Between high school and university I got a summer job working in a electronics company. But when it came time to start uni I had a company car and a decent salary so I thought 'next year'. I later got headhunted to work for a company in Auckland, but I left quite quickly. I was job hunting when the phone started ringing. It was customers saying 'we want you to fix our computers'. So I started repairing computers, and it took me a while to realise I was making more money doing that than I would in a job. So my first company - Current Technologies, or CTL - was born by accident. We developed a number of divisions and turned it into a very profitable multimillion dollar IT company within a few years.
One of our custom software projects at CTL was for a radio station, which was looking to automate and asked us to evaluate automation systems around the world. I thought we could do better than the available technologies, so we built a prototype for a fully automated system playing music off hard disk, which had never been done before. We spun that into a new company called Monstar Labs, and we spent the next few years doing great stuff in broadcasting around the world, before eventually selling to a US company. I actually ended up selling off the various business units of my first company, CTL - some to my own staff, and some are still going today.
When I came back to New Zealand in the mid-nineties to raise a family I started another company called Cyberglue, which was an early player in the content management and ecommerce spaces. We did some really great projects, but my partners in that business didn't share my global ambitions so I sold it to them. Then I spent a couple of years commercialising other people's technologies in the clean energy space around the world, before coming back to start my current company, Cloud M. I wanted to sink my teeth into a real mission, and Cloud M is all about using great technology to save people's lives in the health and safety space.
What commonalities do you see among the businesses you've set up?
All of my businesses have been focused on helping other businesses execute better. Also, I've always lived at the very innovative end of markets, so if the idea isn't going to bring a dramatic, disruptive change to an industry then it's probably not for me.
I look at my early days in business as a time when I was cutting my teeth, learning the basics like how to make money and employ people. Then with Monstar Labs it was about things like understanding disruption, how to go global and how to partner with multinationals. But again that business was about harnessing the opportunities that come from embracing change.
Doing the environmental work opened my eyes to the global problems of climate change, particularly around water, and the opportunities for advanced technologies to solve a lot of the problems the industrial world has created. When I started with Cloud M I thought the opportunity was going to be environmental, but when we got approached by Civil Defence it became obvious it was more about my other passion, which is people.
If you're going to be innovative as an entrepreneur you have to have an all-consuming mission that you're really passionate about, and if you don't have it you have to find it.
Do you envisage more companies in your future?
I like to be very focused on what I've got in front of me and I'm going to drive this company as far as I can while that's right for the company. I feel we have the potential to build a billion-dollar company that's globally and socially impactful. I do have a few ideas about what I'd like to do when I'm done with this, but I'm not in a hurry.
