My guest for Ep179 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Ben Thompson, the Co-founder & CEO of Employment Hero.

Employment hero is one of Australia’s great startup success stories.

The business launched in November 2014 and fast forward almost a decade later, they have 2.5M users and 300,000 SME customers globally and in 2023 they raised a $263M Series F funding round, taking their total funding to $650M at a valuation just shy of $2B.

In this episode we get into many of the insights and lessons from his journey in building a $2B business, but as you may have seen, Ben and Employment Hero have also been in the news recently for their fight with Hostplus, an industry Super Fund that is an LP in Airtree, which is also one of the investors in Employment Hero.

That fight started when Ben called out HostPlus on a LinkedIn post and escalated to the point where HostPlus pushed for Ben to be sacked as CEO of his company.

For the first time since the incident, Ben shares his side of the story on what went down on this podcast.

Timestamps

• 4:27 Ben’s background and early career
• 12:33 Decision to launch a tech startup
• 17:01 Early days at Employment Hero
• 19:52 Different funding options available for founders
• 27:13 Managing multiple businesses and competing priorities
• 30:49 Importance of strong personal relationships as a founder
• 33:22 Employment Hero global expansion during Covid
• 37:05 Finding product market fit in different markets when expanding
• 40:45 How to think about product decisions and requests from different markets
• 43:57 How the CEO role has evolved over time for Ben
• 46:07 Finding and hiring the right people at the right time
• 48:48 Ben’s thoughts on the Hostplus situation
• 57:20 Staying true to company vision
• 59:34 What’s next for Employment Hero

Our partners

A big thank you to our partners for the show:

Scendar 

Scendar is the OG startup accounting firm in Australia catering to all stages of your business’ life. If you’re busy running your startup, you don’t have time to do your own books and forecast. Instead, fully outsource your finance function, giving you time and resources back to focus on what you do best in growing your business. Find out more at Scendar.com

Vanta

Vanta helps businesses get — and stay — compliant by automating up to 90% of the work for the most in-demand compliance frameworks. And with over 300 integrations, you can easily monitor and secure the tools your business relies on.
Join over six thousand fast-growing companies that use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time.
Get started with a Sydney-based Vanta team member today, or watch a 3-minute demo to learn more, at vanta.com/playbook.

Links mentioned

Ben’s links

• LinkedIn
• Twitter/X
• Employment Hero
• Hero Foundation

People mentioned

• Dave Tong
• Elon Musk
• Marc Andreessen – Why software is eating the world
• Luke Anear
• Eric Ries – The Lean Startup
• Geoffrey Moore – Crossing the Chasm
• Clayton Christensen – The Innovator’s Dilemma
• Bradford Smart – Topgrading
• Rob Paterson
• Scott Farquhar
• Mike Cannon-Brookes
• Dr Sam Prince
• Phil Bernie
• Kevin Rawlings

Companies mentioned

• Sydney Futures Exchange
• Employment Innovations
• Din Tai Fung
• SafetyCulture
• Power2Motivate
• Partners for Growth
• Airtree
• OneVentures
• Atlassian
• KeyPay
• AMP Capital
• Volt Bank
• Hostplus
• Starlink
• Swag

Feedback/connect/say hello:

Rohit@startupplaybook.co
@RohitBhargava7 (Twitter)
/rohbhargava (LinkedIn)
@rohit_bhargava (Instagram)
My Youtube Channel

Credits:

Music: Paycheck

Other channels:

Find all of the links for the podcast on Linktree here

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