This week on the show I’m chatting with Paul Bassat - an Australian businessman who is as passionate about entrepreneurship today as he was 30 years ago. Paul co-founded the online job search marketplace SEEK in 1997 with his brother Andrew Bassat and friend Matt Rockman. The brothers were co-CEOs until Paul resigned in 2011.
What started off as not even knowing what the internet was, Paul together with the other two raised a small amount of initial capital and took on the newspaper companies one listing at a time. Against all the odds, SEEK managed to completely transform the landscape of employment advertising from print-dominated to online
SEEK became one of Australia’s most successful online businesses, becoming an ASX top 100 listed company with a market capitalisation of $8 billion. It has expanded to China, Brazil, Mexico, New Zealand and various markets through South East Asia.
Life post SEEK saw Paul co-founding his second company Square Peg Capital in 2012. Square Peg is a global private equity investment fund, and in particular, an active investor in early stage and growth stage technology companies. The VC firm is on a mission to empower exceptional founders, and to date has done exactly that - from being an early investor in Canva to backing companies like Airwallex, Fiverr and Stripe. Paul has always remained passionate about backing the next generation of founders, and is in awe of anyone who starts a business or goes out on their own.
In this episode, we chat about:
- Who is Paul Bassat?
- What kind of businessman Paul is
- Paul’s studies and career before SEEK
- The way the idea for SEEK came about, and how he co-built the platform
- Finding the right investors for SEEK in the early days
- The biggest problems Paul faced when building the company
- What indicated the idea was starting to work
- How long it took to get SEEK to profitability
- Expanding to other geographies, and when the right time to do it was
- Taking SEEK public with an IPO in 2005, and what it meant to become a public company
- How SEEK was almost stolen from Paul and his co-founders
- Why Paul left SEEK in 2011
- Co-founding Square Peg
- How Square Peg picks who to invest in and who it might reject
- The most important things about startups
- Investing in AI companies
- The startup success of Israel
- The most existential problem entrepreneurs face
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Find Square Peg Capital: https://www.squarepeg.vc/
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