trying to work out how we can do that.

865
00:45:21.280 --> 00:45:22.960
I could do all that, but that's going to take years.

866
00:45:23.381 --> 00:45:31.920
What if I just start my own fund, a brand new fund that can become an industry fund that is not an ESV CLP, that doesn't come foul of the regulation?

867
00:45:32.500 --> 00:45:39.700
It doesn't get the tax concession, sure, but my controversial public statement is that anyone that needs the tax concession isn't a very good fund manager.

868
00:45:40.881 --> 00:45:41.935
I welcome a tax concession.

869
00:45:42.440 --> 00:45:42.880
It's a bonus.

870
00:45:43.041 --> 00:45:43.760
I love a tax concession.

871
00:45:43.860 --> 00:45:47.720
I'm negotiating it for the industry at the moment, but I don't need it to be successful.

872
00:45:48.082 --> 00:45:49.080
It's a bonus, like a dividend.

873
00:45:49.804 --> 00:45:52.300
So for me, I wanted to create a fund, Triple Bubble.

874
00:45:52.760 --> 00:45:55.520
And the reason it's called Triple Bubble is I was explaining this idea to everyone.

875
00:45:55.980 --> 00:46:03.060
And I kept saying, well, you know, overseas they have Triple Bubble funds where they do secondary market investing, which is buying shares from the founders and the other investors.

876
00:46:03.860 --> 00:46:07.240
Primary market investing, which is normal equity investing into a startup like a venture capitalist.

877
00:46:07.821 --> 00:46:10.340
And then public markets investing with public companies.

878
00:46:10.701 --> 00:46:12.540
So that's much more common in Europe and the US.

879
00:46:12.681 --> 00:46:16.260
But in Australia, there is not a single fund that is a Triple Bubble fund.

880
00:46:16.640 --> 00:46:17.680
And I'm like, I'll just call it Triple Bubble.

881
00:46:17.760 --> 00:46:22.240
So highly diversified, triple bubble, but with this singular intent of supporting the FinTech.

882
00:46:22.260 --> 00:46:23.020
Focused on FinTech.

883
00:46:23.220 --> 00:46:36.540
The scale of your ambition, the scale of your vision, the generosity of your vision, like always, whenever you talk about anything that you have built or you're trying to build, it's as much about the platforms you're creating for other people to grow and express themselves.

884
00:46:37.244 --> 00:46:38.960
And your vision of the future is incredible.

885
00:46:39.602 --> 00:46:42.840
Let's finish by going back to teenage Dom.

886
00:46:43.402 --> 00:46:45.460
And you've got the Apple computer at home.

887
00:46:45.600 --> 00:46:47.019
You're watching Star Trek on TV.

888
00:46:48.503 --> 00:46:49.868
things aren't all going great.

889
00:46:49.888 --> 00:46:51.253
You've got family tragedy.

890
00:46:51.294 --> 00:46:52.980
You've got all sorts of rocks thrown in

891
00:46:53.020 --> 00:46:53.301
your way.

892
00:46:53.322 --> 00:46:56.980
But through that, you are resilient and you keep moving forward and you keep seeing a

893
00:46:57.080 --> 00:46:57.421
future.

894
00:46:58.343 --> 00:47:04.920
As we sit here today in 2026 with computers much more powerful than the Apple

895
00:47:05.000 --> 00:47:09.860
computer sitting in the chips of everything and AI coming in and disrupting everything and so

896
00:47:09.900 --> 00:47:13.394
much uncertainty and I think an unease about the world and where it's heading.

897
00:47:13.977 --> 00:47:14.800
What is your

898
00:47:15.562 --> 00:47:21.078
sense of, your case for optimism as we look forward over the next 5, 10, 15 years?

899
00:47:22.620 --> 00:47:24.006
Yeah, I'm an eternal optimist.

900
00:47:24.026 --> 00:47:27.460
So I always look for the best in people and the best in opportunities,

901
00:47:28.301 --> 00:47:29.043
the best in the world.

902
00:47:30.266 --> 00:47:34.818
So it's very hard for me to be concerned or upset about AI.

903
00:47:35.018 --> 00:47:35.600
It's very hard

904
00:47:35.660 --> 00:47:37.165
for me to be concerned about compute.

905
00:47:37.807 --> 00:47:42.280
It's very hard for me to imagine that the computer power

906
00:47:42.661 --> 00:47:46.430
that got us to the moon was less than my Apple II.

907
00:47:47.252 --> 00:47:50.540
So none of those things are in themselves

908
00:47:51.001 --> 00:47:53.027
replacing who we are or what we do.

909
00:47:54.371 --> 00:47:57.760
They're tools and those tools can accelerate our excellence.

910
00:47:58.300 --> 00:48:03.960
And if Australians are resilient and curious and confident and entrepreneurial and eccentric

911
00:48:04.361 --> 00:48:09.340
and love to disrupt and cut down the tall poppy and dominate on a global scale and all these

912
00:48:09.360 --> 00:48:13.240
sort of things, isn't that just an opportunity for Australia to punch above our weight?

913
00:48:13.881 --> 00:48:18.500
Use that new technology, use that compute, use that AI to dominate whatever it is that

914
00:48:18.500 --> 00:48:19.220
you're passionate about.

915
00:48:19.660 --> 00:48:21.160
And that's the way I think about the future.

916
00:48:21.240 --> 00:48:28.440
And I think that if more people had that level of insight, Australia could represent more

917
00:48:28.801 --> 00:48:31.660
maybe double digits of the world rather than two or 3% of the world.

918
00:48:33.242 --> 00:48:34.680
Don Pym, we're going to finish there.

919
00:48:34.740 --> 00:48:35.720
That was just extraordinary.

920
00:48:35.880 --> 00:48:38.320
I could go on all day, but podcast rules don't allow it.

921
00:48:38.320 --> 00:48:39.560
Thank you so much for joining me.

922
00:48:39.660 --> 00:48:40.040
No worries.

923
00:48:40.100 --> 00:48:40.680
Thanks for having me.

924
00:48:40.700 --> 00:48:41.040
It was great.

925
00:48:44.620 --> 00:48:46.860
StoryWork was brought to you in partnership with Slingshot.

926
00:48:47.482 --> 00:48:50.340
As you've heard in today's episode, stories really matter.

927
00:48:50.521 --> 00:48:53.700
And there is no story more important than the one you tell your customers.

928
00:48:54.360 --> 00:48:59.240
But finding the right time, place, channel, and medium through which to tell that story is critical.

929
00:48:59.720 --> 00:49:01.860
And that's where my great friends at Slingshot come in.

930
00:49:02.660 --> 00:49:08.020
Slingshot pride themselves on developing creative media strategies to propel their clients further, faster.

931
00:49:08.701 --> 00:49:17.339
You can find out more about the brilliant work that Slingshot does, helping brands find their audiences, tell their stories and achieve their objectives at slingshot.com.au.

932
00:49:17.940 --> 00:49:27.700
And talking about finding out more, you can find out more about this and every episode of StoryWork, including all the show notes and all of my key learnings from every conversation over on Substack.

933
00:49:38.320 --> 00:49:39.357
Thank you.