Most well known for co-founding Up Bank, Dom Pym's list of credentials and achievements as a founder run far deeper with 3 exits under his belt. Despite being an engineer and founder by trade, Dom's track record as an investor is almost equally impressive. In fact, Dom purchased one of the first Tesla's ever sold in Australia in 2014 through early gains in Musk's company.
Now investing through his Family Office, Euphemia, Dom is focussing on underrepresented founders with solutions that produce social good.
The Key Points
- Dom started as a software engineer at a Fortune 500 company before transitioning into the industry now known as 'FinTech'.
- Co-founder of Up Bank which exited to Bendigo Bank, Dom has two other exits to his name over a 25 year career.
- Early investments in Twitter, AfterPay and Tesla laid the ground work for Euphemia
- In it's most simple form, Euphemia's investment philosophy comes down to "the people and the culture and the organisation. What's driving them, what their purpose is, are they doing it for social good?".
- Dom has now reached roughly 100 investments across his family office, TEN13, crowdfunding platforms and other venture funds and syndicates.
Find the full interview and an edited transcript below.
Tell us about your early story?
I'm technically a software developer by trade. I was doing engineering in the software sphere for many years before I got into investing. I worked with Fortune 500 companies all over the world, and lived and worked in Asia, the UK and the US before I settled down and started my own software companies here in Australia.
Somehow I found this intersection point between financial services and technology and ended up doing what we now call FinTech. It feels like it's been about 20-25 years of the ‘school of hard knocks’ to get where I am today…there's always an ‘overnight success’ with decades leading up to to the success.
So where am I at nowadays? I have built many startups and exited three companies in the last couple of years, and that has given us a pool of capital to be able to invest in the Family Office: Euphemia. I'm probably most well known as the Co-Founder of Up, which is the best, fastest growing digital bank in Australia. I still sit on the Up Advisory Board, but my day-to-day now tends to be focused on helping people, mentoring, investing, sitting on boards, helping with long term strategy and product. Yeah, so it's been a whirlwind a couple of decades, really.
When did you start dabbling in angel investing?
I've been investing in companies for a long time, either my own or other people's.
It dates back more than 10 years. I used to live in the UK and so I got involved very early with the equity crowdfunding sites there such as Seedrs and Crowdcube (the two biggest platforms in the world), and then Republic from the US, which ended up acquiring Seedrs. I was not only investing in companies on those platforms, but I also invested in those companies and am a reasonably significant shareholder in both Crowdcube and Seedrs which have both gone on to great success over the years; as have some of the companies that I invested in via those platforms - companies that no one would have ever heard of like Monzo. I actually passed up on Revolut which came through one of the platforms, but to be there at the time when that's happening and to be active on the platform was pretty exciting stuff.
And so that was the start of the journey, and then a bunch of ex-employees and a bunch of mates were starting companies in Australia and so I thought it would be good to support them and get involved in what they were doing. And one thing led to another, and I ended up trying to get involved in either co-investing with others in the industry or doing anything that was happening around investing be it Airtree Explorers or the Startmate program, Startup Bootcamp etc. I just wanted to be part of it and meet new people and have a crack at it.
Why was crowdfunding a good way to start?
Yeah, brilliant. So I'd love to learn a little bit more about the crowdfunding thing given that sort of where you started. Do you want to tell us like a little bit more about why you thought that was an interesting way to access early stage opportunities, what you saw in that opportunity?
Sure. I think there's a couple of things. I've been tinkering with some crowdfunding on IndieGoGo or other, other platforms around the world, and it seemed a bit weird that a bunch of them, like Kickstarter and stuff, a bunch of them, you'd never get the thing that you were your early reward or whatever it was you thought you were paying for, or things were a little bit amorphous where you pay for something and you weren't really sure exactly what it was you were paying for.
And I just thought it was a bit weird, but it really took off. And then equity crowdfunding came along and that was completely different. The platforms were regulated or if they weren't regulated, they were running as if they were venture capital funded businesses that had, rules and regulations and things to, policies and so on.
And so that just seemed to me to be a little bit more kind of legit in a way. And you didn't feel the same risk that you had when you were just investing in a bunch of t shirts or making a new robot or something that never came to fruition. And so when I was investing in the equity crowdfunding, it felt a little bit more real.
And then I saw it accelerating very quickly. And a lot of the due diligence became easier to do because they would present you with an investment document and then you'd see videos and you'd either get to meet the founders if you were there in person, or you could talk to them through a back in those days, sort of Skype and all that sort of stuff.
Nowadays, Zoom and Meet and all that. And so I just felt like it was a little bit more structured. I felt a little bit more comfortable. And it was pretty early days in terms of me investing in companies. So that just seemed like a really good way to go. But the ones where it's an ex employee or a current employee of the side hustle or a mate or a family member or whatever it is, that's easier because you know the person and you trust them already.
But if you want to be more diverse and you want to experiment and take a bit of risk and go beyond your comfort level. Then I feel like those platforms were a stepping stone into more serious sort of style of investment.
How did you educate yourself on early-stage investing?
Yeah, that's brilliant. And then you also talked about a bit of like the education you did in that, coming up to speed, whether it was Airtree Explorers program or others how valuable were those programs for you and equipping you with the tool set to, to be a good investor?
I might just say that linking the two is that the Australian government changed their regulations around equity crowdfunding. Issued a bunch of licenses five years ago. And I think there was six or seven and and virtual was one of the ones that applied for a license and was successful.
And I invested very early days in virtual and then I've invested in every subsequent round and they're raising capital at the moment and they're doing it, they're eating their own dog food, doing it on their own platform. So what I saw was the transition from doing it overseas in the US and the UK to then being able to do it in Australia.
And I thought that was pretty cool but I wanted to see it scale like you've got, if you look at the way I think about it is the entire ecosystem from venture capital and private equity all the way down the different series or seeds or the different segments in the market.
Which you end up having angel investing at one end of the spectrum and private equity and venture capital at the other. But in the middle, there's, debt capital there's, non equity funding styles, there's crowdfunding, there's angel investing, there's seed investing, there's all sorts of things along that spectrum.
And so for me, going along to programs like Startup Bootcamp, Startmate, Airtree Explorers, and so on I felt like I was getting more of a hands on education rather than just the school of hard knocks, like you jump in and you put in 50 bucks or a thousand bucks or 10, 000 bucks or whatever, and you play around that's great way to learn.
But also I felt like going along to those programs, it was more structured. There was a support network. They have a Slack that you can chat in or a discord or something. And then you meet great people and we ended up meeting in person. And so when I'd go to the events you'd meet up with these people that you'd only spoken to online.
And so I feel like over maybe five years or so it was almost maturing the knowledge and experience around investing rather than just having a crack at it. I think both approaches are really important. One is having a crack and then the other is learning about it, doing MBA style things.
Working with a venture capitalist, working in a family office, attending programs like Startmate or Airtree Explorers or whatever. I mentored at Startup Bootcamp and then I also invested in Startup Bootcamp and then I invested in some of the companies that came out of it. So all of those things over probably five to 10 years.
Created a bit more of a foundation and a level of comfort so that, you understand, I get people asking me all the time, like the Birchal raise that's happening at the moment on Birchal, it's like inception, raising on your own platform. I get people asking me how can you accept the risk?
How do you know that the company's, going to do well? Or how do you. Determine how you set the price and all that sort of stuff. And from not knowing the answer to all those questions, maybe 10 years ago or more to now people asking me those questions I feel it's just an education issue.
And if we if we can spread the good word and help with content like this, or, formal programs to help people go through like entry explorers or whatever it might be. I think that's really good overall because then we get more people with an elevated knowledge and experience and we get more people excited and interested in the startup ecosystem.
Also, one more thing, the startup ecosystem in Australia is very nascent. So when we look at I used to live in Silicon Valley. And if you look at the US, you might have 50 or 60 years worth of startups and venture capitalists, and it's multi generational. The people, I think it's the first 22 people that came out of PayPal currently control 4 trillion worth of companies, right?
Say hello, that's extraordinary. But we don't have that level of depth and multi generational wealth in Australia in the startup ecosystem. We certainly have it in, Yeah, property and retail and mining and gambling and other industries, but we don't have it in the startup, the technology ecosystem.
And so we saw early days with seek and real estate and these sort of businesses really making a good go of becoming public companies and getting in with media companies and venture capitalists and so on. And then we had the second round at Lassie and Envato Canberra and so on. And now we're heading into the third round.
So I feel like. We're in the very early stages of building that ecosystem. And so it's a very exciting time but it does mean that education plays an important part. Enough capital, need to have the capital flows. So all of that sort of stuff has just been evolving over the last 10 to 12 years while the Australian market has been growing.
Yeah,
no, it's certainly an exciting time for the Aussie startup space, particularly as you get the afterpay exits and the Atlassian success, etc. And just seeing not only those founders and people like yourself, obviously, like giving back to the startup ecosystem, but also that exec level within that have also done really well out of their equity and then a sort of, Spawning off into new companies that you can then, go and support as well.
How many investments have you done?
Yeah, it's a bit tricky for us because we've done so many over time.
I don't have an exact number, but, say around about a hundred investments some of which early stage seed investments, some of which are my own companies that I was seeded capital to some of them are public companies. Some of them are through the family office. Some of them through crowdfunding and the other thing we've done is actually invest in funds.
So we do syndicates and obviously we're TEN13 and Aussie angels and others start up galaxy and so on, but we also have invested in a venture capital funds as an LP as a limited partner. And so there's probably 20 or more that we've invested in from your air trees and square pegs of blackbirds, all the way.
To some of the innovation labs that have come out of the universities Galileo, Scalata, so there's a whole range of ways that we invest and we like to think about it as direct investing and then indirect through the funds. And so through the funds, we would be indirectly invested in thousands of companies.
And then directly, we would be invested in scores like, 100, so it's hard for me to know exactly. Judy, who runs my family office, Judy Anderson Furth she was the CEO at Startup Vic and now the Startup Network. And she She's the group CEO at the family office.
So she would be better to answer the question precisely because she keeps all the spreadsheets and air tables and she knows exactly what's going on and where it's going. But but certainly from my perspective, when you do this sort of thing, you say around about currently a hundred investments property.
Public market investments on the stock exchange in overseas and in Australia, direct investments in startups, and then investments indirectly in startups through venture capital funds, private equity, debt funds, and syndicates. So that's quite a bit going on. There's a lot
going on there.
What were some of your first investments?
And yeah, you're very lucky to have Judy at your side. She's an absolute weapon and I'm sure she's got it all under control. I've heard one of your early investments was Twitter and AfterPay. Are there any other big headline names we should know about?
All sorts of awesome. So the three that I mentioned that we exited were two of them I founded and one of them was a crowdfunding investment and the crowdfunding investment was in the UK and it exited for over a billion.
So that was a good one. The two in Australia that I found that I was either equal shareholder 50 50, or I was the largest shareholder where it was venture capital back. And we exited to Bendigo bank, JP Morgan chase. So there are three really good exits, but yeah, Twitter and LinkedIn. So Microsoft bought LinkedIn and Elon Musk bought Twitter.
I was a early investor in them and managed to make good money out of those. Oh, there's probably other ones. Like Afterpay was a really good one for us. Tesla, like I, I had this idea that I would get into Tesla reasonably early because I wanted to buy a Tesla. So as soon as they announced the Model S, I wanted to buy one, but it was, hundreds of thousands of dollars when it was first released.
And I think it was announced in 2012 and it came out in Australia in 2014. So I got one of the first ones, but I'd been investing in Tesla for those couple of years while I was on the waiting list. And I made so much money from Tesla that it actually paid for the car. So then I felt like I got the car for free thank you Elon Musk, so I think that those sort of things where you exiting to great companies or you're using your investments for a purpose, to find purpose, whether it's to help people, whether it's an environmental or social purpose or whether it's just to buy a car, or any of those things that that, you're going to have some objective or some reason for doing it, but yeah, there's some of the early success stories.
I would say. More importantly, it's the people that often talk about, the people that we've invested in. There's a lot of people that I've either partnered with as a co founder. Co invested with or employed over the years that have gone on to greatness, like one of my business partners for 15 years was, Tomo AFL footy coach.
And as I always say, I let him tell his story publicly, but him and I became really good mates and had, three or four companies together and built all sorts of amazing things, including up together. And the team that we developed and the culture that we developed, my view was second to none and still I'm here at the office today.
Like I said, we come in on Fridays for Friday demos, and it's just extraordinary to see the growth of, recruited people out of university, seeing them grow up and mature and then get married and then have kids and buy a house and all that sort of stuff. And then we've seen them go on to great success.
So some of the people like Marty Howell was the co founder of realestate.com.au. He was a business partner of Tomo and I in one of our early businesses. And another guy, Lindsay, I talk about quite a bit. We recruited him into it when I used to have a record company and he's now got his own visual effects company doing Hollywood movies and all the movies that he's done are extraordinary but they're things that you would never have heard of like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and you know that sort of things and so yeah so it's not my story either but I'm like I'm very proud to have bought him his first computer and employed him in the record label making video clips before he went on to great success and now has his own company and you know I just wish those people you know the very best we've always encouraged people.
To follow their heart and follow their hobbies and wherever we can help people that we've partnered with or worked with or employed or whatever along the way that's really our goal. And also when we exit companies, we try to maximise the exits so that all the shareholders and all the staff can go on to buy their house, pay for their kids education or start their own startup and fund it themselves.
And so that, that's front of mind. So yeah, it's been an incredible journey. Absolutely amazing. And I agree,
How do you assess your early-stage investments?
The earlier you go into startups, the more it is about the team and the founder and who's driving it. How do you have any tips for us on how to assess that, given particularly how you've built it previously?
Do you how do you look at it?
When I was starting a company myself, it's every company we've exited has been a decade old or older, except for one company, but the exit didn't go very well. So the companies that have gone really well and the exits, exciting, I think you learn a lot when they don't go well.
And those learning experiences actually, build tenacity and strength and persistence and diligence and tenacity, like really gives you that ability to fight through and fight onto the next one, but the ones that are successful. Give you that ego boost, give you that confidence boost, give you an opportunity to actually give back and help others.
So I would say when it's my own company that I'm founding, it's really looking for the right business partners and very first group of employees that can, we have. People that have been at Ferocia now and building up for 12 years, 10 years a long time, really good retention.
When it's a company I'm investing in that I'm not involved, if I'm not on the board or I'm not on the advisory committee or I'm, just an investor and I'm not involved in any way. It really does come down to the people. I want to know who the people are, what their ambitions are, what their track record is.
We back a lot of very new first time founders and particularly try to invest in women improve diversity in the industry. And when we do that you don't know these people. So we spend the time to get to know them. And so a lot of the early states found a lot, for example, 2023, our first three big announcements of our investments, some of which were tidied up at the end of 2022.
But the first three big ones were all female led businesses, all female founders. We lived around, Aussie Angels with Cheryl. We led the round with gather and Jody and and there was one other one that escapes me, but it'll come to mind in a minute, but we we're very proud of that, but we actually got to know those people like we met Cheryl through air tree explorers and stuff like that.
We, we got to know people over a period of time, sometimes years, but sometimes months. Before we jumped in the deep end and either led the round or price the round or did the due diligence and then made the commitment to put money in and putting money in people think, Oh, you got heaps of money.
It's no dramas. Actually, we run like on the smell of an oily road. We run pretty close to the wire because we deploy all our capital. And sometimes when people ask us for money and we say we don't have any right now, they can't believe it, but we might have 20 million worth of capital calls. And we've made those commitments.
We've got to make those calls. We can't not pay them. And we've got a lot of businesses this year, particularly we've done a lot less new investments this year. And a lot of the investments have been follow ons with existing companies and actually helping them. Virtual raising right now.
And we were one of the first people to put up our hands and go in again. And you get, you as you go any deeper and deeper. Elevating the levels of trust with the founders and with the employees and with the other shareholders. And so for us that, that relationship that getting to know people and feeling comfortable is really the secret, yes, there's financial metrics.
Yes, there's legal diligence and there's regulations and all the other things you need to do. But for me, it all comes down to the people and the culture and the organisation, what's driving them, what their purpose is, are they doing it for social good? Are they doing it just to make money? If they're doing it just to make money, it's not as interesting for us.
Money makes the world go around. So you need the capital, you need revenue, you need profit, you need the money. But what's the greater purpose? What, why are they doing it? What's driving them and what drives them as individuals? That's really important for us.
Having been a founder yourself, are you better placed than most to help and provide founder empathy?
Might be personal things, might be professional things, but both Judy and I are very approachable. We've been there, we've done that. So there is that empathy. But I think it's also just that relationship that we build means that people are comfortable to come and have a yarn with us, maybe at a barbecue or.
Yeah. Even if it's in the office or something in a professional setting you can still get emotional and vulnerable and share those sort of inner thoughts. And I think that's, probably driven by the fact that we've been there and done that as a founder ourselves. If you do have that empathy, but it's not to say that there aren't great investors out there that do that as well.
I know a lot of great investors that are partners at venture capital firms that also have that same sort of people focus and can handle those conversations. But it's one of the many lessons I learned from Tomo. He's 20 years older than me, a lot of wisdom. A lot of experience to lend and just teach me the importance of culture and people and being approachable and having a heart and listening.
So I think that is one thing that we do feel that we're very good at is having empathy, listening letting founders be vulnerable and share their things with us that they perhaps wouldn't share with their life partner or perhaps wouldn't share with their business partner or perhaps wouldn't share with some other investor for us to be in a position for them to come and talk to us.
What’s your ideal hold period? Do you have the luxury of longer duration investments?
I think to some extent it's good to have constraints. Like one of the reasons why venture capital works so well in Silicon Valley is that everyone's rushing to be the best. Everyone wants to disrupt. Everyone wants to please their investors and provide a return. So I think that sometimes those constraints are actually really good.
We don't have the same constraints, but we set ourselves other constraints. So we want to balance the ledger in diversity in the industry. So that means we're backing more female founders for argument's sake. Or we want to help First Nations or we want to do something a little bit different.
So we might not be setting the same constraints, but we're trying to create new constraints that make sense to us. We're certainly not driven by the power law. In all my years of investing, we had one company that that failed. And yet in the last year, we've got three on the rocks and one has already shut their doors.
And so it's pretty tough economic times right now. So you need to have that empathy, but then you also maybe need to have that patient capital that you may not get through through the venture industry or private equity. So I think. We see ourselves as a quasi source of venture which is that we have the capital at the venture scale, but we don't have the power law driven sort of constraints that the venture fund is is operating now.
There are other challenges that we face because of that. It's all Dom's money, right? It's all my money. So when we're investing we might have. I don't know, different peculiarities that you may not have when it's other people's money. So part of what we've done is gone from investing in early seed rounds and friends and family and crowdfunding and so on to, leading rounds and doing bigger family office investments to then investing in venture capital and private equity and debt funding teams.
And so we feel and funds. So we feel like we've been across that that sort of spectrum. That we now have interesting sort of insights. And one of those insights is I'd love to invest out of people's money. That's why we do syndicates. And actually I don't always want it to be my money.
Because I don't have all the money I have a limited amount of capital and I'm still earning money. Like we have more money each year because we're still earning money, not only from our investments, because we're still out there working, right? So we get dividends and things like that as well.
So I think that, the thing that's interesting for us is that we've recently publicly announced that we're going to launch Australia's first dedicated fintech fund. And the reason behind that is not only to be innovative and disruptive and, try and meet some of the challenges with the structural, the ESVCLP.
Constraints that exist, for the structure of venture capital firms, but it's also to be able to do more secondary for founders to help founders buy a house or go on holiday or distress or whatever it is. And so we wanted to mix private capital, public capital and secondary all in the one fund.
But we also wanted to use other people's money quite frankly, like quite bluntly, because I don't have enough money. I get so much deal flow coming into Judy and me that we just can't invest in it all. So one of the things we do is syndicated out working with you guys, working with Aussie angels, working with flying Fox or whoever, or we, we are now announced that we're going to launch our own fund so that we can take bigger positions so that we have other people's capital. And we've had a lot of interest from people saying, Oh, what's Dom investing in? I want to invest in that too. So it's actually good for us because our objective is to reduce the burden on Dom's capital.
And other people wanted to share in those investments to be able to tell some of those stories in 10 or 20 years from now. And so I feel like it's a really good match meeting of the minds to raise more capital and make it available to the Australian startup ecosystem so that we can have more of those generations turnover and more founders employing people who become founders and more founders who exit their companies and then reinvest in the industry and other founders.
And I think, a fund can help us do that.
What was the vision for Euphemia, when you set up the Family Office?
So for me, it was the primary driving factor was giving back, like helping the ecosystem to to elevate, helping it to evolve, helping it to improve with each generation that fits the driving force.
And I thought. I couldn't spend all the money from these exits, even if I tried. Actually, it turns out you can because you spend it pretty quick. But at the time I was naive and I thought, Oh, that's a lot of money. Let me let me help. It very quickly turned into what are we going to do with it?
Like we need to do more than money. We want to be strategic. We want to, help fuel the next generation. We want to help balance the ledger. We want to help with diversity, all these different things that we're going through our mind. So Judy was awesome because Judy was just resigning as CEO of startup Vic.
So we had this fortuitous moment when I said do you want to come and run the family office? And maybe for a year or six months or something, I've been tinkering around doing some bits and pieces, but Judy had a really structured approach. I'm a bit chaotic, visionary wanting to do all the things.
And then Judy came in and said we've got these constraints. We've got this much capital. This is our, a regular income. This is the pool that we've got available. What are the things you want to do? How do you want to elevate the industry? What do you want to change? And so we went through some strategic planning exercise and it was pretty straightforward.
Like 2022, for example, was the sort of peak doll. I won three awards, FinTtech leader of the year twice from two different industry bodies. And then C level leader or something, for the Pause awards. And so to get those that recognition was awesome, but it was almost like that's not the end of the journey.
That's the start of the journey. So how do we give back and who should we give back to? Given that I'm fintech leader of the year, and I sit on the board of fintech Australia, and I'm involved in so many different fintechs let's invest in fintech. So that was a no brainer like that. That's what I do.
It's what I've been doing for, like I said, since before it was called fintech. So that made sense. And then that was an easy one, but then what else does Dom like to do? I've been investing for a long time more than a decade in climate businesses anything that helps people or planet.
So whether it's food supply, whether it's energy generation all this sort of interesting stuff to to help with climate change or to help just to help generally humans live on this amazing planet. And so that became a sort of second pillar where we said if you've already got these investments and you're already passionate about it, and people sometimes ask me why.
And I think a lot of things come from when you're a kid and my mom left school when she was 14 and went into the workforce and, help earn an income for the family and all that sort of stuff. And then in her forties, she went back to TAFE and technical college to learn about the world and get herself a job and, those sorts of things.
And one of the things she studied and specialised in was global warming and climate change. And so I remember when I was in primary school, my mom came out and gave a speech to the class about the hole in the ozone layer and rising water temperatures and, the looking after the Great Barrier Reef and all this stuff.
And it was just blew my mind because I was young and impressionable. I must have been 10 or 12 or something like that. I've never forgotten that. And of course, you love your mom and you think your mom's, amazing and all that sort of stuff. So I think that is somewhere in the back of my mind.
And over the years it's meant that I've always had a passion for helping people and planet essentially. So that became a very easy. The third pillar for us was that there's a lot of people who recognize some of the issues that we have. And if I just use diversity in a general sense whether that is, you might be in America and talk a lot about colored founders or black founders or, this sort of stuff in Australia, we'll translate it to immigrant founders or first nation founders or similar things like that.
But the biggest disparity for me is 50 something percent, 52, 53 percent of the world's population are women. And yet 3 percent of the capital is going to female founders. Obviously it's not, maybe it's not obvious, but I'm not female, but I have a daughter and she's very young when we started the family office and I'm thinking about her future.
I have a sister, I have a mom or a wife. I saw I'm consciously all the time thinking about how do we actually make it better? And my wife and I had. Many discussions over the years about how we earn income and bring it into our household and all that sort of stuff.
And the reality is as a man, I made more money. And so it made sense for me to reinvest some of my money into women. How can I actually help female founders to get access to capital? And not just our capital. One of the things we do, like I said earlier was lead the round. So then we bring in other venture capitalists or other family offices or other high net worths.
And so we can actually funnel a lot more than just Dom's money. We can funnel heaps of people's money into that issue and see whether we can resolve it. And I went to a beyond the billions event recently, which was put on by Goldman Sachs and had all the big investors in the room. And it was pretty incredible.
And it's all about investing in the next, the next billion dollars in women. And. Australia is one of the last countries to come to the party in terms of making these these pledges, these commitments but out of that group of people, they've got 450 million committed or something like that.
So it's quite extraordinary. And it seemed to me that would be a really worthwhile cause if we're going to elevate the entire ecosystem, it can't all be middle aged white men or, 20 something. with some ideas. It needs to be much more balanced. So I'm very passionate about first nations.
Is there anything we can do to help aboriginal people? Is there anything we can do to help women? Is there anything we can do to help immigrants who don't have the same sort of privilege that we might have, even if that's a working visa or if it's access to capital or maybe some government benefits or whatever it be.
So those three were the big three. Let's run with that. And then when we started investing, we noticed that there was a sort of theme. And one of the themes was whether we're investing in female founders, whether we're investing in FinTech or whether we're investing in climate tech, we had some sort of proclivity or some sort of bias towards the infrastructure.
So things that wouldn't just, so if you want to elevate the entire ecosystem, I can't just keep investing in individual founders or individual businesses. We need to invest in things that elevate the entire ecosystem. So companies like Buildkite that's helping people deploy software all over the world.
Or companies like virtual that raised nearly 200 million for hundreds of companies or syndicates like with you guys at TEN13 or Aussie Angels or whatever, it made sense for us to be backing those types of businesses because those infrastructure businesses. Elevating the entire ecosystem, which is aligned with our mission.
So we added a fourth pillar somewhere along the way, which is infrastructure. If it's a if it's a service that servicing the startup ecosystem, like everybody is using a tool to develop software and most of the business that we invest in a technology software companies. And so they're either using GitHub.
GitLab or Buildkite to deploy software and Buildkite actually spun out of PinPayments, which is a company that I founded. And the very first customer was Ferocia, which built up. So I already have an affinity with Buildkite. I already know the founders very well because they used to work for me, with me.
And so I had this this feeling that's the type of company that we want to back. And now they're doing over 30 million in revenue and they've raised tens of million dollars in venture capital. And it's just, globally. Companies like, I can't remember all the companies, but companies like SpaceX or companies like Apple or whatever, all these amazing companies around the world, Airbnb, Uber, whatever, these types of companies are using build parts.
So to me, those infrastructure players actually amplify our ability to have an impact on the whole industry. And so that fourth pillar of infrastructure became one of the things that we're very passionate about doing.
What has surprised you most about running the Family Office?
Yeah, I would say technically like the family office is me and my wife, right? So we've been doing it for a long time, but formally the the structures that we set up Judy and I, and then the branding and the positioning and coming up with a strategy of what it was we're investing in and having a more diligent approach.
And appointing Judy to run it as group CEO and all that sort of stuff. It's all happened in the last sort of 18 months a little bit over 18 months, only two years. And and so I would say that prior to that, it was just Dom tinkering away in the background and nobody really knew what was happening.
Now we're much more public about it. Now we've got a brand, the Euphemia brand, Euphemia is the Greek origin of the word PIM, right? I didn't think I'd want to have the family office with the name PIM. I don't know if the kids would like that or if they'd be embarrassed at school and all that stuff.
My wife came up with the name euphemia and we looked into it. It's Harry Potter's grandmother. And it's also the origin of the name pin. So we thought it's an absolute winner and I managed to get the domain name, euphemia. com. So we ran with that pretty quickly, we work with a branding agency and a a technology development team and all this stuff to pull together and launch the family office in the last couple of years.
And so I think that we've really come onto the scene and then we came out of the gates firing pretty fast. We made 20 or 20 or more investments in funds. Including the big three Airtree, Blackbird and Square Peg, and then we made a whole bunch of direct investments and I transferred over the public company and the direct investments that I've made previously into Euphemia.
So now Euphemia's got this portfolio of somewhere between 50 and 100. Investments, maybe more now. And we try to get them onto our website as quickly as possible, I think that maybe there's, I don't know, 80 or something like that listed on the website and sometimes we exit them and sometimes we do secondary sales and things like that.
But yeah, we came out of the gates really fast and hard and I think made a reasonably big impression in the Australian ecosystem, which is good because it helped us. To get awareness about why we're doing this and what's motivating us in doing it. And we've actually had a rally of support from so many people in the media or in other family offices or high net worths or in the venture capital funds and even founders in startups who were just like, Oh my God, it's a breath of fresh air.
It's a family office that we can get behind. It's a family office that we understand their mission. A lot of the times family offices are doing absolutely incredible things, but you never hear about it. They're just operating in the background very quietly. And the big family offices, the, I don't know the.
Smorgasbord or the Meyer family or whatever, they're doing absolutely extraordinary things at a scale that we can't even imagine, but we don't really hear that much about it. If you're in the arts or if you're looking at infrastructure or you're if you dig deep enough, you can find what it is they're doing.
But we just thought we'd. Do you feed me a, like a startup? We do it just like the companies that we invest in. When we come out with a brand, we're loud, we're proud. We've got a very defined mission. We're making very strategic investments and we're doing it collaborative with other family offices, other venture capital firms.
So we did one recently, like even the Billkite one, we introduced Billkite to Airtree, Airtree led the round, we put in money. I think maybe it was a million bucks or something like that, but then tens of million was put in by the big VCs who could, fill out the round. And they ended up raising 30.
40, whatever it was, something million. And we ended up being a small part of that. Of course we did the due diligence. Of course we wanted to lead in that case, we weren't, our check wasn't big enough. Air tree ended up leading the round, that's a good example where we encouraged others to participate.
And then same thing with companies like Zepto, we did the due diligence there. And then a couple of the big venture capital firms came in to invest. And again, we put in money but we didn't put in big bickies. And it was really those BC firms that were able to fill out the round and provide sufficient capital.
Cause I think they needed to raise again, tens of millions of dollars. And we just didn't have the bandwidth to do that. And then some of the smaller investments, like when we led the round for Aussie Angels, it wasn't a huge route, but it was a great group of people, including some of the partners at Airtree and ourselves and so on.
And so it was a really great round of high net worths and some VC related people and so on. But we were able to price the round, do the legal contracts put in a check and lead it and then bring others in our wake. And we did that with future super as well. We ran a syndicate and it was a bigger round than we could handle.
So it was like 15 million or something like that. And so we got an allocation and then set up a syndicate on Aussie angels. And then very quickly, we have a hundred syndicate members just bang, within a few days, I think we have 50 in the first 24 hours when we announced it. And so that was a really great one.
And we've got a good working relationship with future super. And so we're just really happy to be able to play a role.
Any advice for other Founders turn Funders out there?
Yeah, I would say anyone can be an investor now because you can participate in a crowdfund or you can participate in a syndicate.
There's lots of opportunities that weren't available in, in prior times. You can even invest in some of the the debt equity or debt fund businesses like Tractor or Rickson or so on. And so there's lots of opportunities now that you maybe didn't have. But I would say to anyone who wants to invest, it's very high risk.
And so you don't want to put, invest all your eggs in one basket. You want to think about diversity and think about making small investments. You want to be comfortable with risk. And so often I'd say to people, I'm not a licensed financial advisor. I can't give financial advice, but the things that I learned from and the things that I think were important for my journey.
Was deciding to put some investments in some savings where I'm earning interest or some public companies where I'm earning dividends or some ETFs because it's fractional and I can put in small amounts like those types of investments make sense. And then if you're looking at the startup sector, I encourage everybody to get involved, but obviously within your means.
So if you've got a, an amount of money that you can invest like a thousand bucks or something, don't put it all into one startup in, just bang all in one go. Think about how you can make a small investment. You can back a company just in a small way. And then hopefully you either learn from the mistake.
Or you're successful and then you and then you can add that to your kit bag. So I think that people should have a crack. There's only two ways to learn. One way is to gain knowledge through university or reading books or somebody telling you something, attending a course or that sort of stuff.
And that's really important. It's a foundation of knowledge to, to gain it and that sort of stuff, but it doesn't compete with practical experience. The only way you will actually Either lose money or make money is by taking action by doing it. So you have to do both. You have to educate yourself about the market and how it operates, and then you have to have a crack at it.
And I just recommend to people to have a small crack at it in the first instance so that you don't lose your life savings or anything silly like that. Just, take a very measured approach and put a small amount in. But for those founders that have an exit successfully, what I would encourage them to do is to think about who are the people that influence their lives.
How was that company successful? And they'll definitely quickly turn to their employees, the very early employees. Employees that they brought on the shareholders that believed in them, whether it was mom and dad, or whether it was some relatives or friends of the family, whether it was a syndicate or a crowd fund, and then the venture capitalists that backed their business or whatever it might be, think about that and think about how you can be that catalyst for the next generation of founders.
Is that simple? And so for me, I say who were my mentors? Who were the people that backed me? Who are the people that went into business with me? And how do I help people that are 20 or 30 years younger than them? So now I'm the person helping and just flipping it around that way, I think is a good way to think about it because that actually is what will help the ecosystem to evolve and maintain the sort of intellectual talent that we have here in Australia and make us, competitive on a global scale.
So that's what I encourage people to do. If you've got a small amount of money, don't invest it all in one go, take your time and do it easy. And if you're a founder with lots of money, also don't, spend it all in one go, but have a think about how you can be the influence that helped you to be successful.
Can you tell us about your Foundation you’ve set up?
Yeah, pay it forward. It's run really strongly through the startup space here. Do you want to touch briefly? I understand you've got a foundation. Are you happy to share a little bit about what brought you to set that up and what you're trying to achieve?
Sure. So the foundation is sometimes you make an investment and you're making that investment for a purpose, but, you're, there's an expectation that you'll get a return.
Whereas the foundation is a portion of our wealth that we want to give back with no expectation of anything at all. And the original idea was to help immediate family and and friends. And then ex, I call it the onion approach, right? And there's lots of, methodologies like this, but you start with your family and friends, the people that you know.
So if you can help out your mum or your dad, they looked after you when you, for 20 years, when you were a kid and housed you, and fed you and changed your nappies and all that. So there's a way you can help your immediate family. I think that's, that's noble, that's humble. It's, I think it's just nice.
And then if there and if they're in need, like maybe your family isn't in need. And then looking at the extended family, like I had a cousin. Was a bedridden and in a pretty tough environment and not able to earn an income and Judy and I spent time, not just capital but time helping them build up a business, get back on their feet.
And so the foundation is able to assist people in need and that was in an immediate family and then I wanted to expand it beyond immediate family and friends to the people that I know and care about for example, the four oceans that the people that we've employed that have been building up and one of the four oceans had a really tough time, had a stroke and was going through some pretty difficult rehabilitation and all that sort of stuff.
And so we just wanted to be able to, provide something and give back and have no expectation of anything in return. We just want to help these people that have helped us. And then looking beyond that, I'd love for the foundation to expand, to outsiders. 'cause we've got nearly a million of them now.
I'd love the foundation to expand to every Australia, but we don't have enough money to do that yet. So we're building it up one step at a time. And I think we're at about half a dozen, or maybe we're at eight or something. Foundation recipient so far. And it's typically looking at people in dire need where something, money can help, but something maybe more than money we had.
One carer who didn't have transport and it's one thing to pay for their Uber or get them a taxi or whatever, but we thought we really should buy them a car, so that they that they could drive. They just didn't own a car. So we bought them a car. It might sound like a small thing, but changed their life.
and also change the life of the people that they're caring for. So they, they're a school teacher who or maybe an ex school teacher. I don't know if they're still currently teaching, but they're very caring personality, but without transport, it made it pretty difficult. So I don't know.
They're just some little examples of the things that the foundation does. And when I do appearances, we rather than giving a bottle of wine or money or whatever it is we, we donate to neuroblastoma, which is or neuroblastoma, which is childhood cancer. And we had a very close family friend who had a young childhood, unfortunately died of this cancer.
And it's just like, how do you then give back so that you can help other people in that same situation? So that's what the foundation is about is that there's no expectation of any return whatsoever. You're not expecting money or anything from it other than helping people in need.
How do you fit it all in? What do you prioritise?
I joke that I try to get into the office at Up three days a week and inevitably it's my baby.
So it turns into five days a week and then I try to do family office two days a week, which inevitably turns into four days a week. So nine days a week, it's no problem. But that's, I'm just joking. It's just saying it in jest. I am very busy and I do a lot of different things. I try to break it up into maybe two or three different areas and Judy's an absolute godsend.
So she, has helped me to identify the areas of my life where I could do better, like sleeping or eating and I did exercise, those things that are important. And then also identifying the areas where my time and energy and money and brain thinking capacity and all that sort of stuff is best spent.
So we actually allocate my time partly with the family office. Partly with the foundation, partly with up and then I sit on, some boards and get involved in things. So on the advisory board at the bank and working on strategy and we're doing a community digitisation and involved with the foundation and things.
So I try to split my time where it's best needed. I run this thing again. Judy set it up for me called office hours where I have a fixed time in the calendar, like today, what you and I doing this now during my office hours. But often it's talking to a founder. Like I said, founder counseling or founders can just reach out and book me in my Calendly.
And then I, I can spend some time giving back and just giving advice and guidance. And often we don't invest in those sort of more mentor type relationships, a little bit ad hoc. And then I try to also get around to help each of the different companies that we invest in. So whether it's me or someone else as a representative, so in the case of virtual, I got to their strategy day and help them, define what their strategy is.
But then Judy is an observer on their board. So I can't get every month to every board meeting. So Judy does that, I couldn't do that for 100 companies, right? So yeah, it is about deciding where that time is best spent. And then how do we how do we allocate our duty breaks into the three things?
How do we allocate our time? How do we allocate our thinking capability a capacity and then how do we allocate our money? And by having those three different vectors, we can actually land pretty quickly on what are the best things the most valuable use of those resources. So yeah, look, it's pretty good fun.
I will say this. One of the side projects I call it, but it's my full time gig really is helping build what I hope will become the largest social good enterprise in Australia or even the world. And yeah, it's something I've, it's been announced now. It's something I've been working on for a couple of years with Bendigo Bank.
It was when we sold the business up Ferocia was the business, but, up came with it. It's just not a, we hired all these amazing people, but there's just not as much for me to do hands on in the office anymore. And so I was talking to money as the CEO of the bank and so many other people on the advisory board.
What is it, where can I add the most value? And Bendigo do some incredible, amazing things, whether it be bushfire recovery or flood recovery or helping people during COVID or helping with the, I don't know, the the children's hospital, or it's just so many amazing things, putting defibrillators on beaches, like so many incredible things.
And they're very humble. They don't tell anyone really about it. But in the last 25 years, they provide a 330 million back into all these different communities. And they've set up these joint ventures with their communities. They have over 230 banks jointly owned by the local community. And so they came along and said, Look, this is, there's hundreds of these banks.
We've got 100, 000 volunteers. This is great sort of business model, and they've been giving back for a long time. What would the next 25 years look like if we use technology to amplify and scale it? So that's something I've been working on quite passionately in the background is we call it the digital community back.
And it's really if Bendigo have been able to build a physical bank, that's been able to give, hundreds of millions of dollars back into all of these good things. How could you scale that to billions and how could you do that using technology? I feel like I can add some value to that one.
So that's certainly one that I've been putting a little bit of time into, but I sit on the advisory board at the bank on behalf of Ferocia and up. So I spend my my, my time between helping the team at And then helping the team with the digital community stuff.
Sophie Robertson:
Thank you Dom for so generously sharing your story with us today. And thank you for everything you've done: building amazing businesses here in Australia and now helping build out the startup community in Aus.
Dom Pym:
Thank you, and right back at you too. I like the work that you guys <TEN13> are doing - look at all the logos in the background - the work that you guys have been doing in order to help elevate the industry, get more people involved, push through those syndicates, automate those systems, and just give something back to the founders.
The work you guys are doing is pretty incredible as well. So let me just shout out that it's a pleasure to be here and I'm very happy to provide the time, but also thank you for what you're doing and what the team at TEN13 are doing. Thank you, Dom.