David Gibbs

It must be a management challenge to keep these balls in the air, particularly in a public company where you’ve got to go to the market every six months and report some volatile results. Your half-year result (revenue fell) was perhaps an example of a business in transition.

I think wherever you are you have to have respect for shareholders. We probably come under a little bit more public scrutiny than would have been ideal for where we’ve been over the last 18 months or so. Hopefully we’re through the rest of that and hopefully being a public company plays to our advantage because it gives us a degree of visibility which is good when we get it right.

In terms of trying to read the market and figure out what’s going to happen in a rapidly changing environment, what are the strategies for trying to gather that intelligence?

We have all the good disciplined processes where we listen to our sales team, we work out what’s going on and we follow what’s going on in the marketplace and we follow our competitors. I must admit I learn more from spending time in the US and how this game is being played out in the US at the moment. If I don’t get over there every three or four months and listen to what’s going on, the whole game can move.

Does it make it hard to run a business like yours from Australia then?

No not particularly, not if we stay well and truly plugged in here. There are plenty of good ideas here and given we have our international sales team I don’t think it matters where we run a business like this from. Our Pets product is probably a good example, we’ve got that running in Telstra here, we’ve got it running in a couple of US environments, we showcased it at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and that’s creating very strong calls through a number of our European carriers and our Latin American carriers.

If we stay true to our model of ‘we want to be able to build a platform’, we can do that from here just as well as we can do it from elsewhere. And I’d like to do it from here too because I guess the board takes the concept of innovating out of Australia very seriously, as we try to do with Launchpad.

Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve seen through Launchpad? What’s the quality of Australian ideas like in this area?

Very varied. Launchpad was quite an interesting experience for us. I think the good news out of it for us was that it reiterated for us the good old adage that luck is where initiative meets opportunity. So we took the initiative and put it out there and the two deals that kind of came out of it one which was My Level and Inscribe. They were really great, they were really meetings of minds. In My Level’s case it was an idea, while Inscribe it was a business that had put in a couple of years of hard yards. Neither of them had real access to the working capital or the global networks to go to the next level. So those were actually awesome in the meeting of minds and the alignment and how quickly they happened.

But I think we equally saw what I would describe as a quite conservative and protective and almost recycled ideas. I talked to a couple of my colleagues who’d run incubators before we started and they advised me correctly that the biggest risk is when you put a program like this up is the amount of time you spend in dealing in the people who have had their ideas knocked back five times already and you’re going to be the sixth one who knocked them back.

So when we try and relaunch it is see if we can’t be almost a bit like Pollenizer and be much firmer around the early screening of what we will and won’t let in. We learnt a lot around how to I think get the message out there and more broadly into the networks, and that’s partly what we’re trying to do with My Level and Inscribe, talking more around the successes of things because we’re not a big nasty corporate that mauled them.

So there are firm plans for another round of Launchpad funding, aren’t there?

There certainly are. One of the challenges I think for any organisation and particularly a corporate one that’s gone through the type of restructuring that we’ve been through is forcing yourself to do the innovative things that disrupt you. And if we don’t do that, we’re not going to learn and that would be the risk of sitting here in Australia being myopic, not challenging ourselves through that kind of innovation.