Richard White

In my occasional address, I’m not going to create a lecture. You’ve done your lectures; you’ve graduated now. I’m going to try to inspire you, I’m going to try to motivate you, I’m going to try to give you a vision of the future. I’m going to do that initially by connecting you to the university, to the past, to the present and to the future.

So, almost exactly 15 years ago to the day, I was sitting there, a newly minted master’s graduate, having done a lot of work during my master’s degree to try to discover what the future held in my business. I found that engagement with UTS was enormous. I had a wonderful mentor in Ken Dovey and many of the other academics, and I was able to do things that I never thought were possible.

I literally wrote the business plan for WiseTech Global, subject by subject, in my master’s degree, and by the beginning of 2002, just about six months before I graduated, I decided to act on the plan. I took the various assignments and started implementing almost exactly according to what I had written. I hired 16 new staff, told my marketing manager I’m going up the other end of the office; I’m going to build a new company, please don’t disturb me – you run the company. Let me know once a week how things are going. I recruited those 16 people and I built the product that I designed in the master’s degree. I built it in the way that we’d designed it in the master’s degree, I built it for the marketplace that we determined in the master’s degree that it was the right market, and we released that product in 2004, and that became a runaway success.

It propelled the company forward very rapidly. We suddenly found ourselves in a number of countries in the US competing with the world’s best and biggest, this tiny Australian company, very pugnacious, very defined and definite in what we wanted to do, and that grew and grew until, in April 11 2016, we listed on the Australian stock exchange. Today the company has a market valuation – I haven’t looked at the price today, but yesterday it was $2.8 billion. And that started in my basement in my house in Newtown with actually five staff, not eight, but that’s close, and I jokingly say that I founded it with my Mastercard and a lot of sweat equity. So, every one of you that’s graduating today should recognise that the opportunity in front of you is so vast, so important and so available to you should you decide to put in the effort and do the hard work and build the ideas that are in your head into something valuable.

So that’s sort of the past. And a lot of that’s got to do with the university. I would not have been able to take that business that I built in 1994 to where it is today had I not had that experience in a master’s degree. It’s very unusual for a CEO, for a company, however large or small or successful, to decide to come back and do a master’s degree, but I’m incredibly glad that I did and I’m incredibly glad that I met the student cohort that I had and the academics and lecturers that I had because it fundamentally gave me the future.

And now today: so, we are, I think suddenly, in the last few years, technology has become the subject that everybody wants to talk about, whether it’s machine learning or AI or self-driving cars or deep engineering around technology and what it’s going to do to the future, we as technologists are suddenly flavour of the month, or I suspect flavour of the year and flavour of the decade. You stand at the foothills of an enormously powerful journey that is deep and meaningful and important and will actually do enormous things for Australia and for the world. We have, we are going to, as technologists, we are going to shape the world. We’re going to make things different and better, and we’re going to have to do it – there’s going to be some social disruption as we do it, because industries evolve. You’re already seeing huge disruption – look at advertising, look at newsprint. Many other industries are being eaten alive by software and by technology. And that is going to continue and probably accelerate.

So today, we stand as an important cornerstone of the future. Where we stand today gives us an understanding of where we’re going to be in the future. These jobs that we are creating in IT, they’re not going to get outsourced to another country. They are not going to be turned into machines. The work that you do is probably the one industry that can’t be automated anytime soon. And that gives you enormous power and certainty in order to project yourself forward. It also provides enormous responsibility for us, because we have to do it the right way, for the right reasons, at the right times, with an understanding of what that’s going to do to the world we live in. We are going to change the world, but we have to do that in a way that we understand its consequences. It’s inevitable that the world is going to change. It’s inevitable that you’re going to be involved in that change. It’s inevitable that you’re going to benefit from that change, if you focus on your talents, your motivations, your inspirations.

You’re going to be a thought leader of the future from where you stand today. But it also behoves us to think deeply about what that means and the ethics, the moralities and the issues that arise from that position that you hold. Now, the university is becoming a key part of the future – not that this university hasn’t had an enormous part in my past; I’m enormously engaged and respectful of this university, and you should be too. You should look back at what this has done for you and find ways to continue to engage as an alumni, perhaps in advanced degrees, perhaps bringing other people to the university, but certainly encouraging people to understand the value of a university that has such a strong practice-based culture, such a strong industry engagement and such a strong way of creating graduates that actually can do things the moment they start work – and even, for most of you, start work before you graduate. So that’s very important.

Now, to the future. As technologists, we are going to create that future – we’re going to live in that future. And it’s going to be very different to the world that we live in today. Many jobs, many manual jobs, are going to go. They’re going to be replaced by robotics, by machine learning, by computers, by automation. And those things that go have to turn into benefits to society. We’re not going to be able to stop the coming revolution – it is coming. It might take five years, it might take 15 years, but it is coming. But we have to do it in a way that allows us all to improve the quality of our lives, the quality of society, the quality of the world that we live in.

Now, Australia stands incredibly well positioned, and I say that because most people say the reverse. Most people tell you that we are weak in the position in the world, that the only place you can go is Silicon Valley, the only real businesses are overseas. Australia’s very good at mining and banking, but everything else is a bit weak. That’s just wrong. That’s an attitude that belongs in the past. Where we stand today, all the opportunity’s in front of us, and we have enormous benefit. We have a very stable society, a strong rule of law, a society with very low corruption, with very strong economic credentials, with enormously powerful institutions, academic institutions, to drive us. We are not without our problems – we have issues. We are not bringing enough females into technology, and that’s a supply side problem that starts at the very earliest days of primary school and with the social environment that happens in the family and in society, but we can overcome those things. We stand as an opportunity for the future. Australia is uniquely positioned in time zones. So people think well, Australia’s a long way away. Well actually, I did business with the US in the mornings, with the Americas in the mornings; I do Australia, New Zealand, China business during the day; and I do European business in the late afternoon. Now, my days are sort of long because of that, but that gives the company an enormous reach that other companies don’t have because of their location.

Let’s talk about Silicon Valley for a minute. Silicon Valley is seen to be the creative hub of the world, and it does have some of that. But it has become enormously inward looking, and very expensive to be in Silicon Valley. The one thing that Silicon Valley still has is a lot of private equity and funding. It’s expensive and difficult to hire people in Silicon Valley, it’s very tough to grow a business in Silicon Valley, but it’s easy to get funding. WiseTech Global, however, went for its entire life and it never took private equity. Nor did Atlassian, another very famous Australian company – not until the very late stages. We took some funding a year before IPO to help us with the pre-IPO preparations; Atlassian took very little funding until it went close to NASDAQ. Australian companies have the benefit of not being able to get funding easily. I’ll say that again. Australian technology companies have the benefit of not being able to get funding easily. That means you have to be self-sufficient – you have to know how to wash your own face. You have to be able to build a business that’s profitable from the very beginning, and that makes a much better company and a much better industry and a much better society. Money isn’t an answer for everything; it’s sometimes the biggest problem.

So you stand in Australia as a place of opportunity with all of the possibilities of the future and all of the responsibilities that this entails. You and everybody around you can help change the world. It’s all for you to do. You have to be motivated, you have to have the right inspiration, and you have to keep focusing on it. It took me 23 years to get the company to market, so it wasn’t a short job. I didn’t get [clicks] overnight – it took a lot of effort, a lot of time, a lot of learning, and every one of you can do the same thing. I started with very little, just some smarts in my head and the drive to make it happen. Every one of you has that available to you should you choose to pick it. Every one of you can be a change agent for the future. Every one of you can help the university become better. Every one of you can help change society for the better, and every one of you can be part of the future that we all are going to live in. Thank you very much.