Dean McEvoy

Director & Co Founder, TechSydney

Ceremony: 16 October 2018, 2:00pm- UTS Business School, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology

Speech

Wow, it’s great to be here today. I’d like to acknowledge firstly the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of this land and pay my respects to their elders past and present. I also want to acknowledge the Pro Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, presiding deans, University Secretary, members of the University Executive, Council, Academic Board staff, family and friends, but mostly you guys for getting through a tough degree and standing up and graduating today, and also for giving me the opportunity to stand here and speak with you.

Now, normally at these kinds of addresses, you’re expected to give some kind of advice, so when they called me and asked if I’d come down here to do this, I didn’t quite feel old enough to give you guys advice. So I went to bed and slept on it, and I woke up the next morning and had a look in the mirror and the first thing I noticed was I was losing hair in a place where I really wanted to keep it and I was starting to get hair in places I really didn’t want it, so I started to think maybe I am a little bit older.

So I started to count back the 20 years since I left university, and I started to realise maybe I have got enough years under my belt to give you some advice, So, I sat down and thought about it, and the one piece of advice might seem a little counterintuitive given my background, but it is – whatever you do, don’t just go and get a job. Don’t just go and start a business. I want you to go and start a movement. I want you to go and join a movement, because a movement’s very different than a business.

Businesses make profits and money and create services and products, but movements do something a little more. To sound like a little bit of an American beauty pageant queen, they make the world a better place. But if you think about it, the movements you see these days, you know, Apple is more than a business; it’s a movement. Google is more than a business; it’s a movement. And in Australia, we have a few lesser-known names that are starting movements and beginning them. Companies like Atlassian and Canva, [name] and one of the best driverless car companies in the world called Zooks was started by an Australian. I want to talk to you today and give you some tips about I found my movement and some ideas about how you might go about finding yours.

But first, a little bit of context about me. A little bit of a confession today: I actually didn’t want to go to university; I wanted to be a fighter pilot, ever since I first flew in an aeroplane at four years old, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. So, I joined the air force. I got in, and they did all their testing and stuff to see what sort of a pilot I’d be, and realised I’d be a bloody terrible pilot. So, they said, ‘Look, we’ll let you in, but we’ll only let you fly in the back of the plane, a navigator in the F18s.’  Now I’ve never really been one for sitting in the backseat, so I quit. I thought, I don’t really want to sit in the backseat of an F18; I want to drive the thing. Thank god, because I would have been an absolutely terrible pilot. I got lost in my own driveway, and by certain, I would have caused some kind of international incident by now if I had have got in, so thank god for that.

But I was pretty dismayed that I had missed my opportunity for my dream to be a fighter pilot, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, so I went and did a business degree, because that sort of keeps your options open, and it gives you lots of opportunities, but most of my first year of my business degree was really working out how I could party four nights a week and still pass my exams, so 52 per cent in an exam was an extra night I could have gone out. But eventually, later in my degree, I did start to pay attention.

Funnily enough, somehow I managed to score a graduate position at Arthur Anderson, which at the time was one of the big five consulting firms. Now, when your parents and other people tell you that you should go and get a job at a big, secure, safe company like a big consulting firm, just remember that company does exist anymore. So, maybe it’s not such a safe option. Maybe you should look at other options. It did, though, however give me a lot of confidence, so at 18 years old I was standing in front of people who had 40 years’ more experience than me, interrogating them about their business practices and how they should and shouldn’t run things. Kind of arrogant for an 18-year-old. But I also had no fear. I was the only graduate on Friday night drinks that used to go and talk to the partners. Everyone else was scared of them; they thought they were kind of these surreal, crazy people, but getting to know them, they’re just normal people and often I’d be out, having a few drinks with them and some of them even became my friends, even though I was just 19 and they were the head of these big organisations.

I didn’t really know what I was doing but I did it anyway, and you know what? I found out a secret, and it’s something I’ll share with you here today: there’s a whole bunch of people out there who are doing really amazing things in the world who have absolutely no idea. It’s a little secret because you should do it too. You’ve done your education now; you’ve learned enough. Don’t ever let that be an excuse for you not doing something. And the other thing to think about as well, the other reason why you should focus on something innovative is because if you do something innovative, by its very definition, you’re doing something that’s never been done before, so there’s nobody out there that has any more experience than you.

So, don’t ever let that be an excuse for not doing something amazing in this world, and it’s why you should always try and do something innovative, so you’re just as qualified as the grey-haired person right next to you. So, after my – I did a graduate position at Arthur Anderson, left my university degree, and then I thought, I don’t want to get a job straight away; I’m going to go travelling. And this is the first key important ingredient: defining your movement, and that is find something you love. But the problem is, when you’re sitting here now as a graduate like I was 20 years ago, you don’t know what you love. You haven’t tried enough stuff.

So, the next best thing is go and follow your curiosity and travelling was my first experience of being able to do that. Getting up in the morning, thinking about what excites you and doing something about it is following your curiosity. I came back from my holidays and decided to keep the ball rolling and I followed my curiosity into the thing that I enjoyed most at university, which was marketing. So, I went, called a mate whose brother owned an advertising agency, put on my best suit, printed off my resumé, and went in for a chat with him. Ah. He laughed at my suit, because he was wearing jeans, and he looked at my resume though and he said, ‘Look, I don’t have a job for you in the advertising agency at the moment, but I know this strategy consultant who needs an assistant for a job she’s got going for the next six months, and you’d be great.’

So, this is back in 1998. He called her, I jumped in a taxi straightaway and went and had a coffee with her. Now, back then there was no email and phones, he couldn’t forward the email because I’d actually just given it to him in paper form, so he just talked my experience up over the phone. I met this lady, sat down, had a chat with her, she asked me about my experience at Arthur Anderson. I talked about what I did in business, but mostly I talked about the partners I’d been out drinking with on a Friday night, and she obviously thought I was a lot more experienced than I was, because she offered me a salary three times more than any other graduates that had been around.

To this day, up until last year, it’s the best job that I’ve ever had that paid the most, mainly because I’ve never really had a job, but it still was a nice achievement. I went and worked with her for a while and eventually my mate’s brother who owned the advertising agency heard I was doing a good job with her, so he hired me into the advertising agency as long as I didn’t wear the suit. So, turned up there and this advertising agency had this little, small division – and again, I followed my curiosity. I followed it into this little division that used to make interactive DVDs.

Now, this is going to blow your mind, but back in 1999, businesses used to make interactive e-brochures on DVDs. They’d post it to businesses and people would look at them, put them in their computer and it would look like a really crappy website of today. But this company went on to become one of Australia’s largest web developers, and I was one of their earliest employees, so I got to learn a hell of a lot about the internet, how it worked, particularly though how the intersection of business and the internet and technology overlapped. And given that there weren’t that many of us that did that, I was probably one of the best in Australia, because there was only a few of us that did it, and so that’s the second point I’d say about finding your movement – get really good at something. That’s the next step.

And finally, by following my curiosity, I’d found what I’d loved, because I loved technology and business, and because I was one of the people that got exposed to it before anyone else really was able to, I got really good at it. And then one day my dad called me, and he said, ‘Dean, we’re selling the family business’, which was a bar and restaurant in Glebe called The Roxbury. And he called me and said, ‘We’re selling it – the auction’s next Wednesday. Do you want to come along and support the family on the day we’re selling the business?’ And this is a great achievement for my dad and my sister and the whole family, because he’d been working his butt off in it, he was going to retire, we had lots of interest in people buying the place, my sister was pregnant, so she was going to have a baby, so they were going to enjoy a really well-earned rest.

He told me the date of the auction was next Wednesday, September 12, and I put it in my diary and made sure I was going to show up. And then that day happened. September 11, 2001. The day before the auction. And instead of us turning up at this auction site and seeing the beautiful pictures of our business that would encourage someone to buy it, we saw pictures of, you know, death and mayhem and how many people had died in the twin towers. At that time, no one wanted to buy anything, everyone thought the world was going to end, and my sister was off about to have a baby anytime. So, I quit my job at the web development agency and went and helped out at the family business.

Now, by this time I’d got really good at online internet marketing and technology, but actually applying that to your own business is a very different matter, and so here I got to learn about how to apply that and had to have the stress of how you could actually make payroll that month. It was very different from working in a consulting business where you’re working on a pay cheque and clients’ money versus actually trying to work out how to may payroll the next month.

But here’s the next step. So, remember the steps I’ve gone through to try and get on my movement – the first is follow your curiosity until you find what you love. When you do that, do something until you get good at it. The next step, though, is to try and find a big problem in the world. And this is where the problem found me. I was working in the bar one day, I was running the pub for the family, and I had all the website set up, I had all the online marketing working, people were inquiring, and then one day someone filled out a form for a reservation in the restaurant – this is, again, keep in mind, 2002, and in order to check your email at that time, you had to plug the modem into the wall, connect through dial-up, which actually blocked all the phone lines so the EFTPOS terminals didn’t work, and then wait half an hour for the email to come down, and then read your email. There was no iPhones, nothing like that.

And so obviously, I was busy that day serving customers in the bar, and I missed the email. And so, these people came in, we had an event on that night, they couldn’t come for dinner – it was kind of embarrassing. I was thinking though, even though I know so much about technology, wouldn’t it be great if they actually – if that email was converted to a phone message and phoned me and said, ‘Hey Dean, you’ve got a reservation for three people. Push one on your phone to accept it, push 2 to reject it’ so I could go and check the restaurant diary with a pen and paper, fill it in and then accept or reject the reservation. This is where the big problem or idea hit me when I was at the coalface of serving customers.

Thankfully towards the end of the year, we sold the businesses for, in October 2003, and I quit – I went straightaway and started my first online business, which was called Booking Angel. It did exactly what I described. It was an online reservation system for restaurants that allowed them to receive reservations in the way that I described. Now, I realised some money from my dad and a few investors and went off around town signing up as many restaurants as I could. It kind of worked – we made lots of reservations; the restaurants loved it, the consumers loved it and it kind of worked, but the one problem was it just couldn’t work out how to get paid for it.

Signing up the restaurants and getting them to pay was really, really difficult. So, after many years, in 2007, so I started this in 2003, late 2003. In 2007, I was like, ‘Right, I’m going to go and try and crack it in the big time.’ So, I packed up everything and went off to Silicon Valley. So, from 2007 to 2009, I pitched just about every single investor in Silicon Valley, and not one of them said yes. I went around town, I closed some deals with some websites. The system, again, worked – lots of people were making reservations. We were more popular on most of the restaurant reservation websites than the leading restaurant reservation business in the US, but we just couldn’t get paid for it.

We couldn’t work out how to sign up enough restaurants to convince them to hand over their money. So, in 2009, I was just about the end of my tether, but I was pitching one last investor. His name was Kevin Harts. He is the founder of Event Brite; many of you have probably used it to attend an event – they IPOd the other day. He’s a very smart guy and it was something about the way that he asked me about my business that made me stop pitching it and actually listen to what he was saying and try and think about my business in a really clear way. And he asked me, he said, ‘Dean, you’ve been doing this since 2004; it’s 2009 now. You’re a smart guy – why are you still doing it? And in fact, what’s wrong with Booking Angel?’

And so, I thought about it and I could explain to him, I said, ‘We knew the actual key to success of this business was if we signed up a restaurant today and we delivered lots of reservations to them tomorrow, they loved us, and they never left us, they attributed everything that happened after that to us and to our success. If we sign them up today and it took them a while to get reservations, they never attributed that success to what we did; they thought it was something they did.’ So, we knew the key was instant gratification. Sign up today, get reservations tomorrow. And so, we used to do kind of crazy things to engineer that in the background, where we would go and run special offers on other websites, and that helped drive reservations really quickly to our booking system. And he said to me, he goes, ‘Dean, that sounds really similar to a business I just heard about tin Silicon Valley called Groupon.’

And what Groupon did is they emailed people a deal every day; if enough people bought a deal then they collected that money off the consumers, took a cut of it and gave it to the customers. And I was like, ‘Wow, this is amazing. Tonnes of reservations in a single day, and instead of you being a cost item in the eyes of the restaurant, you’re a revenue source.’ I knew that this was going to be like the Holy Grail of awesomeness, and so I was going to go head-to-head with Groupon on the US.  Then a week later, my dad called me and said, ‘Your grandfather’s passed away.’ Poppo, we used to call him. And I was devastated, because I was close to Poppo; he used to teach me magic tricks – I was going to do one today, but not the time.

And I was devastated. I had to go home, but I was devastated for two reasons. I looked at my bank account and I had $900 left in the bank, and I knew that wasn’t enough to get an airfare back to the US, and I’d been sleeping on friends’ couches for weeks, I didn’t have any money or anything else I could do. So, came back, and I was devastated. My grandfather had passed away and I went back to the funeral, but I was devastated also because my dreams of being an entrepreneur were dead as well. And I got back to Australia, was wallowing in my own self-pity. At 32, I had to move home, move back in with your parents, which is of course great for your love life. I was broke; in fact, I was more than broke. I owed people lots of money and I had no job. And I was like, ‘What am I going to do?’ And the folks were encouraging me to go and get a real job to start to pay them back some of the money that I owed them, and that kind of made sense, but I brushed myself off, I stopped wallowing in my self-pity, and I managed to convince someone to go and build the first version of a group buying site in Australia, and I managed to convince them to do it for nothing – they did it for a percentage of the business – and we launched Australia’s first group buying site, which was called Spreets, on the fourth of February 2010, which was my birthday. It turned out to be a damn good birthday present. But we launched on that day, and then our first day we did $4000, which was probably more than Booking Angel did in a month.

So, the growth continued for there; we raised money from some European investors, about $800,000 from some guys who’d invested in Spotify and Skype, and by September that year, we were doing a million dollars a week. We had 40 employees; it was growing like crazy. And just 12 months after we launched, Yahoo Seven approached us and they purchased the company for $37.5 million, just 12 months after we launched, which was an amazing feat. I wish we could do it every year; I haven’t quite worked that one out yet, but the thing I’m most proudest of is that that movement that we started, it generated over half a million dollars in revenue in the year that we sold it across the whole industry, it employed over 1000 people and it contributed over $1.5 billion to the local economy.

And so, I’d finally worked out that missing ingredient to find my movement. So, what was it? Think about it again: start with something you love; if you don’ know what you love, follow your curiosity til you get there. Then get really good at something – so, I got really good at internet marketing and internet business. And then find something the world needs – a cost-effective way to deliver customers to people. But what was the final piece? It was working out how to get paid. So, the business model that actually worked that allowed us to go and collect money from customers in a sensible way. But the thing about getting paid, it’s not about making money for you. It’s about understanding how to be inclusive in your business model.

How do you allow – because if you want to get great people to come and join you on your movement, you have to work out a way for everyone to benefit from it, so it can’t be about you coming to work for me to help me make money, because no one really wants to do that. How do we go and start a movement where everyone makes money? And that’s a thing that we kind of did, because I got to pay my parents back, I got to pay our investors back who made 18 times their money. Our key employees made money, and that was the key to making our movement work better than anyone else’s.  It’s just the beginning for me, though.

That was five years ago and since then I’ve started a few movements. I’ve started one in commercial property, I started another one that Attila mentioned – Tech Sydney – which is about making Sydney one of the best places to start and grow a technology company. We recently had some success lobbying the state government to build one of the world’s biggest technology precincts across the road, and that just recently got greenlit and hopefully goes ahead. UTS have been huge supporters of Tech Sydney from the beginning, so thank you for them, and hopefully it does something really impactful for this world. In closing though, we spend so long trying to increase our standard of living. I want to encourage you guys to try and increase your standard of life.

How do you do that? By finding your movement. Focus on what you love, get really good at something, focus on a problem the world needs, and work out how everyone can get paid. And when you do this, this is a Japanese word called ikigai, and ikigai is a really important thing to understand, because if you follow a life of ikigai in the Japanese culture, it’s meant to also extend your life. They say people who live like this like [14?] per cent longer. So, you’ll live not only happier, but you’ll live longer. And if you translate literally what ikigai means, it means your reason for being. So, I’ll leave you with this one thought: don’t just go and start a business. Don’t just go and get a job. Go and find your reason for being. Thank you.

 

About the Speaker

Dean is an entrepreneur and startup investor and the Director and Co-Founder of TechSydney, Australia's only member funded technology industry group. TechSydney is focused on making Sydney the most desirable place to start and grow a technology company.

Dean has built an impressive career across the full lifecycle of building technology businesses. From startup to multinational, from early stage to exit and now liaising with all levels of government.

He started codifying business strategy with Australia's best web development agency during the Dot-com boom of 1999 to 2001, and directly learning business operations when he owned, managed and successfully sold his bar and restaurant.

An expert in assisting the development of high growth technology companies, Dean is also an investor, and is one of the limited partners at Blackbird Ventures, one of Australia’s largest venture capital firms.

He is an investment and startup advisor via Binary Investments, and is a founding mentor and investor at Startmate, one of Australia’s premier startup accelerator programs.

Recently, TechSydney partnered with UTS to host the Women in Venture. This two-part event series aims to introduce female students at UTS to the fundamentals of venture capital, and connect them with Sydney's leading venture capital funds.

Dean has graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Sydney.