Afterwards he joined the university’s IT division and was part of the AARNet project, which brought the internet to Australia for the first time. “It was a fabulous learning experience,” he says.
But Hackett had no intention to stay at the university; he wanted a company of his own. That ambition was realised in 1991, when he co-founded Internode with fellow graduate, Robyn Taylor, who left in 1993.
Hackett’s company spent three years finding a direction, and then focused on being an ISP. “It was a perfect time to catch the internet wave in Australia in 1994,” he says. “As soon as ADSL was available we were onto it.
“The biggest challenge for us was trying to catch the balls as they fell out of the sky. It was like a gold rush and by serendipity we were where we needed to be,” he says.
Picking the right moment to hit the market is an important part of any business and it’s no different in the tech world, says Hackett. “Timing can be critical in technology waves; five years earlier and no one would have bought it, five years later and I would have been behind the wave,” he says.
This year, it was another new wave of technology that led him to sell his company to iiNet. The deal was completed in January. “Things are happening in the industry and the national broadband network (NBN) is accelerating them,” he says. “The internet is heading towards commoditisation and to succeed in that world you need enormous scale. iiNet/Internode is one of the four entities in Australia that have the scale to compete.”
Growth through sale
It was the similar culture between the two companies, and his relationship with iiNet founder Michael Malone, that gave Hackett the confidence to sell. “I previously said to Michael that Internode wasn’t for sale, but if it was, he’d be the first guy I’d call,” says Hackett. “Both companies have some very similar drivers: high quality of service and high quality of outcome.”
Hackett has had a friendly rivalry with Malone, who started iiNet a couple of years after Internode. “I’ve known [him] for the better part of a decade,” says Hackett. “We felt we were on the right side of the fence … both of the ‘challenger’ mentality. In Australia, everything is Telstra and everyone else is a challenger.”
The “challenger” mentality has now become part of Internode’s brand. “I think I would like us to be the challenger that makes people happy. We already hold that position and I think we have a good chance of holding it.”
Hackett says customers will pay a premium for quality. “Because I started out serving high quality software to a small number of customers, I realised … I could sell quality outcomes for slightly higher prices. There’d always be a market for quality. It may be a smaller market, but it’s a market that doesn’t go away,” he says. “I’ve always been personally driven by quality.”
Board member and aviator
Hackett doesn’t intend to take his money from the sale and run; he’s in the business for the long haul (although he did fulfil a lifelong dream of buying a plane with the sale proceeds).
In July this year, he left his position as leader of Internode to take up a board position with iiNet.
“My strategy was to [equip] Internode [to] continue to succeed in this era, not just to pull money out of it,” he says. “It’s because I’m so mentally involved in this industry that I didn’t just want to sell and move away. I’m now the second largest shareholder in iiNet [after Malone]. I’m not on the board for the money; I actually really like this stuff.”
