Employee to Entrepreneur

Preface

I was summoned to Human Resources on the 15th floor of a central Sydney office tower in the city’s iconic Martin Place precinct, home to Macquarie Bank, the country’s largest investment bank. Earlier that day I was featured in a one-page article in The Australian newspaper, in which I was referred to as an employee of the bank. Only it wasn’t for anything I’d done for the bank. HR wanted to know how this media attention had come about. What a loaded question! My mind shifted back almost 12 months.

At the time I was working 800 kilometres away at EY in Melbourne. As a consultant for the big four accounting and professional services firms, I saw acres of vacant office space at almost every client site I visited, which prompted me to turn over the idea of an ‘Airbnb for office space’, connecting vacant office space with flexible workers, freelancers and business vagabonds. And the idea of Hotdesk was born.

I took the gig with Macquarie in April 2013, which meant moving to Sydney, but I kept working on Hotdesk, reading and learning everything I could about building a startup. I quickly realised how right Socrates was when he observed almost 2500 years ago that the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

I first tested customer appetite for the concept by posting a free advertisement for a non-executive director on the Australian Institute of Company Directors’ website. At the time, I was interested in obtaining some guidance by bringing on a non-executive director; ...