Most people aren't that ambitious. Most people just want to do what they do well each day and go home. I've never met a small business owner, so it was easy for them. I don't have like a work and personal life. Like this is my life. You work for nothing, literally work like 18 hours a day for like 5 years with very, very, very, very, very little return. I just spend a lot of energy. like we spend every brain cell just thinking about like the next thing, the next challenges. If I was working for someone else, there are going to be some limits. And I don't do well with limits. I want to do something great with my life. Something on a massive social scale. I wanted to get up every day. I wanted to do something to challenge me, and I want to be able to look back and say I did that. With those two scenarios kind of at opposite ends of the spectrum, you then got the whole range of use cases in the middle between you know setting up teams of people and getting other people involved. Any questions? Startups are incredibly hard. You're trying to build a product that no one's built before. You're taking the vision of a founder and trying to turn it into reality. So we have created an open source Python SDK and toolset. Most people don't have like the persistence to actually get there, like, hey! I want to like start a startup. Like I'll be a millionaire in a couple of years. I'll create some app. That is fucking bullshit. When you start a business, the highest probability is that you will fail. Most people fail. The difference with the tech boom is that change happens faster than at any time in history, so that means success can come fast, but so can failure. I think we all talk about how easy it is to fail, and it's great. It's really important. It's fucking brutal. It's hard getting so much rejection continuously, like has it been just a complete waste of everything? Is it going to actually work out, or am I just going to have been this crazy person and try to hound people to join me? You know, it's it's not just validating the idea. Like, is the idea good enough? But it's also does the team have the capability? Can they attract the right people? Y'know , you wake up, and every bit of energy or every idea, every bit of empathy, it's it's sort of the whole gamut of everything. It's exhausting, but everything you can give, this is a job that will take. It's actually hard to find people that are that ambitious. It's actually it's really hard. You're committing up to a very long, very trying journey where you have to educate yourself on a lot of things, and most people don't have that commitment. I think it starts off with naivete. I think a lot of founders would never start their business if they knew how hard it really was. I don't have the ability to turn up 9 to 5 and just be Joe Average. Like I'm constantly just thinking and checking and and you know planning. I've always been impatient even to the point where you know queuing up for something like airports, every person I overtake when I get off that plane going to customs is a minute less in customs. Everything is a way to get there quicker. I was bored, completely bored at school. I want to get into the world. I want to work. I want to learn about this thing called business. I was earning $800 a week, so I'd written down this goal to make $40,000 in a month. The first thing I had to do was quit my job. I started organizing this tough man challenge which was this this thing that happened in my hometown in Townsville. Someone would put up a prize purse for people to go in and fight each other. I'm $22, 000 in debt, and I said the gates open at 6 and fighting started at 7. Six o'clock. Maybe 10 people turned up. I came out at like 5 to 7, and there was a queue of traffic out in the street. It was all the way into my event. The security ran out with all this cash. He's like, where are you putting the money? I was like, I don't know. I haven't thought about where to put the money. I had it stuffed in my shoes, in my pockets. I I had the stuff everywhere, and I never thought about what I'd do with the money. But I didn't think that
would be my problem. One thousand, five hundred and nine people came. $42,600 four weeks later. It was incredible to have that self-belief that if all I had was the shirt on my back, I can go out there and make it. I'm just going to make
half a one in a minute. I left high school to study accounting which was you know just because I wanted to be a businessman. I think I liked the idea of creating something, and my dad was to a large extent an entrepreneur. But I think I saw that as being a pretty normal thing to do rather than getting a job. In the beginning nothing else really fulfilled everything. So you know I studied accounting. I'm a singer. Really wanted to be a rock star. You know, I always wanted to direct as an actor. Like so I was a shit actor because you know poor director be like can you just worry about your role and your performance? And I was never good at that. Even as an actor I was frustrated that I had to really place my life and my livelihood in in the hands of you know an agent or a director. I was unfulfilled, and I wanted to do something bigger or or or or that just yeah provided some sort of passive income was
probably the original driver. It's all this pressure that oh, you got to dream big and chase your dreams and live every day like it's your last. Bullshit! Too much fucking pressure! How do you get anything done? And how do you not feel like you're constantly..
how can you live up to that? Like when you hear a number
like a hundred million designs. I think that it's really hard to fathom just how important one of those single designs can be to a person. Mel is like a a massive visionary and the visionary and sort of the product person. And so you want all of these people to create beautiful
visual content very quickly. She's like impeccable. There's no one like I know that is able to conceptualize products as good as as Mel. Mel is the most determined and stubborn person you've ever met in your life. She's like, I'm going to create this company. I'm going to change the world. And like, no one can tell me I'm not going to do it. And she's that stubborn. They're like everyone says like no. She's like, I'm proving them wrong. I like things intense. I would be very bored if things were just like chill. Chill is not my scene. I like things that are like there's this big challenge. Let's go tackle this big challenge. And then when we're tackling that challenge, then I kind of feel in my element. I've got in pretty incredible parents. My mom in particular has never had any expectations as to what I would do in life. She's always encouraged me to do whatever crazy thing um that I wanted. When I was really, really little, I used to be able to design a birthday party. And so like we had bizarre like Halloween birthday parties, and like me and Mom would sit up all night like making these paper mache pumpkins and just bizarre things. But what was really important about that I think was being able to create an idea and then see that turn into reality which was a little bizarrely themed birthday party. If I put enough effort into something, I could out-effort most people. And when you realize that effort is the main ingredient required for things, it's a pretty powerful lesson to learn. Yeah, okay, this looks like the right place and lighting, and it looks like somebody's home. I came back to Sydney. I had no purpose. I didn't know what to do next. I just climbed this Mount Everest. So yeah, it was it was take a few jobs, work in a servo, learn as much as I could learn, and then uh took an ad out of the paper in Brisbane to become a P.I. Oh, fuck. Here's our guy. Yeah, there. Is that him? Is that it? It looks like him. I'm actually spying on people. I was a real-life spy. Like we weren't doing you know national security stuff. We were doing people who had been injured at work. This guy's been pretty active, actually. It turns out that that when there's money involved, often people can exaggerate the truth. And so they would exaggerate how injured they were. I saw a case where a guy had lifted a piece of concrete, and he hurt his back. And then a few weeks passed. He'd been to doctors, and his doctors recommended he perhaps talk to a solicitor about his legal rights. And so then he's getting legal advice. This guy ends up drinking earlier in the day. His wife then starts getting depressed, and and she moves out and says, you know, when this is all over and you're back to normal, then we'll come back. He rings her up and says, it's all done. I've got my money. We can now pay off the house and that. She says, I'm not coming back. And the next day he commits suicide. He was 36 years old. I at that point realized like we are part of the problem here. We're spying on people who have been injured, and we need them to be injured to have a job. From that point on, I realized I need to be part of the solution. When a company first starts, it's usually 1, 2 or 3
founders who get together and start working on something. Goes out and it's like that's like the moment of like Oh, I get it! It's like this realization moment. And it's the coming together of the idea and the person that's really important. It's really like in a split second. Yeah. For a lot of people,
it's the learnings they get out of trying things
that don't fully succeed that drive them to the next success. Rather the Australian wines and the New Zealand wines are brighter, richer, sweet-fruited. The European wines in a general sense... I was interested in this idea of like this place with
customer reviews. I was interested in the voice of people and rather than just professional wine critics. It's Christmas Eve. Justin is talking about his, oh, I discovered this thing
overseas called Facebook. I started talking about um this idea I had around Facebook and Facebook for wine. I could see his mind ticking. I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting. I've been working on this wine business idea as well, this wine site. It's like customer reviews, and people could share recommendations and look up and we're going, Ah! That's pretty similar! We were drinking wine, talking about our ideas. After that much wine, we thought it was a great idea to go into business together as brother-in-laws. I definitely had a moment of, ah, that is a stupid fucking idea to go into business with your brother-in-law. Then I was thinking, but you've failed at every venture you tried, Andre, and Justin hasn't and and he's good at thinking big and he's good at money, you suck at money, maybe that's what you need. You know, we love wine. We're wine geeks, but you know, we don't wear bowties, and we don't talk bullshit. We wanted to change the language of the wine, and Qwoff sort of is to you know just chuck a wine back. It takes the elitism out of wine. We want to we want to democratize wine. That was the idea. Let's introduce great wine to everyone. We're like yeah, Qwoff. That's cool. By 2006 you had to get pretty desperate to find a name that you could still register a dot com for. So we searched it. There was no way we're getting that URL. And we eventually misspelled it, and it was Q, W for Wendy, O double F. So it was Qwoff. And we're like, yeah,
that looks kind of cool, too. The first person we went to sell this to,
we believed this shit, right? And we're like, this is just the way of the future, and it's going to be awesome. It's going to be so awesome for you. And they're going, wait, wait, wait. You mean like people like the public can review our wines? We're like, yeah! And they're like, in public? Yeah! But they're not qualified. Like they're not professionals. I'm like, but they drink your wine. They're probably if they like it, they'll probably tell their friends, and if they don't like it they... Oh, what do you mean? They can say something bad about our wine? Well, yeah, but you can commu...
Oh, no, no, no. I'm actually been working
with some of our other things, all of the other pages. If you bring up the search afterwards. Research stuff? The research stuff. When I was teaching
graphic design programs I would write a lot
of instruction manuals on how to use the programs. And you'd have so many steps. So it's like step 1, click this button. Step 2, click this button,
etc., etc., etc. for like 22 steps to
do one simple action. And that just seemed completely insane. Why do people have
to learn the software? The software should learn people. In a more polite way,
she's like, this is shit, like why do these tools still exist? In her head there was just like
it was just so obvious. There's got to be a
better way of doing this. Like I can be the person
that can do this. In the very early stages, we had
like eight different concepts of different ways people
could communicate their ideas whether it's like through photo books or through sorts of
different other things. It was very sort of conceptual, and I really didn't think
it would go anywhere. But then Mel started getting
really serious and like drawing up like product plans and
doing real work behind it. And I was sort of like,
yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll see where this goes. Hello. So today is the 11th of July,
and this is our Minute Wednesday. We always go very quickly
from like this is an idea to this is the thing
that's going to happen. And we are in a fun position
at the moment. We're actually starting to
really get a lot of traction. So rather than trying to take
on the entire world of design, we decided to take on
school yearbooks in Australia. Fusion Books was
an online system that made it easy for schoolteachers
to create yearbooks. We had our entire family
sitting there stuffing envelopes to send to every single
school in Australia. We had like my mom
would be like licking the stickers, and his dad would be
sealing the envelopes and we'd have someone folding them. I didn't want to just send
these books out to schools that weren't any chance of like a lead. I started by calling
them up and saying, hey can I please have the name
of the yearbook coordinator? And they'd be like, no. I would end up like
out-sassing the secretaries. That wouldn't be something
that I would endorse. I very like the truth. I'd be like uh, yeah, yeah. I've got a book here, and I really need to send it to the yearbook coordinator. They're registered for this book, but I don't have a name
to address it to. And they'd be like,
oh, send it to the office. I'm like, I can't send it to the office. I'll just not send it.
I don't really care. It doesn't bother me either way. And she's like, oh, hang on. Let me find out who the who the who the who the the person is. Um, and I'd get straight through. For three months a year
we'd be like printing around the clock. It was my in my mom's living room, and so she'd babysit printers. You'd hear the printers
in the background. You're constantly listening,
sort of ch-ch, ch-ch, ch-ch. And you'd be like, I think the printer's stopped. Because if the printer stops, then you're losing money. The very first night
we had our new printer, it exploded everywhere. The cartridge hadn't
been put in correctly, and so our entire room
ended up in cartridge ink. This is a pleasure, and Qwoff TV
is going to be a lot of fun. Australian Pinot is what
we're talking about today. Aaaaahhh, BANG! About two years in,
we came in with no money, and we hadn't made any money. So we started making videos where we would talk about wines and feature wines in our language, in our way. It's like ice. It's kind of really you know what I mean. It's pure ice. It's like purity. That's like... What do you mean? Oddly enough, like the industry, particularly the media side ate it up. They loved it. So we became content guys. So we had this community platform, but nobody was really interested in the community side of it. But the community were interested in us. This is as good as it gets! Yes, it is. This is, if you talk about small production, great wine, this is just the duck's nuts! They came back
from a Christmas break which is another, you know, space time. Andre, I got this really good idea! It's like...well, I've always
wanted to buy a Kombi and travel around Australia surfing and visiting wineries. It sounds stupid, but we we thought that would make a good video show. You know, instead of just standing
in our office reviewing wines. And maybe people would pay us. So we bought this piece of shit
Kombi sitting in a lemon orchard in the Barossa, which and we got there andIt didn't work, and I remember we were inspecting it which was ridiculous because it was this rust bucket. And um I go to to open the side door, and it falls off. The fucking whole door falls off. I was like, no, this is unbelievable. And we kind of put it back on And it's like, it's still good. It's still good. We can do this. We towed it back to Adelaide, and we thought we'd we'd do it up and get it working and then we'd film this show. Spent four months, six months
trying to do this Kombi up. We just though let's just get one
that actually goes, and so we went online,
sight unseen, bought a Kombi, Started filming "Road to Vino." Our first region was Hunter Valley, and it was unbelievable. Beautiful as this is,
I'm getting thirsty. Let's go and find
some really good booze. It's pretty crazy, though, to be changing the day
before the event. I mean, I had to call to pull the pin and change across and get some other people on it and you know I think
it was the right thing to do, But we'll find out. The early stages of a startup are all about iterating on an idea, so building a product,
making it a bit better making it a little bit better, getting it out
in the hands of users seeing what people like, what they don't like, and making it a bit better again and again. That's the startup land. You get to keep making decisions
every day and trying. Measure twice and cut once. Think about what we're doing and then move foward. You're trying to build a product
that no one's built before. You're taking the vision
of a founder and trying to turn
it into reality. It wasn't until 2011, 2012 when the smartphone had gotten to the point where everyday people now had this computer in their pocket. And once everyday people were carrying this thing around, I thought, now's our chance
to reach all those people. I realized I needed a software engineer,
and I didn't know anyone. I went out to the
local university and was introduced to a young guy
who dropped out of uni working at a youth detention center running IT and he was like, Sure, I'll try and build an app with you. He was a smart, smart kid and we sat down on
my kitchen bench. And I said ,we needed to help
the frontline worker actually do their jobs safer
and more efficiently. We had this risk assessment form, and I was like, I think if
we turned this into an app, then people could use it. And so we need a team of people. You know, it's just like,
who's the smartest person you know? Let's get them. We were on the kitchen bench
for a couple of weeks, and then we graduated
to the garage. Air conditioners put in there. And we had plastic
on the walls, sat down in there and started coding and designing and building it. It was an app so that you could check the risk before you do a job. So, if a plumber turns up to a job, you could ask, Is there any live electricity? Is there any water? It was just a basic app
for being able to say, Is this safe to do my job right now? And we called it IJSA. It stands for job safety analysis which is the worst name in the world. Usually when that happens, you have the option in
SafetyCulture today where they can create a password for the auditor as well. I think we had like 60 or 70
people in a couple of weeks, which is like crickets, right? If you've got 60 or 70
people using your app, there's nothing happening. It wasn't flexible enough. It was too restrictive. We had to find a way
that made it easy for everyone in every industry. What is the tool? What's the way that everybody universally agrees on managing safety and quality? And then it occurred to me. It's like the checklist was the thing that everybody used. It's like since the 1930s the aviation industry starting using the checklist before a plane took off. They would do a preflight check. Even like the McDonald's bathroom
has a checklist on the wall, when it was last cleaned
and who by. So if we could build an app that was a easy way for people to build checklists, then that would help them
manage safety and quality. Within about three months we had an airline from South America
email us and say, Hey, we're using your app
for all of our checks now on our aircraft. It's amazing! But the update that you guys
put out this afternoon broke the report builder. If you can't fix this,
our fleet could get grounded if we can't have this
information available. And I was like, damn! And so, yeah, I rang Al
who'd gone home. I'm like, Al, I got good
news and bad news. The good news is we've got
an airline in South America that's using iAuditor. The bad news is they're really pissed. Yeah, I think that was
the first point where we kind of went
people are really using this. This is real, like someone
in another country has downloaded our little checklist
app and started using it. Yeah, we're chatting last week about like structure and how we go and what we can overlay
on the top black. I think whatever structure
we put in place next we'll sort of want to enable
us to at least double in size, or at least
get a lot of the way there. There’s lots of ways
to build a product. You can get outsources, You can get someone,
either onshore or offshore, to build the product for you. But it doesn't allow you
to really iterate quickly. that everyone who's building
that product, or as likely to have intuition around
the problem they're trying to solve. We got our first system
built in Australia with this awesome software firm. And then we saw this new
technology come on the scene. And it turns out like this
you can get like developers for really cheap in India. Wow, we can get like
five developers for the price of
like one developer. This is amazing! Even if they're 50 percent
as good as our developer, there were five of them. So that's like awesome,
like we're getting way more bang for our buck. So we outsourced all
our software development, and it was terrible. The front end of it looked really good, so like we had like at that stage I think it was 160 schools all building their yearbooks
in this amazing system. And from their side it looked fine. But when on the backend, you need to like to
print a yearbook, you need to export a pdf,
it didn't export a .pdf. So we had to recreate 160 books in the very software
we're trying to replace. So we had to literally
get every image out of the book and look at
what they'd created and re-design every page
again from scratch. And that was probably
one of the points where we're just like
this is not good. Have we had any data come through from this email campaign today? Uh...It's broken, yeah. It's it's coming through. Yeah. It's just...zero percent. Yeah. Companies can what
we call bootstrap, which is grow organically. So you build a product. You sell the product,
and get some revenue, and only when you
get that revenue do you hire another person. The problem is that there is
so much more competition now, and the markets are
moving so much faster. There's a high likelihood
that others will start after you and just walk straight
over the top of you. So it's really important to be able
to raise capital ahead of time, hire teams that can
execute really quickly. We met a guy called Bill Tai
who's a sort of pretty prominent venture capitalist in San Francisco. He was the first venture
capitalist I've ever met, and I didn't even know that
there was this whole world of startups and this whole
thing in San Francisco. Mel sort of pitched him the idea
just like off the cuff, not knowing who he was. And we had a five-minute
conversation, and he said if I went to Silicon Valley,
he'd be happy to meet with me. That just like sparked
her sort of ambition, like, oh, rather than taking
these incremental steps by bootstrapping the business, we can leapfrog everything
take on a shitload of capital, and just like blow this up. I was working trying to put together this pitch deck for Bill. There was literally one night
where she stopped seeing. She called me up freaking out
because she's like, I can't see. I'm like, how long have
you been up for? She's like, 48 hours or something. So I then jumped on a plane
to Silicon Valley. I was sitting there trying to
have lunch with Bill, trying to eat and trying to look cool and trying to show him
the future of publishing while trying to stuff
my mouth with food so I didn't look like I wasn't eating
because I was too nervous. And he said that if
I could find a tech team, he'd be happy to invest. You're going to hit brick walls, and many brick walls
in creating these products. Every founder goes through moments of, is my product good enough? Are people going to buy it? And it's it's just really tough. It's particularly tough when you've put your
heart and soul into it, and you've given up
everything else. The sacrifices are everywhere. When I went to San Francisco for the first time, I was there sleeping on my brother's floor, getting rejected all the time. I'm trying to grow this business, and I was running out of money. Every month or so there'd be a knock on the door or a phone call or a debt collector or a summons on a thing, and then you would focus everything just to get rid of that. And then those debts would build up. Uh on the home front your time with the kids and family and loved ones. You dragged them all in. You are all in. It's your self-worth. It's your you know, it shouldn't be, but it is. It just is. I had had a marriage that had broken up. I had shared custody with my daughters, so I had the girls one week
on one week off. If the money's not in the bank,
you don't have the money. These things can
fall apart at any time. You'll lose it all. It's horrible. It's a horrible way to be when so much of your relationship is about lack of money. Just the logistics of having
five, six people in our garage all sharing one toilet with my kids. My wife, she wanted
to really believe in me, very convincing where
we'd talk about our dream and it's going to work. And it's always like it's going to work in a month. It would just be everything's just around the corner. You're hanging in there. You're hanging in there. And I remember I'd be in the supermarket, and the card doesn't go through. And you go, oh, my God. I'm so sorry. They'd say, that's fine. Just leave. Leave the trolley there. I said, I just need to go and transfer some money. I'll make a phone call, and I'll be back. I'm sure a couple of times
I just had to leave. I think a couple of times
I did just leave. It's just too hard. At the end of the year, in 2008 Jodie sort of sat down with me. I said to him, I can't do it. I just can't do it any more. And he said to me, um yeah. I remember two months being something that he said. He said, just give me two more months. Yep. I said okay. Two more months. I'd seen the pain. Like I'd seen the pressure. Andre told me about the conversation. It's like Jody really wants me to pick a date where you know if it's not working by then, we'd go out and get normal jobs. Then we just launched into we thought we need an investor. You know, we can't keep trying to do this ourselves. I remember thinking, well,
we need a business model which is you know a great
way to go in your business. First time we're constructing
actually a revenue model was for to raise money. We were pitching and everyone was like,
oh, we love your passion, but I don't see
a business model. The date came. We were like, no, no. We're so close! I know we said this date. And it was like another date. And we were like
just get us to this day and it's like this really
cool thing is about to happen. After the second date
didn't come through, well, I said we've actually
gotta do something here. And we we did look for jobs. And I think that that's
what felt like a failure. We're behind on all this stuff, but we need to make money or let's be honest we're going to have to close this in two to three months. You're telling yourself,
oh, we need to focus more. And Justin comes in, and he's like, what about if we did like a wine group buying site? I was like, oh, you got to be fucking kidding me. I said yes, but this might actually make some money. I think that our initial
fear around that model was we didn't want to be selling the cheap low-end clearance-type wines. When we came up with the idea of we don't need to be that. We can go for the premium to super premium end of the market. Once we'd come to terms with that and agreed that we'd never sell out, Vinomojo is born. Wines at really amazing savings. One deal, one day. We got a cease and desist letter from a trademark attorney representing a public company who had a wine called Mojo. Basically said that they want to stop us trading unless we changed our name. We were two days out from launch. We're in our office, and it's by this stage about 9 p.m. And we are drinking, and we are feeling honestly pretty fucking desperate and a and a bit delirious. So you know we we continued to drink and throw ideas out and have like you know just that conversation. Oh, you know, Vinomoto, Vinomodo, like trying to work out how little we could change this so it didn't seem too shocking to the people that had signed up. After substantial amounts of amazing wine, um I said why don't we call it VinoMofo for the motherfuckers that are trying to steal our mojo? I went, ha! Yes. Great. Love it. No, come on, seriously. We need a name. Bloody mofo stole our mojo. And what started as a joke, my friends, got some momentum, and here we are, Vinomofo. Vinomofo.com it is. So what do you do? Look. You register, and every day you'll find an email in your inbox with a deal. On the Monday we launched, we switched logos over without ceremony. And then we put a story on the About page, and um and we launched. I was sitting on edge going, oh, this would be nice if we sold a few cases, you know? We got a tipping point of 10. Maybe that was too ambitious. And then it sells like like um think it was 43 cases. And I'm like, holy fuck! That's pretty good! We probably made
more money in the first month that we had in the last six months for the other business. And then that doubled the next month. And then that doubled the next like it was just went nuts. So we were like all right. We're winding those motherfuckers down, and we are all in on this. So that's exactly and I'm like I love this business. I love selling wine. Good to see you. How you doing, buddy? Good, mate. Uh, looking good, hey? Yeah. It's all come together. Yeah. It's coming along. Yeah. Our view is that it's really hard to build a great company. It's not hard to sell the shareholding of a great company. Love it. So good! Yeah. I don't I mean the with the new new ceiling going in and all the lighting, it's going to come up a lot. It won't be as busy. So we're looking for founders that can build really great profitable stand-alone valuable companies and don't want to be doing anything else. Once they've found the thing they love doing, they want to keep doing that for the rest of their lives. Yep. And then that's the top there. That's the top, yeah. We're just about to put it on it's ready to go We weren't thinking about investment. Well, what I just thought I was going to build a normal normal profitable business. That's what I knew is is you know you exchange value with someone. You give them value, they give it back, and you grow a business. That's that was my approach. Blackbird Venture Capital Rick Baker then saw it and um reached out and came up to Townsville, walked literally down our gravel driveway and into the garage. Luke sort of pulled us in and said
Rick's coming on Thursday. You boys should probably
wear some shoes eh. Luke was really worried about whether his office would look grand enough, whether he had enough people, whether it looked big enough and serious enough for us. It all went pretty well except for the clocks. Luke had read that we are looking for companies that are global day one. It's become a bit of a cliche for us at Blackbird. Global day one where we really want founders who dared to hit the world from the beginning, And so Luke had read this on our website and put up these clocks on the wall. He said we looked like an international you know company in the garage. We tried some double-sided tape roll on them and stuck the clocks up on the wall, and then sure enough they stuck. And these things are are light as a feather. And and so we you know we got Tokyo and London and New York all all up there. We noticed you know Tokyo started leaning out, and so I'd get up and kind of sort of just put tape care back on, and anyone like a drink? No? And on the way back sort of fix London up and go and sit down again. As Rick's sitting there talking to me, you know, Tokyo just falls off the wall and crashes on the ground. Rick turned around on his chair and looks at the clock and oh, you just you just lost a clock. And Luke says, ah, gee, that's that's never happened before, has it? Lunch arrived. I mean, you know we put on a good spread of Subway it was about all we could afford. Yeah, well, I quite like Subway, so I was very happy to have the Subway. I didn't know what to do. We'd never met a VC before or venture capitalist, like I don't know who or what these guys are. And it worked. It worked. They loved it. But actually what impressed
us was the fact that here were eight guys in literally a garage in Townsville who had built this app that was being used by tens of thousands of people all over the world. And so we went from oh, my god, like how do I survive? How do we get through this to woo-hoo! We've got $3 million in the bank, and we don't know what to do with it. ...need to create a website so that's sort of keep these like your public and your private, so like available for anyone on the Web. When I first went to San Francisco we were still calling it Fusion Books. We were just going to take Fusion Books to the next level, and then I was like, well, we probably need a different name because Fusion gets used quite a lot, and books is quite limiting. I went on a year-long hunt for another name and eventually settled on Canvas Chef. Canvas Chef was a crap name. The most dorky name ever. I even like had a little chef um icon. So the idea is that we can take high-quality ingredients, so stock photography, visual assets, illustrations, stock photos, layout, and then you can put them in for design. Everyone hated that name, including myself. So we're sitting there, and Mel really liked the name "Canvas," and we had this French engineer at the time, Ollie, and he's like in uh in France a canvas is "canva." And we're just like, aaah! -That's amazing. Same metaphor. So like there is normal like... Do you want me to draw it Building technology at scale is really hard, and to build a scalable system that cater to 20 million users or 100 million users, you really need an exceptional engineer. More expensive behind mobile or tablet or any other device. And also add some landscape. Oh, that's awesome! Investors and rightly so more readily fund people that have a technical co-founder or have a lot of technical expertise. Was a lot of Google engineers in Sydney who were sort of disgruntled, and so we used that opportunity to sort of like really hit up a couple of their best people and one that was Cam. So the first time we met, Cam had a startup already. Yeah, I was chatting to you about HMTL5 and what you can do with it and how you might take Fusion Books from Flash to HTML5. And it was interesting, really interesting at the time, but you know I was deeply into my own thing at the time. Cam said no, then Cam said no to consulting work and then Cam said no to joining us. Everyone rejects you. Neither of you had a
technical background, but you'd manage to create this pretty good product. He messaged us one day when we were in the States. He he said he couldn't get Canva out of his head. I think I could see in that there was a good mesh between us where we could join forces and create like the ultimate company that that had it all. Then when he said yes, it was pretty incredible because all of a sudden we went from having no technical co-founder to like ticking that box and having an amazing one. When we had the first meeting, before we even finished our pitch, boom! George wanted to invest 500 Startups. We had another... We didn't
even finish our pitch. Small teams can get products out and attack global markets now. That also means that there are tens and maybe hundreds of other people trying to do the same thing. In about three months in, we're invincible, we get a call from the producer whose deal was featured that day. They've just gone like, oh, boys, I'm so sorry. You got to pull the deal now. I'm like, what's up? Why? It's going great! No, no, no, no, no. My national sales rep for X Y Zed big retail wine giant just called me and threatened to pull our whole account, they buy $200,000 worth of wine from us a year I can't I can't put that at risk. When we we're chatting to them, they're like, look, I'm so sorry, but you know if we continue to supply you, we run into some major issues with other people that take a big portion of our wines. We can't get any good wine. If we can't get any good wine, we got nothing. It really is a race to win markets, build products to to take market share in the long term. And companies need to scale really quickly. We're starting to sketch out some of the projects that we're hoping to do next year. It's so fast-paced. It moves so quickly. The scale at which you grow presents all sorts of problems kind of like a symphony of chaos. To be successful, you need to be able to do things like sit down on a Friday night and decide that something's not working. We had a backend that was getting harder to build on. So we didn't start out thinking we're building this for millions of people. We started out just hoping someone would use it. We had to change all the architecture and build this thing so it could scale, build a true platform that was that was global. We decided to build it across on Amazon which meant rebuild everything. We had to move the whole thing across live, 1.8 million records from Google across to Amazon. We thought it would be a 3-month project, and 10 months into it there was no end in sight. We're running out of money. We had customers that rely on us from all around the world, and we had to try and move all that data from one platform to another, make sure that we didn't lose anything, and still figure out how to do this. We're uh just going into the boardroom now. we've got four days. I can remember Rick just kind of looking at me going, what the hell have you got us into? There's a fair bit of stress, and everyone's working really hard to get things done. We didn't know when
we were going to have the new backend out. I'm doing videos to customers telling them it's coming next month, and then next month would come and go. Things are getting stressful, and that's when I'm waking up in cold sweats in bed at 2 o'clock in the morning just like holy shit! How do we do this? What's uh sort of working, not working, I'm going to fix for it. I put everything into this. There was no Plan B. The clock is ticking, you know, that uh you've only got a certain amount of money, and you're spending a certain amount each month. You know, you've got 18 months to deliver on a whole load of things that you promised. It's so hard when you can't see a way out, like everything you can think of is not working. We decided we needed to grow really quickly, or we would die a slow death. Again I was like oh, come on! We were like, what do we do? Grow? Fast? Like tomorrow? And there was an email in my inbox, and it was from the CEO of Catch of the Day who were at the time is Australia's biggest online retail group. So this email was going, hey, we want to get into wine. We like what you're doing. Justin and I are chatting, and we're going, alright they're going to ask us what we're worth. And we're like, uh, I don't know. What what do you think? And we just kept saying these numbers until we kind of could like would giggle. So we went into this meeting that we thought would be really casual. It was like super hostile. One of the founders had only just been told about us. He's on a rant as we're walking in. Oh, here they are, wasting my fucking time... Oh, I can tell you already, boys, I'm not going to invest in you because, you know what? We build companies. We don't buy them. He's going, you tell me, why we should invest in you? I'm like, oh, do I really go hard here, or do I not? I'm going, do you really
want me to tell you why? He's yeah! I mean, I want
you to tell me why. I've goin', okay, it's because the wines you're selling at the moment on your site are so shit that anybody that has a half a clue about wine will also then think that your sunglasses and your sneakers and your frickin' holidays are shit! So you need us because we know wine, and it's like that. I'm thinking, oh, he's going to just throw something at me or he goes, what are you worth? And without hesitation, BANG! We said our number. Twelve million. And the guy went, like, what the...? He's like, wow! We were thinking a lot lower. And I'm not blinking, and I'm not saying anything. There's just silence. And then it's like, Ah, that's ridiculous, right? And, we actually stood up
and went, really? If you're not going to be serious,
we're out of here. But sure enough it settled the number a lot higher. And we could start we could start fighting against the bigger players within the industry and actually make it a viable alternative. Uh, we're about to go live
with the new backend, So, we had everybody here moving all of the old data across to the new Cloud. It was the climax of everything we'd worked for for the last year. Holy shit Uh, it's been a big weekend. It worked like clockwork. We were so happy. We were just we can't believe that this thing's you know now happened after a year of our lives had gone into it. SafetyCulture is on its way to becoming a billion-dollar company. All those sleepless nights, all the stress, everything else, that that that was the training for the real show. Congratulations, everyone. Twenty-two million in the bank! We see that so often. People uh you get the big press release. You have the big party. Everyone's real excited. You got the money in the bank, but it's it's really just the beginning of the journey. We're still just getting started. We put up just over 10 million users now using Canva, but with 3.5 billion people on the internet we have an extremely long way to go. When you take venture capital funding, you light a fuse. At some point those investors want to get a return on their money, so you have to keep moving forward. This is just a ticket to the dance. Super excited about this town hall. Justin's going to give you an update on Singapore But, you know, you start with two people in a garage, and you are everything. We've had um we've had a great lead-up. We've um we we started a marketing campaign. And then you get like 20 or 30, and it changes a bit um as far as culture and influence. And then you know you get to a hundred, and then you got no chance. You're only 2 percent
of the entire company. For many founders, raising capital creates a lot of stress. A lot of people now are dependent on you. When you have nothing to lose because you got nothing, it's pretty easy to take risks. But now you got a lot. So I worry about not changing and therefore being obsolete. I worry about changing too much and therefore people not liking us any more. The difference is shifting your mindset from like we're building just this product to we are now a company. It was only two-and-a-half years ago that we were in a little hot garage up in Townsville. Paul then introduced us to what became Index who then led the most recent round for 23 million. It's such a unique opportunity to get to do what we're doing, to be able to create a product that's affecting millions of people across the globe and potentially billions. And to be able to work with such incredible people where everyone's so passionate and creative and pouring their heart and soul into something and seeing that tiny little idea turn into reality. Well, it's an interesting I think phenomenon that founders tend their ambition tends to increase as they build their businesses. I think that if you feel like you're done, then there's no point in being here any more. That feeling like it's constantly in its infancy, constantly having to reinvent itself, that's the fun. Well, if you don't have to sell a company you build, if it like can just be just great thing that everybody all around the world wants and uses. You don't get to be a billion dollar company if you take a $30 million offer. And it's a pretty brave founder who says no to $20 million. It's an even braver one who says, I'm not about selling even for billions of dollars. I want this to be a stand alone company. I want it to be something that impacts the world, and I want to run this company. There have been many opportunities to sell the company to date. A lot of people like what we're doing, but we just have so much we'd like to do yet. It would be insane not to continue down this crazy road. If you happen to read one of the articles talking about our coolness today, it may seem like we've got it all figured out. We don't. It's hard and it takes equal parts of unwavering belief in yourself, but also brutal humility and self-awareness to be able to see what's not working and change it. While there's many elements that I'm extremely proud of, our team, our product, our community, our progress, it's still extremely early days for us yet. And there's a huge amount of room for improvement across every single facet of our company. Once you believe in the business so much that you'd grow it globally, I think you understand well and truly that this is going to be a long journey. Without any any one of you, it wouldn't be what it is today. We're definitely going to need everyone's help to grow from where we are today to where we hope to be in the future. A small team of people changing the world, like that is the time we live in. It's it's unprecedented. Technology's just the enabler that's allowed us to do that. So whether we build this incredible company that completely changes the whole world or we just build a really successful company that has a big impact in certain markets, that's the bit that's unwritten right now. That's the next chapter for us. This is just the fucking beginning.
