Scaling Up: Lessons From The World's Best CEOs and Founders

Phil McKenzie, the CEO of Pacific Smiles Group , the ASX listed ( PSQ:ASX ) dental services business is our final guest of Season 5. Phil joined Pacific Smiles in 2018, taking over the previously founder led business and completely reshaping the corporate culture. Many listeners may be familiar with Pacific Smiles given its listed nature, or as a customer of one of its 115 dental clinics around Au...

Episode 2 of our People and Culture mini series features the phenomenal Anna Binder , the CPO of Asana , the $15b NYSE and LTSE listed technology business that is changing the way businesses work, collaborate and thrive.  The genesis of Asana is important to frame this conversation; When co- founders of Asana Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein were both working at Facebook, of which Dusti...

This episode is the start of a Scaling Up mini series hoping to illuminate some amazing growth stories in regards to people and culture. We go deep on the scaling challenges that all companies face when it comes to people and culture and highlight what best in class can look like - from the role of a great, strategic CPO, to operationalising the values of the business, we are hoping this mini seri...

Cameron McIntyre is one of Australia's most respected executives, having played a major part in the Carsales.com (CAR:ASX) journey over the last 15 years, initially as the CFO in the late 2000s where he was charged with seeing the business' transition to the ASX boards, and most recently as the CEO, where he has been guided the business tremendously well through their next stage of growth. Carsale...

Pro Medicus may well be one of the most under the radar growth stories of the world. Many listeners would not have heard of Pro Medicus (ASX:PME) , nor its low profile and humble CEO and founder, Dr Sam Hupert. Which is funny, given that the business started in 1983 and has a current market capitalisation c$6.5 billion. This is a story of patience, persistence, and perseverance. An inspirational s...

Katherine McConnell, the founder and CEO of Brigte is revolutionising how Australians are financing and decentralising sustainable energy solutions in their homes. A former Macquarie banker, and mother of two, Katherine initially mortgaged the family home to go after the opportunity of becoming the leading consumer finance business in the space. And that she has – Brighte has financed ten percent...

Welcome to the fifth season of "Scaling Up"! Expect an ecclectic mix of incredible Australian growth stories, told by their founders and CEOs. Some of the episodes are with businesses at the earlier stages of their scaling up journey, as well as a few of Australia’s largest listed businesses. Regardless of scale, or business model, there are some common scaling pain points, and we try again to unc...

Abhishek Gupta is the co-Founder of Circles Life , Asia’s first fully digital telco. Everything a Circles customer experiences is completely online, bringing the same level of sophistication to the telco world that consumers enjoy in many other walks of life, such as their food delivery or ride sharing.  Circles is currently kicking off its second act. Having penetrated Asia initially with it...

David Obstler is the CFO of Datadog (NASDAQ:DDOG) , a $30b hyper growth monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. Few current active CFOs have been at the forefront of fast growing technology companies like David has - he is the seasoned pro that founders and CEOs have turned to to help them scale effectively for the last 25 years. You may remember from a previous episode the anecdo...

The first episode in this mini series is Jill Woodworth, the CFO of Peloton (NASDAQ:PTON) . Since 2018, when Jill joined, Peleton has been on a hyper scale journey – she took the reins of the finance function when the business was a private, $200m revenue company. In under 4 years since then, it is now a $4b revenue business listed on the NASDAQ.  The next two episodes are moving the spotligh...

Ethan Berman, was the CEO and founder of the NYSE listed Risk Metrics, until it was bought by MSCI in 2010 for US$1.55b. RiskMetrics, which was spun off from JP Morgan Chase in 1998 and became the market leader in risk management software systems. We need to transport ourselves back to the late 90s – a time of floppy disk distribution and only a handful of pioneer SaaS companies. From writing...

Howard Lerman is the CEO and co-founder of Yext (NYSE:YEXT) a US$360m revenue business that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.  Maybe listeners have had interactions with Yext and never known it. Every time you google a business, or ask Siri a question, the up to date information is being powered by the Yext platform. We all know of that terrible customer experience of getting misinfor...

Therese Tucker is the founder, former CEO and current Executive Chair of the NASDAQ Listed, $6b market cap business Blackline Inc. (NASDAQ:BL) Therese is a pioneer in every sense - an inspiring woman who has written her own script at every point in her career. As a 40 year old single mum of 2, she decided to bootstrap an enterprise software company - building Blackline over the next 20 years into...

Welcome back for another series of Scaling Up. Season 4 will again explore some of the great growth stories from around the world. To kick off Series 4 is the the CEO and co-founder of Braze , Bill Magnuson – one of the world’s hottest technology companies. Based in New York, Braze is a customer engagement platform that works with some some huge brands and businesses like Gap, Deliveroo, The NBA a...

A very special guest rounds out Season 3, with many listeners very familiar with Hamish, Magellan, their investment philosophy and sustained success.  People's minds will always drift to how good an investor Hamish is having compounded capital at high rates of return for 15 years, it is perhaps easy to ignore what an incredible business Magellan itself is, having scaled from humble beginnings...

Robbie Cooke is one of Australia’s most experienced CEOs – having seen 'big' in his time as CEO of Tatts as well as entrepreneurial and fast growing in his previous role at Wotif.com . Robbie of is now the CEO of the $2b Tyro Payments , which listed on the ASX last year as the second biggest technology listing ever in the history of the exchange. We cover a range of topics in this conversation – f...

Myles Glashier is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Phocas Software . Most listeners would not have heard of, nor read about Phocas, as this is a story that is largely unknown, but certainly needs to be told.  20 years ago an Aussie backpacker in London, falls into starting a bootstrapped business selling on premises business intelligence software. Fast forward 20 years, and Phocas has carved out a nic...

Paul Bassat makes for a unique 'Scaling Up' episode. As most listeners will know, Paul and his brother Andrew, along with Matt Rockman founded Seek in 1997 and in doing so carved the path in Australia for great technology businesses. This was a time when the internet itself was in its early days, and it is hard to fathom the foresight required to build what is now a $8b company . Paul left Seek in...

Simon Griffiths is the Co-Founder and CEO of Who Gives a Crap . People listening might not, until now, appreciate both the scale of the business and also the deep community impact it has had in the developing world, where Who Gives a Crap donates half of its profits to charity each year . From the humble idea that they could sell toilet paper online and deliver a great customer experience, all the...

Sankar Narayan, the CEO of SiteMinder is my guest today and the tapestry of his career is equal parts fascinating and inspiring. Born into the India middle class, Sankar has swung from the branches of a variety of roles across the US and Australiatech scene that have enabled him to bring a unique perspective to his current role. Sankar has become one of Australia’s scale up experts, cutting his te...

Mike Frizell and James Edwards, Co-Founders of Pet Circle , are the quiet achievers of the Australian consumer business scene. Their story is largely untold and unknown. Whenever newspapers publish lists of Australia’s largest e-commerce players, Pet Circle is always a surprise omission to those in the know. Having grown at an astronomical rate over the last decade to now over $300m in revenue, Mi...

Luke Anear, CEO and Founder of SafetyCulture , is undoubtedly one of Australia's finest modern entrepreneurs. A boy from Townsville in Northern Queensland starts a software company from his garage with no technical expertise. SafetyCulture is now a pin up of the Australian technology scene – a billion dollar valuation, revenue growth at break neck speed, tens of thousands of customers across 85 co...

Rick Stollmeyer co-founded Mindbody in 2001 and is still the CEO 20 years later. This is his story as much it is Mindbody’s story; from his learnings as a nuclear submarine engineer, to selling CD ROM software from his garage with his co-founder Blake Beltram, to now scaling a multinational software company.  Rick is one of the most passionate and deeply mission-driven CEOs you could ever hav...

I am thrilled that Anneka Gupta has joined as the guest of this episode. Anneka is one of the rising stars in the US technology scene. She is currently the co-president of LiveRamp , a New York Stock Exchange Listed $2b business with offices around the world. Her own corporate journey is as fascinating as the company itself – a journey that highlights the potential of ‘generalists’ with ambition a...

Jonathan Corr is my guest on this episode of Scaling Up.  Jonathan is the current CEO of Ellie Mae. This episode is a wonderful deep dive into the world of a highly experienced CEO who has had the benefit of seeing the full spectrum of the growth curve. Ellie listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011, relatively early in its journey. Jonathan oversaw and came through all the common scalin...