This is episode 6 of The OpenVC Podcast. In this episode, Oliver Palmer, founder of TigerSpike (sold for $85M), shares his journey from building an innovative mobile tech company to co-founding DQ Ventures. He discusses de-risking the startup journey for founders, lessons from selling a company, and the value of seasoned advisors.
Harrison Faull (03:53.32)
Oliver, Thank you for coming onto the first season of the Open VC. It's an absolute pleasure to have you here. Where are you calling in from today?
Oliver Palmer (04:18.788)
I am in Sydney in Australia. It's evening here. So yeah, sitting on the other side of the world from where you
Harrison Faull (04:26.242)
Awesome. So you've been a man of the world, having grown up in Cape Town, or been born in Cape Town and then grown up in Nairobi. What took you... No, come on.
Sydney. So you've been a man of the world and having lived in multiple countries I'm going to take you all the way back to the beginning so you were born in Cape Town and then grew up in Nairobi. What were your parents doing out in Africa that had you growing up out
Oliver Palmer (04:56.194)
Yeah, so I was born in Cape Town in 1976. My father was a diplomat in the British Foreign Office, so he was posted to various places around Africa. So there's a sort of family that sort of trailed around behind him wherever he went, we sort of followed along. So we did three years in South Africa, Cape Town, and then we were back in Holland for a couple of years, and then we moved to Nairobi in 81. And then we ended up staying there because Nairobi became a bit of a hub.
And then we were in Nairobi until 92 when I came back to the UK. it was an amazing sort of childhood from the age of the age of five until 16. I grew up in Kenya and it was, it was a phenomenal place to be wonderful sort of childhood experience. And then yeah, moved back, my A levels in the UK. And then I went to university in Durham for three years. And then I went traveling after university and I got as far as Sydney and I never left. So I had 14 years in Sydney.
Oliver Palmer (05:50.166)
got married, had kids, and then we spent eight years in Singapore and now we're back in Sydney. So that's my life travelling the world in a nutshell.
Harrison Faull (05:57.128)
Awesome. And very adventurous back then. In terms of Sydney, I love it. think it's, I'd love to spend a few years there if I can, work permitting. But you being a young, recent grad, you found your way into quite an exciting startup in a boring space, if that's fair to
Oliver Palmer (06:16.191)
It was a fascinating space at the time. I arrived here in 1998. In 1999, I started working for Global Gossip, which is what you're referring to. It's a chain of internet cafes. One of the jobs we had as people working in the stores was to teach people how to use email and to actually set them up with a Hotmail account. So lot of backpackers and travelers and people would arrive in Sydney as their first stop and they didn't have email. So they would come into the store and they would pay us $25 to set up a free Hotmail account for them.
and then they would travel around the country and at every sort of tourist backpacker trail, it was Melbourne, Byron Bay, Darwin, Cairns, there would be a Global Gossip shop and they would pop into our store and they would check their email and meet up with fellow travelers. And we had a calling card product that allowed people to call back to the UK or to Canada or wherever they were from. And so we were sort of a hub for backpackers, but it was super early on in the days of the internet and websites were just sort of starting to emerge, 97, 98. And the guys who came up with the concept were
very forward thinking. And just to carry on that story a little bit, one of the fascinating things was just the way the company kind of went towards the end. I remember sitting in a meeting in 99 2000 with Vodafone who was saying that they wanted to provide a SIM card for every traveler who arrived in Australia, every backpacker who came in and they would brand it Global Gossip, be what's called an MVNO, which is like a sort of like a boost mobile, something that sits on top of the telco.
Oliver Palmer (07:44.156)
and have a Global Gossip one. And the founders were at the time were like, no, that's not our thing. We provide fixed internet services for people to sit down and use a computer. Nobody's going to come in with their laptop. Nobody's going to have a mobile phone and travel around. It's just kind of not going to happen. And to me, that was fascinating to just sort of have your core, which was providing internet access, but then not to sort of see where things were going and not that I'm any better at it than they were. We've missed trends and all sorts.
But just the sort of you look back and you think that must have been one of such a key decision because the company's changed and nobody goes to an internet cafe anymore, but everybody's got a mobile phone. So there's a really interesting insight into how you've got to keep adapting and keep changing as an entrepreneur. You can never just rest on your laurels and think you've kind of got it solved. You've got to be always, always kind of adapting to new technologies.
Harrison Faull (08:34.627)
Was that your first experience of entrepreneurship actually joining that startup or had you had a few ventures before
Oliver Palmer (08:42.722)
No, no. So my business partner, Tiger Spike, he'd had all sorts of ventures. He was selling t -shirts at school and he'd try to make money in all sorts of ways. I hadn't at all. I graduated from university, went traveling and one of the first jobs I got in Australia was working with Global Gossip. I think the biggest thing it taught me was that you didn't need to be anyone special to start a business. Peter and Philip, the founders, were brilliant people, super smart, intelligent.
But there was nothing magical about them. There was no mystical quality that made them entrepreneurs. And yet they were two founders who built up a very successful business turning over millions of dollars in the space of sort of three or four years. And I was a part of the journey. was sort of one of the first 10 employees or whatever. But it really sort of showed me that pretty much anybody can start a business. it doesn't, it doesn't, there's not some mystical thing that you need to have, right? You can just start the company and away you go.
that was, that was probably the thing that taught me that owning a business was, was the way to go. Sorry, my daughter walked in, which was really annoying. So there's a little click on there.
Harrison Faull (09:50.012)
That's okay. You can speak to her if you like. There's no... we can... No? Okay.
Oliver Palmer (09:54.263)
No, she's gone. She's just telling me something, but she's gone. all good. Edit. It was quite good. It quite good that bit as
There's, we can do some AI editing at the end and hopefully it can remove background noise so things like that should be able to get nullified but yeah it's absolutely fine. When I was playing with my phone I was just putting on do not disturb so it's not going to vibrate. Okay, time's up.
Oliver Palmer (10:19.678)
So we're Global Gossip, we've just done the Global Gossip piece, talking about entrepreneurship, showing that you don't need to be special to be an entrepreneur. You don't need to be an Elon Musk or whatever, so that anybody can do it. That was kind of the lesson I took away from
Harrison Faull (10:30.674)
Yeah, I definitely agree. I think it's actually become easier than ever to start a company. The amount of information people have access to, the amount of AI tools that are now available and cheap. There's never been such a little friction to actually taking that jump and starting something.
Oliver Palmer (10:47.806)
And we've sort of lived through that. So when we started Tiger Spike in 2005, I remember setting up servers and the servers were originally in our sunroom in a flat in Piermont. And at one point they actually got unplugged. And that meant that our website went down because I was hosting, had a fixed IP address and was hosting our website. And suddenly the website wasn't working. I went back in, plugged the server back in and hey presto, our website comes back up, but not quite 99.99 % uptime. But the other thing was we were then, when we sort of graduated from the really early days, we were putting
server racks in a data center in Sydney and maintaining them ourselves. And so we had, you know, secure access and going in there. And if something happened at 3am, then I was in there at 3am trying to work out why this server wasn't working or what, was sort of not happening along with our CTO. And now you spin up an AWS instance or whatever it is and you're away, right? There's nobody's maintaining hardware or worrying about whether their windows.
Oliver Palmer (11:44.434)
server licenses are up to date or crowd strike, whatever, it's all completely gone. And I think you're absolutely right. The friction to building a startup has been removed. I think it has democratized it in a lot of ways. It's sort of reduced the cost, the barrier to entry. But what it does mean is that there's a lot more noise. It makes it harder to stand out. I mean, we had certain skills amongst ourselves in the early days of Tiger Spike that were a little bit different from other startups, which gave us an edge. I could put a server together.
We could put services out there on the internet quite quickly. And then we hired engineers who could help it, make it more robust and scale it. Now, you know, pretty much anybody can do that. don't, there's the only, everybody's got the skills. and with AI tools, the developers are now kind of becoming democratized so that I can start to build applications and build services incredibly quickly. But it means you've got to really have something that separates you from the rest of the
Harrison Faull (12:23.551)
I think you're at the forefront of technology at the time and that's just evolved and it's kept getting faster. So the people at the forefront of technology now might be in the AI and our space.
Oliver Palmer (12:46.686)
Correct, exactly right, I totally agree with
Harrison Faull (12:50.175)
But for the audience listening who aren't aware of Tiger Spike and your story there, could you take us all the way back, even back to the idea, the inception, and the 12 or so years of your life that you built Tiger Spike
Oliver Palmer (13:04.03)
Yeah, so after Global Gossip, I decided that startups were crazy. It all sort of imploded and it was was a bit unpleasant. They went through voluntary administration, bankruptcy sort of 11 it is in the US. And then they traded out of it to their credit and they kind of turned it around again. But I thought, gosh, that's kind of, you know, that's full on your whole livelihood is sort of wrapped up in one thing. And I got a job with government here. I worked for the roads and traffic authority, big business, you're just a very small cog in a big wheel.
And after about a year of that, thought that this is just not for me. had sort of seen what Peter and Philip had done with Global Gossip, but I'd recognized that there's no reason I couldn't do it. And so my business partner, Luke, who's also very active on LinkedIn, as I'm sure you may have seen, but he and I, actually him and my wife, my girlfriend at the time were kind of trying to get something going with ringtones, as you mentioned. So my wife worked for a company
Oliver Palmer (13:59.166)
sold ringtones on premium rate numbers and she couldn't get hold of a bunch of sort Australia centric tunes, ACDC and that sort of thing. So she said to Luke, Hey, what do need to do? Can you create these ringtones? You've got a band. What are you doing? He was a chartered accountant working with KPMG, but he had a band on the side and it was very musical. So Anna said to him, you make these tones, we'll buy them off you and then we'll sell them on our premium rate numbers. And so we worked out how to plug his keyboard into his
Oliver Palmer (14:26.494)
keyboard players keyboard into a computer and he would bash out the ringtones and then we would send them to Anna and she would give us $50 for a ringtone and then they would sell them hundreds of times on a premium rate number to the Australian public so we were sort of the primary producer I guess of mobile content and this was sort of 2004 2005 and and from there we just started learning about mobile we I used to say to people that Tiger Spike was was a company
worked on color screen phones. So we were trying to provide content to color screen phones. And most people I speak to can't remember a time when there was anything but color screen phones. But sort of Nokia 3210s and SMS and all that little games were been going for a while, but we were focused on the early smartphones, I guess, the kind of ones color screens were coming out, larger sort of they could hold more content, run games, run applications on them.
BlackBerry launched and we were part of BlackBerry World. So we were doing stuff with BlackBerry and then it just became mobile. And when the iPhone launched in 2007, we were known as the mobile guys. And so we just had, we were inundated because everybody needed an app. mean, they didn't even have an app store until six months after the device launched. But very quickly people saw what was happening in the States and everybody wanted an application. So we were inundated with people and we were just hiring engineers as quickly as we could. We opened offices in London in 2000.
London in 2006, we opened up in New York in 2008. And at that point, we had sort of Sydney, London in New York, Apple and the iPhone had was going everywhere. And we were just hiring engineers and doing what we could to keep up and all bootstrapped. So it was all organic. We we had a bunch of challenges around that, but we hadn't taken on any money. And partly that was because we were located in Australia, the tyranny of distance, they call it's very hard. The local
venture capital environment back then was very nascent. There hadn't been sort of big exits. There hadn't been a sort of a PayPal mafia or any kind of large scale tech exits, which had provided a group of people with cash to put back into the ecosystem. And so we tried to raise money 2009, 2010, we would do trips to San Francisco, we'd go down San Hill Road, we'd go and visit the Rosewood.
Oliver Palmer (16:46.43)
Wonderful, wonderful time, but it was always not, you're not big enough. You're not making enough money. No, no, no. And then 2000 and 2010, 2011, Aegis, they were eventually bought by Dentsu, but one of the big advertising agencies kind of approached us. And then we had a sort of a mutual conversation and it seemed like the right time. They felt that mobile was becoming a bigger part of their advertising strategy for their clients.
and they didn't have the in -house capabilities. And we had location Sydney, London, New York, which really kind of helped them sort of see us as a Global play. And they invested 11 million US into the business in 2011 at a pretty good valuation for us. It allowed us to then kind of have enough cash to sort of really expand. And from there, we opened offices in Singapore, Dubai, Tokyo.
Melbourne and San Francisco very quickly with that cash, which was a bit of a change for us because we'd always done it organically. We'd had different strategies for different markets. The UK, we'd sort of won business by flying over there and being local. So we worked with the Daily Mail group and we worked with some of the banks and some of the airlines in London. And that was won by one or either of us going over there. And then we found the right person to manage it and then sort of grew it organically.
New York was a bit more of a strategic position. So in New York, the advice was that you've got to be on the ground. You've got to be meeting people. So we put in a core team of five people into New York. We did that in January 2008, about seven months before the financial crisis hit. fortunately for us, had sort of Australia really rode that out probably better than any other economy. And the Australian business did really well. And we were able to support the London and New York businesses.
And one of the things that that meant was that we were still standing when kind of the dust settled. So 2009, 2010, a lot of companies went bust, a lot of venture capital VC funded businesses couldn't sort of keep their head above water. And because we were sort of cash flow positive and not quite profitable, but running at break even, it meant we could support the New York office. so suddenly 2009, 2010, we were inundated with people whose prior previous mobile suppliers had gone bust.
Oliver Palmer (19:11.1)
And so it was the best thing we ever did was kind of keep the office going. It was not by design in any way, just sort of dumb luck that it happened. And then as alluded to, so we raised money, we opened up, we sort of expanded our Global footprint. We had some challenges with that. I mean, the hardest thing was that you've gone from a situation where you're very money conscious, you're very tight on what you do to suddenly having a large amount of money in your bank account.
and the option to say, right, well, we'll open San Francisco and we'll hire 10 people and we'll open up in Dubai and we'll hire six people and we'll win these jobs and there's lots of mobile work. So you just do it. And you lose that kind of that link between the month, revenue coming in and the cost because you've got this sort of large amount of money. And because we take an honest strategic investor, they didn't see us quite the same as in the same way that a VC had. So they were sort of fairly hands
They left us to our earn devices. They were investing in the business for the PR exercise and then for us to sort of tap into their client base, which was great, but they weren't really looking at us to be, you know, scale 10 X and get to a billion dollars. They had a different sort of strategic rationale for the investment. And so we sort of, you know, open the San Francisco office, hide all these great people. were next to the Moscone Center. I mean, everything we did was into the business. We're very fortunate in that Luke.
being a chartered accountant, having worked at KPMG, everything was sort of funneled towards the company, which was, which was lucky for us. weren't Sam Altman buying fancy cars and we weren't, you know, bankman freed buying houses in Barbados. was literally everything was pumped into the company. But after about sort of a year and a half, suddenly you realize that the large amount of money that you had has gone down fairly rapidly. You know, suddenly your burn rate in San Francisco is half a million dollars a year and you've only got
or whatever it was, 750 ,000. And there was no oversight. There was no sort of adult in the room to say, guys, you know, this is where you're going. This is your strategy. And if you don't get it right, you're going to screw it up. So we sort of, fortunately, however it came about through both the director from ADIUS and ourselves, kind of realized quickly enough that it wasn't sustainable what we were doing. And so
Oliver Palmer (21:29.438)
We were able to kind of downsize a couple of the offices. We sort of reduced size. We focused on the bigger bigger jobs that we were getting. We did the Emirates app out of Dubai, which is, you know, we've got some really big jobs because we had this Global footprint now and we were able to sort of get back on track, but we hadn't quite kind of used that cash as effectively as we could have done. And then in 2013, we raised another, we raised from a financial investor who really didn't care what Tiger Spike did.
It was an interesting conversation when they had no concept of mobile and development or what have you. But our rationale was that we thought they would help us drive towards an exit. We thought that they had a sort three to five year plan. It wasn't a huge amount. It was a sort of a, I think it was a six or $7 million investment, but they were looking to sort of make a return on that in a timeframe. And our feeling was that we would go along with that because it would help us get to an exit. We didn't see it as
grow for the next 30 years kind of business. And we also thought that without a financial investor on board, it would be more difficult for us to get the right kind of outcome from the company. So we brought them on board in I think 2013 2014 ish. And then fairly quickly, you know, things were looking good, things were moving in the right direction, markets were looking good. And we looked at we kind of were offers came in to, to potentially acquire the company in. So
Oliver Palmer (22:53.854)
Pause. This is a very long kind of diatribe. Is this OK? Or do you want to interject with questions? Is this all right? OK. OK. All
Harrison Faull (23:00.247)
No, this is good. Thank you. I think it's led by the questions that were sent over. yeah, I think it's all good.
Oliver Palmer (23:04.729)
Okay, yeah, that's kind of where I'm going. Okay. Unpause whatever the cat is. So so yeah, so 2013 took on a financial investor. And then very quickly, the company started getting offers led by our M&A advisor out of San Francisco. So we had somebody helping us with the money raise. And the reason we did that was because we felt we were so far away from the US and where the markets were that having somebody on the ground over there with our kind
best interest at heart would mean we wouldn't miss opportunities. So, so Carlos was an amazing part of the story. And then we sort of put it out there a little bit. Once we had one offer, we felt that if one company wanted to buy you, there's probably 10 that you've never heard of. And so, you know, creating a sort of a competitive tension amongst buyers is always a key part of the process. And so in late to sorry, in late 2016, mid 2016, Accenture
came and actually wanted to acquire the business. were setting up innovation hubs in all the same cities that we had offices and we were going to be a key plank of what they wanted to do. We got right through due diligence. They had about 80 people inside a data room, really, really focused on kind of assessing Tiger Spike and getting to an accurate kind of valuation and how it was all going to work. We all had nice big jobs with Accenture which is going to be very exciting. And then at the last minute, market shifted a little bit and Accenture's share price took bit of a hit.
And they had a bunch of deals on the table and they just cut the bottom, I think they cut the bottom 70 % of them by profit. And we weren't the most profitable business. We always had a path to profitability, but we were focused on growth and we were a high growth business. So we weren't throwing off cash like some of the companies were. So at the very last minute, almost two days before it was due to be signed, I got a call from the M&A advisor of Accenture and he said, I'm sorry, Oliver, just to let you know that we're no longer progressing with the deal.
And it was traumatic, I have to say. was very traumatic. was mainly because we'd got so far through the process. I think if it had happened sooner, we'd have been fine. We didn't really need to sell it, but we thought this was a great opportunity. We sort of had a plan for our future. And our advisor said, look, guys, you did everything right. They came very close. We knew the reasons. They knew the reasons, and they were happy to kind of keep going with it. But then things changed. And so he said, the best thing you can do is kind of put your heads down for 12 months.
Oliver Palmer (25:28.692)
and just really focus on hitting all the targets you told essentially you were going to hit. And then we'll kind of pop up in 12 months time with another year's worth of figures and hopefully another year's worth of growth and a larger kind of valuation. And we'll see who's out there. Maybe Accenture would come back to the table, maybe someone else who knows. And that's what we did. And then Concentrex were super keen. They really liked what we were doing. I
They'd been competing with Accenture on a number of deals at the time. And so there was some kind of good stuff for us in that. And the deal was done incredibly quickly. mean, it took just over four months from meeting the head of M&A in Singapore to actually signing the deal and us all sort of moving away on July the 31st. Seven years ago next week. So it'll be seven years since we sold the company in a week's time, which is very exciting.
Harrison Faull (26:24.435)
Yeah, it's a great anniversary. Hopefully you'll get together at least to celebrate that one. Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you for doing such quick rendition of Tiger Spike. There's a lot in there. There's a lot to dig into. To give more context to the listeners of the kind of things that you were building and developing, could you share perhaps like the one or two
Harrison Faull (26:47.634)
projects that you may be most proud of or even you know a disaster.
Oliver Palmer (26:51.121)
Yeah, definitely don't talk about the disaster ones, but but I will do. Yeah, 100%. So I guess some of the projects so we did the first we did the economist on the iPad. So when the iPad launched in 2010, I was my role is sort of a spokesperson. So I was giving talks on innovation and what was coming and I gave a speech about this new device that Apple was launching in 2010. We call it the ice slate because nobody knew what the name was. And I had a polystyrene cutout of the shape of what it was going to look
And I was trying to explain to people that it wasn't going to be a mobile because you can't hold this up to your ear. And we talked about being more of a lean back device, something where you could consume content in a different way. You're not kind of doing something quick and easy. You're not sitting at a computer. You're actually consuming content in a more relaxed environment and blah, blah. And then the iPad launched. We were development partners with Apple. So we had engineers actually over in Cupertino and we worked on some of early apps in Australia and in the UK.
We launched the Australian newspaper, which is Australia's largest newspaper, Global newspaper, sorry, national newspaper. in Australia. We launched that on the iPad. We launched The Economist on the iPad. We did a big Global deal with Time Out. So Time Out, the sort of travelers magazine, the city guide in London, we did a Global deal in all the places we had offices and everywhere there was a Time Out London, Time Out New York, Time Out Sydney. We worked on, I think I mentioned the Emirates
Oliver Palmer (28:15.053)
So we did the we had a whole team in Dubai working on the Emirates app. So it's kind of big, iconic sort of media and kind of lifestyle brands were coming to us. And that was one of the reasons we we sort of looked at investments. This was 2010 when the iPad launched and we just felt that other people were going to move into this space and we needed a big brother, right? We needed somebody else who had our back. We were one hundred and eighty hundred fifty hundred eighty people at the time.
And we weren't big enough to be dealing with some of these large corporates who had so many hoops you have to jump through and so many rules and regulations to launch software. So those are some of the big ones. There's a whole heap of things Australia centric channel 10 in the US. actually we did a preliminary design for Tinder. So we we kind of did the very first Tinder app, which didn't have the swipe left and swipe
Oliver Palmer (29:07.52)
And then they took it in -house and they built their earn app, it was done internally with Swipe Left and Swipe Right. that's, so we were kind of involved in, and now it seems so obvious, the whole, that kind of thing. But at the time, nobody had used and interacted with devices in that way. So like you said,.com, well match.com was an online dating website. So match.com has been around for years since the early days of the internet. And that was, that's still around today. That owns a lot of sub brands underneath it.
Harrison Faull (29:22.216)
Was it called matches.com? It wasn't even Tinder.
Oliver Palmer (29:36.233)
But no, Tinder was initially a startup trying to kind of, think, not sure whether match invested in it or something. yeah, so little things like that. We did a project, we pitched it, we did some initial designs, and then they're like, nah we're to do it ourselves. And then it became Tinder and you're like, my God, was part of a very small part of that kind of... So yeah, were kind of just known for, we had a great reputation in the mobile industry and it was super exciting.
Harrison Faull (30:01.694)
Yeah, you're not going to land any of those big name brands without a stellar reputation, being reliable, constantly over delivering and climbing the contract size and client values.
Oliver Palmer (30:11.337)
And also without huge amounts of competition, there weren't 50 mobile application developers to choose from. mean, later on it sort of evolved into digital transformation. And that was when we started working with some of the larger organizations doing internal iPad apps, moving a lot of documentation for training or for staff assessment or what have you for banks onto iPads. that instead of paper forms and what have you, things could be done on iPads. So we did a lot of that with of chartered with ANZ here in Australia.
So lots of kind of super interesting stuff just as the whole kind of digitization of the workplace had started to happen 2011, 12, 13 and then and then on. So yeah, it's really exciting.
Harrison Faull (30:52.593)
Wow. And in terms of the magic, what do you think made Tiger Spike special? I think you've referred to the culture and your quite innovative approach to opening small offices across the world. So even though you had a high head count in any individual office, it would still feel very startupy. People could make decisions quickly and there'd be innovation and you wouldn't be burdened with too much bureaucracy.
Oliver Palmer (31:16.231)
Yeah. I the magic, I don't know the magic of what TigerSpoke was able to deliver was really around the UI UX. We hired very, very talented designers who were able to build things that look good. And then we had engineers that could then kind of actually engineer them into into software. That was the thing I think that stood out a little bit was our kind of the focus on the UI piece, not the tech piece, nothing we built looked like it done done by an engineer. It looks, know, visually, it was very appealing. But in terms of from a company perspective, I think it's
down to the people and the culture. I think Luke and I and Dean, CTO and Alex Hall were very fortunate to meet Alex Burke, who's our CEO and who led the business through to the sale and then ultimately he became our GM. He was part of the early team, but we recognized quite quickly that we were great at the idea piece and great at the early stage, but we weren't necessarily brilliant at
was required to scale and the operational excellence that was required to deliver work for BT Telco, British Telecom or a Telstra or a Diageo or someone with that requires more than just kind of a bit of sticky tape and a hope that the tech will hold together. And Alex came in and brought in a team with him as well very early on when we got to a reasonable size and took us from
Oliver Palmer (32:39.808)
sort of a scrappy startup who could kind of fight our way through things to an operationally excellent sort of machine in each of our locations around the world. And along with Nick Newman, who was in the London office, the two of them really kind of operationalized what Tiger Spike had to offer and created the culture. mean, we've always had a culture of we always provide Friday lunch. So someone in the team would do Friday lunch for everybody in that office. So whenever you were in a Tiger Spike office on a Friday, you knew you were going to get a free lunch.
And someone in the office was going to do it. it might be in New York, it would sometimes be a picnic in the park with sushi in Tokyo. was a barbecue in Sydney. It was just, it was great. sort of sports on Wednesdays. So Alex brought in a kind of fitness thing. And so we had a personal trainer or someone in the team who would lead them, you know, yoga classes and all that sort of stuff, which it's not Google with kind of free food all the time and sleep pods and that sort of thing, but it's so important in the startup
Oliver Palmer (33:39.2)
because our model was to pay people at the bottom end of market rates. So we were always sort of kind of, if there was a scale, we were towards the end because it was the excitement of a startup. It was the challenge of working on new things and exciting stuff. And there's always options. There was an ESOP program that a number of our staff kind of were a part of. So there were lots of pluses for working in a startup. And so trying to provide an environment
Oliver Palmer (34:05.951)
young people doing cool stuff and having lunch on a Friday and exercising together and writing great software and building great apps. I think that was probably the magic of Tiger Spike.
Harrison Faull (34:15.339)
Yeah, you referred to it before of that culture that starts with that excitement, that giving employees value in the jobs they're doing, allowing them to have control perhaps over what they're doing and not be too micro -managed. It's a way to out compete large incumbents that are actually much more boring to work for, even though they are cushier.
Oliver Palmer (34:32.961)
Yeah, it is. it also comes down to, you know, there's always a, what are you going to get paid if you you're paying someone, if your job is worth 100 grand and you'll accept 90 because of all the pluses. But if somebody comes in and offers you 120, you've got to make that decision. Right. And so we were we were quite open and transparent with everybody. Alex, Alex Burke, as our our CEO, would talk about our results and how each office was doing and what revenue was coming in. And when people are aware of that.
it's kind of like, okay, I've got, know what I'm working for. It's not like there's millions of dollars being skimmed off and that the founders are sort of kind of, you we were all very, very visible within the company and working hard and doing what we could to make it succeed. And everybody felt they were all part of a team, all pulling in the same direction. Everybody knew whether we were, what we were talking about, whether it was acquisition or raising capital or just growing, whatever it was, we've kind of tried to as much as possible to be as open and transparent with everybody who worked.
Harrison Faull (35:31.01)
Thank you. Did you have much advice when you were growing this? Because if started in Sydney, you must have been one of the fastest growing or largest companies to have grown from Sydney. And I remember hearing that you decided to actually take some money off the table at each fundraise. And I really liked hearing the rationale behind that. So if you could give us a bit of an insight as to why that happened, that'd be great.
Oliver Palmer (35:50.429)
Yeah, so we were one of the first companies to be in the Deloitte Fast 50 for five years. We were the third fastest growing company in Australia in 2007. I want to say, don't know, there's a Sky Business News interview on YouTube. So you could search that up. And if you look at that, you'll see me talking about how Tiger Spike, I think we were third. I'm pretty sure we're third anyway. But the main thing for us, we were in it for five years. And that was really exciting because that's continued high performance growth over an extended period. It might be easy to go from a low base to
the high in one year, but it's hard to sort of maintain that growth. And it's run by Deloitte. So it's kind of audited and that kind of thing. So that was very exciting. In terms of this sort of the money off the table. because we bootstrapped for eight years, we'd obviously sacrificed an awful lot along the way. And our contention was that it was better for the investor to have founders who recognize what they built and had obviously sort of kind of sacrificed a lot along the way
but keep us hungry and within the business. So we looked at what we could have earned if we'd had our corporate jobs over that eight years and just sort of came up with a number and And basically we split that proportionately between the four founders at the time. So it wasn't a huge amount of money. It wasn't kind of life -changing. It didn't pay off a mortgage. buy you a house in Sydney even back in 2011. But it was something that helped
recognize the value of the shares that we held. in Tiger's Bank. They were worth something. We've always dreamed it was going to be huge and yes, it's going to be amazing and all founders think like that. But to actually tangibly, not just issue stock to the investor, but to sort sell down some of our earn shares as well as issue new stock and be able to put a couple of hundred thousand dollars in your bank account and recognize that you're also getting paid a salary and that you hold
an awful lot more shares in the company, just drives founders to kind of the right, it's the right sort of behavior. You're not, you're not sort of trying to overprotect your business and thinking all my eggs are in one basket, I can't possibly make a decision that might jeopardize that. You suddenly become sort of free to make decisions which kind of are in the best interest of the business because you know you've still got a lot of your wealth tied up in it. But equally, are sort
Oliver Palmer (38:03.04)
a little bit more prepared to take a few more risks because you know it's going to pay off in the end. So I think it's a really good thing. It's definitely a challenge to convince investors. And it's also, it doesn't work in an early stage. If you're sort of seed or even pre -Series A, the investment is in the team, it's in you. And every dollar that goes into the business has to be building the business. The founder hasn't necessarily kind of earned the right yet, perhaps they've got to show, but I think it's Series A or Series B or whatever.
Oliver Palmer (38:31.739)
if it's not astronomical sums of money, it makes such a massive difference. know, the heartache that partners go through supporting early founders and you keep telling them that it's going to work and that one day you're going to be sailing off into the sunset and to be able to show a little bit of a return on all the work that you've put in without having necessarily to get to that kind of exit, I think is really
Harrison Faull (38:52.324)
No, I think it's a great approach. There are some stories, I think probably Adam Neuman of WeWork is one of most famous examples of a founder taking a lot of money off the table, I think close to one and a half billion dollars. Yeah, yeah. And then try to back the whole company for 500 million.
Oliver Palmer (39:05.283)
I mean, what's the incentive, right?
Yeah, there were investors would say not a chance, right? Every dollar I want to put into the business has to be put to work. I want to turn it into into $10. And if it goes into your pocket and pays your mortgage or puts food on the table, it's not working as hard. But I think the right kind of investor understands the human element and understands that the business is only going to succeed if the founders remain in the company, remain hungry and remain focused on what the business is trying to achieve. And I think that's super important.
Harrison Faull (39:37.008)
Yeah, you said taking a bit off the table enabled you to stay risky with the business and stay hungry and make those decisions rather than perhaps being a bit more conservative with your decisions and potentially being outcompeted by the next guy that's willing to bet a little harder.
Oliver Palmer (39:53.076)
100%. Yeah. And once you've got a winning formula and somebody else just sort of sets up a business and raises a whole lot of capital, you know, like, you said, technology moves really quickly. And if somebody duplicates it and moves past you, you've suddenly got this, you know, that's very large part of a small pie, as opposed to a small part of a large pie, as many, many, many investors will tell founders.
Harrison Faull (40:14.577)
Yeah. So you had some like mini liquidity events along the way. And then there's a cheeky question. When you did sell out for $85 million, did you buy anything particularly special or is there something surprising that you spent some money
Oliver Palmer (40:32.276)
I did. I bought a brand new set of golf clubs from a company called PXG, which is Parsons Extreme Golf. And they were not ridiculous. They weren't gold plated, but relative to what I said, a golf club's cost, they were quite expensive. And I then realized that they were great and I loved them and I played lots of good golf with them, but I couldn't possibly buy another set of golf clubs for five years. So I kept those same set of golf clubs for five years and only
literally two years ago that I'd buy a new set so they were old technology. So no, it was interesting. mean, Luke and I have talked about this a lot and nobody went out and did something crazy, right? already had houses and not lots of houses, we had a house with a mortgage and so obviously then you pay off the mortgage, which is a big deal but none of us are
Koenigsegg or whatever the supercar is and there aren't too many boats in that any one of any of us has a boat. So, so no, nothing crazy. It's it's it's a weird feeling, right? Suddenly, or you feel like you're financially secure, and you think it's all good. But you're also young, like I was 40 when we sold Tiger Spike. And so it was an odd, weird kind of thing. I've got another 40 years of my life
I'm potentially financially secure for the next 40 years. So didn't need to get another job. If I if I sort of played my cards right. And then you go, you know, what do I do? I didn't want another job. I didn't want to go and set up another business. I didn't want to get into another startup because I felt I'd kind of done that. Right. I just invested 12 years of my life. I'd started from we started from two, three people in a in a very small room. And we got up to three fifty or four hundred, whatever it was when we when we sold. And I thought
I just don't have the energy to do that again. And I think that's a very common feeling. And then it goes, right? That's the key feeling for the first 12 months. And then suddenly you're like, God, I can't carry on, I've got to find some sort of purpose. And I'm definitely very typical in that kind of regard.
Harrison Faull (42:37.304)
So you're very into golf. Do you think live has had a positive effect on the industry or negative?
Oliver Palmer (42:42.286)
Wow, that was a curve ball. think Liv has shaken things up and I think it's amazing that it's opened the doors. You look at the crowds in Adelaide and in London and you look at the people who are being exposed to golf who never would have watched it otherwise and it's changed the way people perceive it. I don't particularly like the way it's funded. I think it's kind of challenging to watch but I think the team element to it is awesome.
I don't know if you watched the live event that was on in Australia, but it was the final came down. The final was Australia versus South Africa. have a big rivalry. Australians have a big rivalry with South Africa. And it was the three Australians, including Cam Smith, who just won the British Open against a bunch of South Africans. And that's compelling golf, right? Like, let's ride a cup stuff. And that was brilliant. And that doesn't happen on the PGA. I think it's detracted from golf and that you're not seeing the best players play week in, week out anymore. And I don't think
as good to watch on TV to from a from a golf pure golf perspective. But it's got a place and it's great. It's it's not the same as the T 20 and 50 and 100 whatever's happening in cricket. But I think it's sort of shaken things up. And it's it's definitely sort of been it's grown the game. Where the money's come from, I do have something of a challenge with I just think that's kind of like a bit of sport washing. But I only know that from what I read in the papers. Who knows what you can believe these
Harrison Faull (44:07.739)
Yeah, no, I like it. No, no, no. Yeah, some of the contracts are ridiculous. I'm a big fan of football. So we're saying it in football as well with the sound.
Oliver Palmer (44:08.157)
Was that reasonable?
Oliver Palmer (44:16.564)
same thing right with the elite with the what's it called the elite thing or the super league there's a super league yeah no but there was a was a team one we can cuddle this but do you remember that the man united the super league yeah from each league and just kind of screw everything else yeah yeah could you support
Harrison Faull (44:19.975)
the Saudi pay.
There was a Super League where they were going to the top four teams in every league and they couldn't get relegated. That was the big stipulation. I'm actually Bournemouth, so it's a small south coast team that's now in the top league. Okay. Yeah.
Oliver Palmer (44:38.313)
Pordmouth. I know Pordmouth, I'm a Leeds supporter. I've been to see Leeds and Elland Road a few times and we lost out to get back into the Premier League. They said it was a $350 million game, Leeds vs Southampton, I And we lost 2 -1.
Harrison Faull (44:53.961)
Yeah, we bought a few of your players actually now. We've got Tyler Adams, a winger, Sinistera. I can't remember if there's any more. So, okay. Okay. I can't talk about cricket unfortunately. don't know anything about it. Yeah, yeah. In terms of, so okay, so from...
Oliver Palmer (45:03.975)
Yeah, Anyway, there you go. That's the football chat. I love it. I'm very into my sports, not just golf. I do love my cricket as well.
Oliver Palmer (45:15.339)
We'll cut all this by the
Harrison Faull (45:19.967)
from golfing to then becoming an entrepreneur in residence at Investable.
Oliver Palmer (45:24.49)
Yeah, that's right. I literally kind of got really into golf. I took a bunch of lessons and it became a sort of a focus and a hobby and that was really good because it kind of filled my days. got up in the morning, got the kids ready, took the kids to school and then I'd go have a lesson or play around a golf and it was great and I really enjoyed it. you're moving in circles, particularly in Singapore with other entrepreneurs, with people who've heard about the journey.
people who are super happy for you, people who kind of want to hear how and why. and what have you. And I met Creel Price and Annie from Investable and they were looking at starting a, to expanding their funds. So Investable is an early stage VC based in Australia. They've been hugely successful in Australia, had made some fantastic early stage investments. And they were looking to expand into Singapore and set up a fund over there, which they've now done. And
sort of after Creel and I had a few conversations and then working with Annie, I was kind of the first filter. So I met with the founders, I kind of got a breakdown of what investables criteria was for their sort of investment strategy, their mandate. And I would meet with startup founders and make an initial assessment if I thought they might pass, my job was to sort of pass them through that first filter to the investment committee that was based in Sydney. And then if they didn't, I'd say, you
kind of maybe think about this or think about that. but sort of acting as that first, first entry point for the funnel. So I met with about 150 companies in nine months, which is not a lot by VC standards, they'll meet 3000 in a year, what have you. But for me, and other people were doing it, but for me, that felt like a lot. I was doing a lot of coffees and a lot of chats and meeting a lot of people as well as still playing golf and things. And it was fascinating. I met lots of companies, I spoke to lots
Wonderful entrepreneurs. I've got a real feel for what it took to get investment from the other side of the table, not from the founder who's kind of asking for the money, more from the person sort of holding the cash. But the challenge I had was that it's quite binary. You sit there as a VC and you make a call on whether you think, know, whether this person meets the criteria, where you think they're going to go, whether she's created a wonderful business and has a good team, whether he's got the right three kind of initial clients and are they going to win another
Oliver Palmer (47:47.842)
and where it's going to go and you make that decision and then you walk out of the meeting and you either follow up or you pass it to somebody else and then you have the next meeting and the next meeting and the next meeting. And I felt just from my earn perspective that I didn't I wasn't able to kind of influence or help in any way. It was literally yes or no based on that half hour or 45 minute chat. And on a number of occasions I thought God if I could just work with you for kind of three months if I could just help you win two more clients or kind
you push you in this direction, or get you into this industry rather as well as that industry, or help you hire two more people so that you've got instead of a team of three, you've got a team of five, you would be the perfect person for Investable. You're not right now. And you might be in six months if I help you, but you could also spend six months and not be right. Just particularly just for Investable. I'm sure there lots of other VCs in the same sort of space.
But that's not my job. I didn't want to spend six months with these founders. They might not like me. Even if I did all the right things, it might mean that the investor wouldn't invest. So your job is just to kind of make that initial assessment. And having been on the other side of the table and seen how Tiger Spike had pivoted from know, kind of ringtones to building apps to kind of digital transformation and all of those sorts of things, I thought it's really difficult to kind of determine whether
Oliver Palmer (49:07.457)
company that's turning out a startup that's turning over 250 grand a year today is going to actually get to a million dollars ARR or it's going to be they're going to get 10x on my money. And so I sort of said like, this is this kind of might not necessarily be for me. And I was sort of complaining about this to someone. And that's where the idea for DQ Ventures came from. They sort of said, well, we've got this idea of how can we help people,
make all the right moves as early on before they've settled onto this path, before you have to change them away from a particular way of thinking, how can we work with them in that super early stage and influence them in such a way that they have the best possible chance of success? And that's where the idea for DQ Ventures came
Harrison Faull (49:52.356)
Okay, and I really like the investment thesis behind DQ Ventures, which is don't necessarily quit your job until the startup is right, until you've done enough market research, until you've done enough customer interviews, and there's enough initial traction to even commit to that first step, which makes a lot of sense, especially given your target audience, which isn't the 21 -year -old fresh out of college. It's more the 40 -year -old who's been a working professional, who's climbed the corporate ladder.
Harrison Faull (50:20.076)
who's seen a big problem and is now willing to perhaps try and build a product to fix that problem. Is that an accurate summary?
Oliver Palmer (50:26.365)
That is you can we almost want to take that and put it on the video on our website. Now that's exactly spot on. And it's not necessarily the 40 or 45 or five year old lady who's climbed the corporate ladder and is now kind of got this big idea about how they can change an industry. It's often people who are kind of just a little bit frustrated with where they see the next 10 or 15 years of their working life. And it's fun to run a startup. But our job at DQ is to try and help people understand.
what it takes to build a business, but also what are the sort of the challenges and the pitfalls and the downside of it. So if you quit your job at 45 and you throw five years into a startup and it doesn't succeed, suddenly you're 50 and you're looking for a job where you've probably only got 10 years left to work. And so it is a massive risk. And so we want to try and de -risk that startup journey for mature founders. And for me, that's super important because I'm very fortunate to have had an exit.
James, my business partner at DQ Ventures, raised two and a half, three million dollars and then the business folded and he had to call all those investors and tell them that he'd lost their money and that there was going to be no return. And Arjun, the third founder, he's run kind of large operation, like large cohorts of startups and mentored people. And between the three of us, we've got kind of the success side of it. And here's how it might look if your business succeeds. you
Oliver Palmer (51:49.677)
Here's kind some of the challenges and this is what it looks like if it doesn't. And then we've got the operational excellence of here's how you actually go from idea to launching something to starting to scale and then onwards. So yeah, it's working really well and it's really fun at the moment. I'm really enjoying
Harrison Faull (52:06.886)
Awesome. So I'm a founder, I'm sold, I love what you're saying. What is the reality? What's the reality of the program? What do I receive?
Oliver Palmer (52:10.33)
Hahaha Yeah, so we've got an online program. We go through a series of modules, know, ideation to kind of user profiles, personas, very kind of stock standard stuff. There's nothing radical about that. You can find that online. The key, guess, is it's we spend between three and nine months working with you. And it's not fixed. If you quit your job sooner and you're all gun ho and you can get out there and do it, then that's cool. We'll work with you on that.
And if you just want to extend your time and it doesn't work, that's all good. So there's no, we're not, don't work in cohorts. It's not sort of a three month program like Antler or an entrepreneur first. Whenever you come to us, we'll work with you and kind of try and get an understanding of where you want to get to and how the business might get there. We kind of, we focus very much on rational startups. It's not a sort of swing for the fences, VC led kind
weight cut, how quickly can we get to the point where we can pump a bunch of VC money in and see if this works. We really try and focus on kind of how do you win that first customer? How do you make sure that people are prepared to pay for whatever it is you're selling? Do you understand the sales process? know, can we have we got a large enough target audience to make this success? But from how it works, you sign up with us, we work with you for three, six to nine months, generally sort of six months is the sweet spot. And then ultimately,
you decide to quit your job. that time, generally, we've lined up a bunch of angel investors, we feel that it might not really be pre-seed, it's kind of angel. So like 300 to $600 ,000 is probably the sweet spot for that. That's 150 ,000, know, 300 ,000 pounds. And that gives you a couple years salary, 18 months salary, obviously reduced on what you would have been earning, the ability to kind of deliver on the tech that you've that we've done from an MVP perspective.
Oliver Palmer (54:07.188)
and maybe your first one or two employees. And very quickly, we focus on how do you get to that revenue, right? Get that revenue coming in and then you're off to the races. So we founded 18 startups so far. We're just coming up to three years. So the cadence is sort of increasing from our initial foray into it all. And I think we've had four, five founders quit their jobs. The others are in various stages of it. Five of them have raised capital. So
Zen here raised $750 ,000 on the very basic MVP that we put together and a deck and some solid conversations and an idea of where it was going to go. Dealer Docs in the UK raised £300 ,000 from a group of angels. Those are our proof points that we can do it. We need more of them. The ideal thing for DQ would be to an exit of a DQ Ventures company, someone who's gone to where I've managed to do with Tiger Spike.
But we're a bit too early for that. hopefully, sort of the other thing is, it's a seven to 10 year kind of timeframe on these things and the rest. So you got to put in the hard yards and you got to kind of navigate the journey for quite a while before you see that return. And that's where we're at with DQ. So the plan is to try and start companies with the right people in the right spaces and for the right reasons. And then ultimately,
Once they've got the idea and they've got their initial employees, we stay as advisors. If they want us to take a board seat, we will, but we tend not to only because for us, it's really about getting them up and running, but we're always there as advisory because we take an equity stake in the companies. And then ultimately where I'd like to see it is in five to six years, I'll be on the other side. I'll be selling all of the DQ ventures that we started back in 2024, 2023, 24.
Oliver Palmer (56:05.518)
grow for five years and then my job will flip. I love the process of selling Tiger Spike. I sort of worked with my wife on selling her business, Cresco Data, which she exited two years ago and has just finished her earn out. So she's had her, she's a successful exited tech founder and I have too. So we've got a wealth of experience between us. We've never worked together, but the process of selling a business and understanding, you know, how to run a proper due diligence process, how to kind of negotiate
And one of the things we didn't touch on, the four founders of Tiger Spike all negotiated an exit on day one. We had no earn out. We took all of our cash on the table on the day that the company sold. We had pre -signed our resignation letters. And then on the day of the deal, so July 31, think it was, everything kind of happened. It was all good. And then August the 1st, we were unemployed. had the shares were all transferred to Concentrix and we had the cash in our bank account and that was
So that was, that's quite unusual. There's not many founders who sort of have been through that, but that was part of our negotiation and part of the process we went through. And if it works for you, then great. If three years with a company is part of an earn out, then you can handle that, then awesome. There's many different paths to success.
Harrison Faull (57:23.965)
Was it hard? You didn't have any time to adapt if you had to leave on day one of it being acquired and the deal only took four months to arrange or was that something you were pushing for to actually happen?
Oliver Palmer (57:37.036)
Yeah, we pushed for it. So the four of us wanted out. We'd had the failed sale to Accenture 12 months before. We'd sort of mentally kind of checked out then and then kind of got ourselves back into it. But we just knew that we had one foot out the door, right? We'd already made the decision we didn't want to do it. sort of, early stages we discussed roles within Concentrix and what an earn out might look like. Very quickly, none of us wanted to do that. We also felt we would be a hindrance to the integration process.
So that was where Alex Burke, who I mentioned before, CEO, he was sort of the most senior person he stayed on. He stayed on for two and a half years. There was quite a substantial retention bonus that was on top of the 85. So the 85 was equity and then there was a larger amount. There was a staff retention bonus, which we negotiated. So we could have had it all and then paid it out to the staff, but it made more sense to work it out that way. And then, yeah, so we signed slightly...
more stringent reps and warranties perhaps than you would normally because if there was anything kind of untoward that came out after a year one, that's one of the reasons people do an earn out. You want to make sure that there's no tax liabilities. There's no nothing sort of hidden through the didn't come out during the due diligence process. But we were pretty confident that we built a machine. was no longer about Luke Jansen, Oliver Palmer, Dean Jezard or Alex Hall. It was it was this kind of operational machine
kind of ran in multiple countries and was able to deliver on what we said it could. And we were confident that that would that's what Consentrix was buying. And it seemed silly for them to sort of kind of pay large salaries to four founders who were not really interested anymore and suddenly got large bank balances from the initial sale and were kind of just just biding their time. So and everybody sort of around the table agreed that it was probably best if we left and we worked out who
There was some backs and forwards and some negotiation, but at the end of day, yeah, it was a fantastic result for everybody.
Harrison Faull (59:38.431)
Awesome. And just because it's podcast, I can split things up. I just feel like we haven't necessarily covered DEQ ventures in too much depth. perhaps, like if I'm going to ask you about geography sector, and then if there's an example of how you help Dealer.
Oliver Palmer (59:53.681)
Cool.
Harrison Faull (59:59.667)
beyond potentially fundraising or another one of your portfolio companies, that could be a good bit of, yeah.
Oliver Palmer (01:00:02.343)
Yeah, cool. Okay, switch back to DQ. Yeah, you lead off and I'll get back in that track.
Harrison Faull (01:00:10.719)
So DQ Ventures, are you sector agnostic and are you geographically focused?
Oliver Palmer (01:00:19.975)
So very much sector agnostic and geographically agnostic. We were all based in Singapore. The company is founded in Singapore and still head office in Singapore. But since we started it, I've moved to Sydney. I kind of this number of Australian companies that we founded. James has moved to Stockholm in Sweden. So he handles sort of Europe and the Nordics and Arjen is based between Delhi and Singapore. So he's the director based in Singapore and he covers kind of middle.
And so we were sort of globally with the world's smallest Global business. And then in terms of industry, it really just comes down to what value we can add as individuals based on our experience. So predominantly technology, there's been a number of sort of med tech, but not necessarily too much tech, more the med side of things. I've got a background in biochemistry. it really, after initial conversation, it's whatever, if we can
and you think there's value in what DQ brings to the table, then let's move forward. If you don't, or you're not sure that we'll help you, then don't sign up with us, right? We're going to be talking to each other and having each other's WhatsApp conversations and email addresses for at least 10 years. And if you don't like us and we don't think it's going to work with you, then it's not going to happen. I mean, we did have one guy who approached us who was an accountant in Singapore and he wanted to import Japanese motorcycle
into Singapore because apparently you couldn't really get them. what value could we add? We could maybe build an e -commerce site and perhaps list the products and stuff. at the end of the day, we don't know. We did a bit of research and there actually four different websites selling Japanese motorcycle parts in Singapore. He just hadn't found them. So we very quickly said, are you going to do any better than this? And he was like, no. And then carried on with his job. So for us, that's a brilliant result. We've stopped somebody from quitting a high paid corporate job to start a venture that had very little chance
Harrison Faull (01:02:10.035)
Okay.
Oliver Palmer (01:02:16.043)
of doing anything for them. So yeah, so I think it really is about can the three of us really help you? Because you can go through the program, but we add sort of the color and the flavor to the process, we help you understand things. We've also got large networks, James is very active on LinkedIn, I'm kind of quite active in angel investing, and also in sort of corporate. So we want to help that business as much as possible. not, you know, we might put whatever hat on is necessary,
It's important that the founder does the work and understands that they can't sort of, we're not a crutch. We're here to help you and mentor you and get the best out of what the business proposes to do, but we're not here to do it for you. And we've learned that the hard way. knew there's been times where we've perhaps over egged the investment and we can answer all the questions and we know the right people. so the angels are sort of seeing us as the business and that's just not the right approach. You know, they've got to invest in the founder.
in the space that they're in, the company that they're building. And yes, we're there to support, but they've got to know that that person is going to win. That's that's how it's going to succeed. And I guess the only other thing one of the we see success within Tiger Spike, not just as the number of companies we found, or the number of people who quit their jobs and go on to run their earn startups, but also the number of conversations where people don't necessarily quit their job, where they don't actually do that startup, and they they, they kind of recognize that that one wasn't right. And then the next one might be and
one of the brilliant company in Singapore called Julix, which is a corporate secretarial company. The two founders of that came to us with an initial idea, which we loved the founders, we thought they were awesome, but the idea was awful. And we just couldn't, there was just no way we could see that making kind of money. And they both had good jobs and were earning a lot of money. And we thought to kind of, turn this startup idea that you have into even sort of paying your 50 % of your current salary.
it's just, it's just never gonna happen or even be very difficult to do. But we love you guys. How do we what can we do? And so they went away and we kicked around different ideas. And now they've set up this corporate secretarial business secretariat. So basically registering companies, registering business numbers, doing all that. And it's going gangbusters. And they're the right people to be doing it in the right time. And it's just it's awesome, right? It's fascinating. And because they knew they wanted they didn't want to stay in corporate life, they knew they wanted to change. One of them quit his job, Patrick's now doing it full time.
Oliver Palmer (01:04:40.318)
I think is the other founder based in Germany is going to quit in the near future and they love it. They're so happy. It's great. And they now do all the corporate, corporate secretarial stuff for all of the DQ Ventures companies. So it's kind of creating this ecosystem of companies which will help each other out. And the other one is Blue Mongoose based in Portugal. If ever you want to talk to an early stage tech development company, he does predominantly pretty much only no code development.
So using bubble or all these different AI tools he talks about. we invested, Blue Mongoose is another DQ Ventures company. Toby had started it in Vietnam and then moved to Portugal. So we sort of helped him out. He builds landing pages and early prototypes of all of the DQ Ventures applications that we deliver. And he's working on some other big projects, that sort of thing. And again, he's, know, his quickest job, he's working hard, he's loving what he's doing.
He doesn't want to hire a huge workforce. So it's all kind of, you know, bringing in contractors who use the same tools. He's got a couple of really cool project, really competent project managers who keep things on track. And that means that we've got a tech development partner who can help our new startups to build their landing pages. And then when it all starts to work, we've got a corporate secretarial company who can register the business and get all the share structure and everything set up. And then, you
Oliver Palmer (01:06:00.215)
maybe in a few years we'll help set up an M&A advisory who can help sell them and all these businesses will exit. it's all kind of fitting the pieces
Harrison Faull (01:06:08.835)
I can see that you're the visionary and yeah, always looking.
Oliver Palmer (01:06:10.875)
Don't tell James and Arjun that. be they were all visionaries, all visionaries, but somebody's got to do the work. And that's where Leanne and Darius come in. building, having that operational team within DQ has been really big for us. Leanne has been amazing coming on board as sort of general manager and helping sort of operationalize and and apply process to a lot of the things that, you know, entrepreneurs like me tend to sort of have ideas and think it's great and it's all wonderful.
And then you do it twice and then you're onto the next thing. And it's the third, the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth time where it really matters. Right. And, Leanne is, is able to kind of work with the three of us and pull it together. And this is where the process and the kind of the, structure, the organizational structure kind of makes sense. And that's what helps you to scale. And that's the same process with Tiger Spike. You're never going to find me putting in organizational structure or putting in kind of systems and processes that people follow. But as long as someone does that in the business, then it's got a chance to succeed.
So that magic that you talked about of being able to hire the right people, recognizing your earn deficiencies and knowing that you need to fill those gaps for the business to succeed, I think is a crucial part of any entrepreneur's journey. You've got to understand what you're good at and you've got to understand what you're not good at and you've got to let it go. And even if there are bits you could probably do better if you did it, it's far better to let somebody else do it and then do it 10 times than you kind of keep doing it and keep doing it until you can't possibly do all of the right kind of, too many moving parts, guess.
Harrison Faull (01:07:38.54)
Of course, and sometimes you don't necessarily recognize it yourself. So having a seasoned advisor, someone that can see like notice the red flags and actually help you with the solution is valuable. So VQVenture is going
Oliver Palmer (01:07:48.439)
Yeah, I know we talk about sorry, sorry, the drug is with the you're saying exactly the same point I was going to make. mean, the Deque DQ Ventures we see our role as helping you avoid some of the potholes that we've already seen. And you know, you're to hit your earn potholes and what have you. And James talks about, you know, on a on a sort of grander scale, helping you avoid company killer mistakes early on. So what are the decisions that you make that can kill a company? I mean, he's invested in over 90 startups.
I've had one we've seen some of the mistakes can be made. He's seen some fail, some succeed. And just having that experience and being able to sort of talk to a founder when they've got ideas and what they think they might do or the path they might go down and say, yes, that is perfect. You've nailed it. Let's go for that. Or actually, kind of you want to just be a bit careful because if you go down that path, you might end up here or you might hit that pothole or you might do this. Not to say that we know everything or that our advice is any better than anybody else's,
We just want to help you understand as much as you possibly can in order to try and make the best possible decision, the best possible choice at any given
Harrison Faull (01:08:55.205)
I love it. So you've got 18 portfolio companies at the moment. Do have a target of how large you want that to get before the end of the year?
Oliver Palmer (01:09:02.39)
Before the end of the year, we've got six months left. kind of ideally it's kind of 10 to 12 companies a year is what we're sort of looking at. We don't have a grand target if we added two and they go gangbusters great. If we added 20 and we're all a bit stretched, then fine. The initial kind of premise for the business was to earn 10 % of 100 companies. That was what we thought would be really cool.
We've sort of expanded on that a little bit because we think that there's a way to operationalize what we do so that it's not just the James Ollin Arjun show. And we feel that, you we've spoken to a number of exited founders or, you know, people who have seen the things that we've seen and, you know, put money into startups and haven't seen the returns they want or been frustrated with the startups they've invested in. And so we're working on a program that would
people with a similar ish background to us who've exited tech company, had a year of not really knowing what they're doing. And now tried a bit of startup this and tried a bit of startup that but not really sure how could they get involved with DQ Ventures companies and be those mentors and add to the kind of experience and background knowledge that James Arjun and I have in a sort of structured way that allows them to work with startups, take some equity in that startup takes my team DQ, you know, what's
What that looks like is kind of the partner program that we're looking at. We're raising money at the moment. So we've raised just over a million dollars to date. don't need the cash, but we feel like some of the ideas, even just what I talked about with allowing other venture partners to sort of play an operational role, it takes a little bit of time to put some of those processes in place and a little bit of capital. But we think that if we can operationalize that and scale, not just with the startups that we're helping.
Oliver Palmer (01:10:50.706)
but bring in similar people to us who then help five, 10 startups a year, we can go well beyond that to the hundreds of companies that we've found over the next five
Harrison Faull (01:11:02.288)
That sounds really exciting. So where's the best place for founders to find you? DQventures.com?.com
Oliver Palmer (01:11:03.666)
That's super exciting. DQventures.com.com. There's a form on there. I mean, the key thing that one of the key things with DQventures is we're not a VC. We don't, if you've got an idea, if you've built a company and you've got three employees and you've got two clients and you're just looking for cash, we can't add as much value. If we'd raised 100 million and we could invest, then that's one thing, but we just haven't gone down that path. We are, you know, really focused on people with an idea.
who don't quite know where to start in startup land and doing their research and Googling and looking at tech stars and reading about everything it takes to start a company. That's the kind of person who we, who's the ideal candidate to come and talk to us and see if we can help you. And if you've worked it all out for yourself, definitely go for it. We'd be, we'd love, can answer the phone and what have you. But if, you feel that we could add enough value as a part of the process and you reckon that we can be your, we sort of talk about ourselves as a co -founder as a service kind of model. And that sounds
a bit wishy washy, but but that's what it is. We were a co founder. I put the t shirt on and I've walked around conferences for one of our one of our portfolio companies, I've got email addresses with all the companies and we'll do what it takes to see if this business is going to work because you know, that that's what it's all about. And so yeah, so DQ Ventures.com is a form on there explains the whole process connect with me on LinkedIn connect with James on LinkedIn, probably James because he's much better at LinkedIn than I am. But get in touch and have a conversation because
doesn't cost anything to do that. We're fairly sort of circumspect about the companies that we do take on. We're sort of, you know, there's a process. We have a couple of different interviews and we're trying to refine that a little bit. But really, whoever you work with in the early stages of a business, you're to be working with for a long time. So you've got to make sure you're going to, you know, you're to work, you know, you're going to enjoy the process.
Harrison Faull (01:12:50.922)
Well, look, this has been a great episode. Thank you very much for your time, Oliver. All those links will be in the description below. Yeah, just thank you. Thank you very much. I've learned so much. I'm sure everyone else has as well.
Oliver Palmer (01:13:02.711)
Brilliant, thanks very much, that was great.
