Why I built Noviscient.

“I was a chemical engineer and we were building chemical plants. What you find is that these things you're building are not necessarily in places you really want to live.

So after a few years of that and I decided to go and travel, I did a little bit of skiing and I'm sitting at the top of the mountain thinking, well, maybe I could do this forever. All the guests have gone and the sun is setting behind these snow peaks over on the Grossglockner.

And then I realised. No, I can't really do that, it's just not me.  

So I ended up saying, okay, what do engineers do if they want to change? They go and do an MBA. An MBA is a natural course because engineers at least used to not be taught anything about business, commerce, finance, companies. It was all purely in hard science.

I did an MBA in Melbourne, then I joined Macquarie Bank, worked in what we call technology investment banking. We had a $50 million venture capital fund through the 90s and we had an eye up towards Silicon Valley trying to work out; okay, how do we really do this venture capital investing and what are these series A, B, C rounds?

For five years, we did that and I had success with one company we found that was about to run out of cash. We injected some cash, they ended up listing on the ASX and NASDAQ. It was a search engine company before Google called LookSmart. In the time of Lycos and AltaVista and all those. When that industry was still competitive.

And LookSmart had been being funded by the Reader's Digest, who at one point realized that it's readership was getting very old and dying. They finally ran out of any excess cash and had to stop funding LookSmart. And so we came in and said, okay, we'll bridge you through and then got some further funds in and they become kind of successful.

That planted the seed of me running my own technology business.”

There has to be a better way.

It is time for change.