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Electric bike start-up Zoomo has banked a substantial $80 million funding round with investment from the venture capital funds of both Atlassian founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, as it rides the wave of rampant growth in the home delivery food and grocery market.

The round is its second external investment of the year, following a $15.4 million injection in May, and comprises 50 per cent equity and 50 per cent debt funding.

The round was led by Grok Ventures, the fund of Mr Cannon-Brookes and his wife Annie, with money also from Kim Jackson and Scott Farquhar’s Skip Capital and global cleantech investor ArcTern Ventures.

Co-founded by former Deliveroo and Mobike executive Mina Nada and his former Bain & Company consultant colleague Michael Johnson, Zoomo makes, sells and rents e-bikes to both gig economy delivery drivers and the operators that employ them.

It has clients such as US fast grocery delivery firm Gopuff and Domino’s and Milkrun in Australia, and will use the money to expand further into Spain, France, Germany and the United States and finish developing its next-generation bike model.

From its earliest days as a bike rental start-up for Deliveroo drivers in Sydney called Bolt Bikes, Zoomo has expanded and now provides a “one-stop shop” of fleet management and delivery solutions, including bikes, software, servicing and finance.

“This raise will really see us go from a start-up to a scale-up,” said Mr Nada, who is Zoomo’s chief executive.

Mike Cannon-Brookes said he had backed Zoomo because of its potential to reduce carbon emissions in deliveries. 

The company is not yet profitable, as it is investing to chase rapid growth, and Mr Nada said the fundraising process had taken three months to finalise.

Despite having to conduct the separate tasks of thrashing out a funding round, with frequent early morning and evening calls to the United States and Europe, while running business as usual during the day, Mr Nada said he was relishing the challenge of building a fast growth company.

“I think this role attracts a certain personality. I was talking to my wife the other day, and she was like, would you do anything differently if you had all the money in the world?” he said.

“And I was like, it feels like a video game. I’m playing poker one moment in a negotiation with an investor, the next I’m thinking about how to exit someone without them blowing up at us.

“Then suddenly I’m trying to solve a really tough operational question about motor control rates of failure, so it’s so varied, but, for me, it’s kind of fun.”

Half of Zoomo’s latest funding round has come in the form of asset backed debt – an option that many founders overlook when pitching for funds – from Israeli tech-focused investor Viola Group and Sydney-based firm OneVentures.

This debt facility will give Zoomo the financial backing to operate like a buy now, pay later company and allow customers to pay for bikes in monthly instalments rather than with an upfront lump-sum.

The four-year-old company was most recently valued at more than $100 million, a figure that is from before this latest raise.

As fast grocery delivery companies such as Gopuff and Gorillas grow, Zoomo hopes to join the ride as their obvious business partners in the mobile app-enabled consumer convenience game.

“Our Zoomo e-bike fleet is critical to enabling our rapid grocery delivery promise,” said Gopuff’s UK general manager, Alberto Menolascina.

“Not only have we found Zoomo the most advanced partner for enabling our vehicle scale-up, but the bikes are the favourites among our couriers as well.”

Mr Cannon-Brookes said he was drawn to Zoomo because he thought “electrifying” commercial delivery fleets could reduce carbon emissions.

“If we want to decarbonise our world, transportation needs to change,” he said. “Zoomo is an incredible Aussie start-up taking this on. They’re greening delivery and transforming logistics on a global scale.”

Zoomo’s bikes are “light and agile”, which means the industry can reimagine how mobility looks in major cities, particularly in the rapidly growing delivery sector.

• Legacy businesses like Telstra are struggling to recruit tech talent, pointing to border closures and the creation of more tech jobs as the cause.
• Some Australian businesses, like Xero, have resorted to recruiting overseas to fill the gap.
• Some in the industry say preference has become a largely overlooked part of the discussion, as specialists flock to opportunities to work on the “future of the internet” instead of legacy businesses.

As companies try to fill thousands of tech-adjacent roles with a labour supply that was already stretched before the pandemic, legacy businesses are finding it harder than ever to recruit talent, as Australian tech workers flock to work with buzzier startups and companies on the “future of the internet”. 

Some business leaders have pointed to border closures as the main driver of Australia’s tech talent supply shortage, while others say salaries for specialist roles like developers have risen to exorbitant levels, as talent feeder programs and universities fail to produce enough graduates to fill supply.

Earlier this week, some of Australia’s biggest tech startups told the market they were struggling to fill specialist tech roles. Culture AMP, the workplace survey startup valued at $2.05 billion, said it has some 100 roles to fill. 

Employment Hero, a HR tech startup, said it had 50 jobs going, while Marketplacer said it was looking for 25 more staff. Telstra, meanwhile, said that it was struggling to fill as many as 1,000 new tech jobs, as it looks to accelerate its own digital transformation. 

But other industry leaders say that preference has come to play a prominent role in the struggle to lock down Australian tech workers. 

Legacy Australian businesses, like Telstra, have come to compete with newer businesses that are happy to pay rising wages, and can offer specialists the opportunity to work on emerging tech-native projects, like the metaverse, or Web 3.0, along with blockchain technology, DeFi and NFTs.

Lachlan Feeney, founder and CEO of blockchain firms, Labrys, told Business Insider Australia that businesses across all industries are feeling the squeeze because companies like his are becoming the more attractive growth option for Australian tech workers.

“I think this is a really interesting point, right? That basically all companies are becoming tech companies,” Feeney said. 

“We’re kind of passing the point where you can get away without any sort of tech people — whether in IT, whether they’re functional or technical — you need them in your business,” he said. 

“There’s definitely an aspect where, if you’re given the option to work at a blockchain company working on [things like] Web 3.0, the future of the internet, or going and working at some traditional sort of boring legacy company that just needs some websites built — that’s definitely there.”

While preference has become an overlooked variable in the discussion of Australia’s tech skills shortage, Feeney said the talent pool is still far too small.

“The shortage is definitely real,” he said. “There are companies like ours, which maybe get the better side of the shortage or can be a bit more comparatively attractive — the other guys are definitely doing it tougher than us — but that’s not to say it’s easy for us either.”

Joseph Lyons, managing director at accounting software provider Xero, told Business Insider Australia that their approach to plugging the labour gap has been one centred around flexibility, allowing them to look overseas highly sought after technical specialists. 

Even still, he said Xero has “hundreds of open roles”. 

“We’re not necessarily [intent on] roles needing to be in a specific city or location. Our employees and products and tech teams can choose whether they would like to work from one of our offices or work remotely, or work in a hybrid model, or a combination of office and home,” Lyons said. 

“I think given that because we’re a global organisation, and we do have product and engineers working in other geographies around the world, and the fact that we do now have a fully remote and flexible arrangement, it just gives us an opportunity to tap into additional talent pools beyond the shores of where we’ve traditionally looked in New Zealand and Australia,” he said. 

For Feeney, cross-border talent hunting isn’t as much of an option, as Australia has become a world leader in the space. He said that Labrys has instead resorted to investing more time and energy into training junior workers straight out of university.

“So our company works with some pretty big name clients around the world, and yet they source power from Australia, because we do have that reputation of delivering high quality software, particularly in the blockchain space, particularly in DeFi, these sorts of things, where quality is so important,” he said. 

Feeney said much of the industry is still self-taught, a decade after the emergence of bitcoin, which means Australia’s tertiary institutions could be doing more to fill the local talent pool to relieve some of the baseline educative burden shouldered by the industry. 

“Pretty much anyone in Australia who’s already educated [on blockchain] is basically self-taught, which is a problem,” he said.  

“And we try to get those people out when we can find them, but they’re pretty rare. So we’ve got to try and train a lot of talent in house, which is difficult to do. The education system and the industry and everything else basically gets people with zero experience in our industry, we have to do it all ourselves.”

“It also doesn’t make it easier as well when, just generally, the whole [developer] space is very hot, very sought after. So you’re competing on that level, too.”

Xero has bought a four-year-old American inventory management software start-up called LOCATE Inventory, while posting a loss for the first half of the year.

LOCATE is Xero’s third acquisition in 2021, with plans to embed its fresh inventory and e-commerce staff and software within the Xero umbrella to improve its existing inventory management offering.

The strategic logic is to help Xero meet increased small business demand for inventory and cash flow management tools during the global shift to e-commerce.

Xero said that transaction, integration and operating costs from the acquisition will have a “minimal” impact on earnings for the second half of the financial year ending in 2022.

In terms of Xero’s results for the first half, the company swung to a loss despite revenue climbing by more than 20 per cent during the six months to September 30.

The company reported a $NZ5.9 million ($5.7 million) loss in its half-yearly results despite operating profit climbing by 23 per cent to $NZ505.7 million.

Companies are offering big pay rises to retain professionals such as website and app designers, data scientists and digital marketers to make sure they can keep up with the rising demand from consumers for digital products and services.

Senior user experience designers’ salaries jumped 10.5 per cent in 2021 and pay packets for experienced professionals in data science and data engineering grew 8 per cent, Mercer’s 2021 Australia Total Remuneration Survey found.

Workforce consulting firm Mercer expects an overall salary increase of 3 per cent in 2022, up from 2.5 per cent in 2021, signalling a tough market for hiring talent.

Employees with the right skill set who are prepared to change companies can net larger pay increases of 20 per cent, anecdotal evidence suggests, as companies attempt to lure talent to their business.

And it’s not just experienced professionals benefiting from the increase in salaries. The salary for entry-level cybersecurity professionals increased 8 per cent in 2021, Mercer found.

Twenty four-year-old Chloe Choy’s pay packet increased by 40 per cent this year when she moved from a graduate consulting role at EY to an entry-level position in cybersecurity.

“Money was a factor, the salary was significantly higher than my previous role,” Ms Choy told The Australian Financial Review on why she made the switch.

As a security adviser at Trustwave, one of Australia’s biggest cybersecurity consultants owned by Singapore telecoms behemoth Singtel, Ms Choy provides advice to clients about how they can improve their cybersecurity.

While the money was important – and allowed her to move out of a share house and into her own place – Ms Choy also values working in a diverse team and learning about the sector.

“I knew absolutely nothing about cybersecurity when I first joined. I didn’t have a background in it and I didn’t study it. That was in part why I was interested, I wanted to learn more about it,” she said.

The increased risk of hacks as more services move online and criminals develop new ways to attack businesses has accelerated the existing demand for cybersecurity professionals. There are 7760 IT security roles advertised on job site Seek.

Mercer’s head of insights, data and analytics business, Chi Tran, said the mass move to online services during lockdowns had driven demand for professionals in digital roles.

“These are the roles behind those tools, platforms and interfaces that are driving that online experience, whether it’s social media to drive the marketing side or digital platforms and services to enhance that experience as they go to these websites,” Ms Tran said.

For example, the average salary for a senior UX designer is $194,000, a role which brings data and design principles together to understand how customers behave online and make recommendations to improve websites and apps.

Social media marketers and e-commerce specialists also enjoyed an average salary increase of 7 per cent to help businesses capitalise on the online shopping boom.

Entry level digital marketers benefited from a median salary increase of 9.5 per cent in 2021. The average starting salary for candidates in this role is $66,000.

The survey of 1029 Australian businesses found almost a third of Australian organisations are planning to expand their overall workforce in the next 12 months and 58 per cent indicated maintaining overall workforce size by only hiring replacements.

Tim MacKinnon has left his role as managing director and vice president of eBay Australia to head up celebrity chef Shane Delia’s gourmet meal delivery start-up Providoor. 

In a post on his LinkedIn profile on Friday, MacKinnon said he was grateful for the opportunity to build Providoor into a global brand, but sad to leave the online marketplace where he has worked for the last 10 years. 

“I’m feeling ‘nervcited’ (to use my kids’ term) as I am leaving eBay [and] becoming the CEO of Providoor, a marketplace for enjoying Australia’s best restaurants at home,” MacKinnon wrote. 

“I feel sad too, I just wept in our team meeting, but I feel grateful to have led eBay Australia, and worked for 10 years on behalf of 40,000 Aussie retailers, with a pretty special team (past and present) in a pretty special culture.”  

Delia launched Providoor during Melbourne’s lockdown in June 2020 to help high-end restaurants like his own Maha, Maha East and Maha Bar tap into the multi-billion-dollar meal delivery market without sacrificing quality or presentation. 

Instead of sending fully cooked meals, which inevitably become cold and soggy during transport, the gourmet restaurants on Providoor prepare meals part of the way and provide instructions on how customers can finish cooking them at home. This generally involves a few simple steps, such as heating something on the stove. 

The platform has grown rapidly over the last year and a half, expanding beyond Melbourne to Sydney, Canberra and Adelaide. It will launch in Brisbane later this year, The Australian reported. Providoor estimates that it has returned $40 million back to the restaurant industry.

According to MacKinnon’s LinkedIn post, he has been advising Providoor for the past year. 

“I’ve been advising Providoor this year and feel grateful Shane has entrusted me to work with him and his amazing team to build Providoor as a global brand [and] habit,” he wrote.

David Ramadge, previously a senior director at eBay Australia, has taken over as managing director and vice president to lead the marketplace through its next phase of growth.

• A new focus on delivering market-leading “customer experience” in climate tech could accelerate Australia’s transition to renewable energy, says Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes.
• He said Australian policymakers could look to the UK as a blueprint, after Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged to cut 78% of carbon emissions out of the British economy by 2035.
• “The globe is going to move there if we don’t, but we have to have an understanding that can be a very positive thing for our economy,” Cannon-Brookes said.

Market-leading “customer experience” could accelerate industry uptake of climate change technology, says Mike Cannon Brookes, who thinks renewable energy solutions need to benefit businesses in more ways than just emissions reduction.

Speaking at Sydney’s “Impact X” summit in Sydney on Wednesday, Cannon-Brookes, and British billionaire and Virgin boss, Richard Branson, each weighed in on how Australia could best accelerate pathways to zero emissions. 

Using Tesla as an example, Cannon-Brookes said climate tech start-ups need to engineer products that offer customers a broader range of benefits than just “doing the right thing”. 

“If you show them that doing the right thing can be cheaper, and they can have a better experience of whatever it is that they’re doing, then I think it will accelerate the rollout,” Cannon-Brookes said.

“I argue that all the time with Tesla cars, so people buy Tesla cars, they buy them because they’re just a better car, right? They don’t buy them because it’s green, they buy them because they’re quiet, because they’ve got a great sound system and all this other stuff that happens to have an effect, that they save the planet while they’re doing it.”

The Atlassian CEO’s comments come less than a week after his company booked first-quarter revenue of $614 million, up 34% on the $459.5 million they pocketed last year. 

Announcing the results, the company — which has been running solely on renewable energy since the start of the 2020 financial year — also committed to bringing forward its net zero emissions target from 2050 to 2040. 

On Wednesday, Cannon-Brookes said although Australia’s transition to decarbonisation still faces considerable challenges, the nation’s policymakers should look to the UK as a model for long-term decarbonisation, after 10 years of considerable progress. 

Earlier this month, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged to cut 78% of carbon emissions out of the British economy by 2035, before heading to the UN’s COP26 climate summit, where he brokered a deal with 100 world leaders to cut methane emissions by 30% before 2030.

“The UK is actually one of the nations that has done this the best if you look at their 2030 [targets], and even 40-year history,” Cannon-Brookes said. 

“This is a challenge for our economy, and we have to be honest with people, whether they’re a worker in [carbon] industries, or… a business, we have to be honest and say we are going to take action to move away from those technologies,” he said. 

“The globe is going to move there if we don’t, but we have to have an understanding that that can be a very positive thing for our economy.”

It’s a view evidenced by recent research from Deloitte. Pradeep Philip, head of Access Economics at Deloitte, told Business Insider Australia that inaction on climate change could cost the Australian economy $3.4 trillion and 6.6 million less jobs by 2070.

“But if you do act — and I mean, commit to net zero by 2050 — in concert with the rest of the world to keep temperature rises to around 1.5 degrees, the benefit to the Australian economy is not that loss, but instead a gain of $90 billion and about 200,000 jobs by 2070,” Philip said.

He said either demand for Australian exports will plunge, or the risk of a carbon border adjustment mechanism (a carbon tariff) will increase dramatically — or both.

“In our analysis, we’ve also noted that if the rest of the world acts, while we’re too slow, and the rest of the world imposes carbon tariffs on us, that will effectively add about 45% to the cost of transitioning our economy over the next 10 years,” he said.

At Wednesday’s summit, Virgin boss Richard Branson said because legislating an Australian carbon tax is unlikely, policymakers should consider introducing “something like a carbon clean energy dividend”.

“Every company [would] put aside a certain amount of money, like Mike has done to invest in clean energy projects, but they would have the chance of getting that money back through their investments,” Branson said. 

“And if every company was asked to do that enormous amounts of money would then be invested in Australia in trying to create a clean energy revolution.”

Digital gift card provider Prezzee fancies itself as the country’s next unicorn, but there is a lot riding on its valuation.

The fintech, led by former David Jones executive Tony Karp and 85 per cent owned by Rich Lister Shaun Bonett’s Precision Group, has ambitious listing plans and has kicked off a non-deal roadshow of sorts in the United States, testing to see what kind of valuation it could get if listed in the US versus Australia.

The company’s chairman Bonett is known to be talking to investment banks and institutions to suss out how the US market would value a company like Prezzee.

Whether it pursues a US listing, heads for the ASX, or raises a substantial round of venture capital funding in 2022, comes down to a million -or a billion - dollar question: What kind of valuation would it attract?

Karp, who believes the business deserves to be valued highly enough to make it into the major indexes locally and will delay listing if not priced highly enough, feels it’s more likely to attract a premium in the company’s own backyard, than it would in the US.

According to some estimates, the sprawling telecommunications networks built and supported by Ericsson process about 40 percent of the world’s data. While the 140-year-old company’s introduction of 5G and other innovations continues to transform the way data travels across its networks, Ericsson is also transforming the ways in which its people use the company’s own data. The organization recognizes that data is more than just a by-product of its business activities; when fully utilized, data can help improve areas such as customer experience to operational efficiency.

We spoke to Sonia Boije, leader of the company’s Data Enablement Office, to learn how Ericsson has approached the early stages of becoming a more data-driven organization. In her interview with McKinsey’s Asin Tavakoli, Sonia shares an overview of Ericsson’s new data operating model and discusses the importance of focusing on people to deliver this change, including clearly articulating the vision to all stakeholders, empowering employees to take ownership of data, and providing company-wide data education. An edited version of their conversation is presented here.

McKinsey: Can you describe Ericsson’s data strategy and the role of the Data Enablement Office in executing it?

Sonia Boije: In short, the office oversees the end-to-end processes for how we utilize data, including setting the overall data strategy. The key objective of this strategy is to democratize data in a compliant manner. We are an engineering company at heart, so we’ve always worked with data, but not necessarily in a way that’s coordinated at a global level, as it is now.

To achieve this, we needed to meet certain preconditions. For example, we had to create clear ownership and accountability for data, by which we mean having people who are accountable for it on behalf of the organization and our customers. We also needed to improve data quality to foster trust and reliability. And we needed to follow a value-based approach, engaging our various business and market areas to focus on high-value use cases. I think this last point about applying a value-based approach to data governance—driven by the business—has been the biggest enabler to realize the true value of our data.

In the Data Enablement Office, I lead a global and expert team with responsibilities for data quality and governance, data architecture and tooling, metadata, and risk and security. We’re also responsible for supporting a data-focused culture and an environment of continuous learning, as well as creating new data domains and organizing teams around them. Organizationally, we report to the digital transformation officer.

McKinsey: Can you explain what you mean by a data domain?

Sonia Boije: You can think of a data domain as essentially a group of logical units of data relating to a specific topic. These might be, for example, data about your customers, accounting or reporting data, and so forth. Data-domain teams serve as subject-matter experts for their data domain and include a domain manager who’s accountable for the data and how it is used, as well as supporting data stewards, who are responsible for taking the data under governance.

How these relate to use cases is that use cases need data to derive an insight or to deliver a product or a service for a customer, for example, and might need lots of different types of data from multiple data domains. Data-domain teams can effectively support the use-case teams to provide the quality of data they need.

McKinsey: Many organizations struggle to determine if they should employ a centralized or federated model to support their data efforts. Would you consider your data operating model to be centralized by the Data Enablement Office?

Sonia Boije: Not quite. I would say the office standardizes data rather than centralizes it. The Data Enablement Office supports the scaling of data capabilities via a federated operating model.

According to our model, data domains are staffed by people across the organization who are closest to the data concerned. This model offers the advantage of leveraging the knowledge of the practitioners within the organization. We’re engaging people who have worked with the data before. And the data stays where it naturally resides, within the associated business areas.

I believe this model has also increased awareness and support from across the organization by involving relevant business stakeholders right from the start.

McKinsey: What types of roles make up the Data Enablement Office, and how did you go about staffing them?

Sonia Boije: New roles were created, including a data-use-case coordination team that supports use cases from across Ericsson and moderates discussions involving the use-case squads and data-domain teams; a data-quality expert, who defines and maintains the organization-wide data-quality frameworks and metrics; and a data-risk-and-security expert, who is responsible for translating security and regulatory policies into the data operating model and sharing them with the broader community.

We started staffing by identifying and working with existing talent within the company. We already have a vast wealth of data experts within Ericsson, so the first task was to bring the people already working with data into the Data Enablement Office as well as into the domain teams.

We’re pragmatic about how we staff the data domains and start by basing the support on what the use cases require. We’re generally able to staff domains within four to six weeks once a domain has been operationalized—meaning once we’ve decided we’re going to roll out that domain across the company.

We look for two types of profiles for the domain teams. The first is people who understand how the data is used from a business perspective and how it flows across the process end to end. The second is people who work within the actual data-source systems. These could be colleagues who are more technical from an IT perspective and are touching and fixing the data, always ensuring the completeness and freshness of that data. What has made this setup unique is bringing the process and technical people together to make decisions about the data, such as how it’s classified, what the level of quality should be, and so forth.

McKinsey: How did you go about selecting the initial data domains to establish, and are you seeing value from those yet?

Sonia Boije: We first conducted a feasibility and impact assessment of the data use cases that should be supported by the domains. We then selected two initial domains for rollout, which were chosen because they supported multiple prioritized use cases and were central to our operations.

We have seen real value to date. One example would be that we’ve automated elements of data collection, which has really helped us further enhance the timeliness and quality of data and eliminate the inconsistency in manual collection. This has enabled the effective use of machine learning and automation in various scenarios across the organization. We’ve been able to use machine learning to enhance customer support.

I would say our approach overall has really benefited from our data-governance activities. For example, the lineage of data is now readily available. That alone adds value to the people who want to use this data. It enables stakeholders to find data, trust that data, and use it related to their use cases in a compliant way. We anticipate significant additional value for both Ericsson and our customers as we continue to roll out this operating model to scale across the organization.

McKinsey: What were some of the ways you tackled the change-management aspects of becoming more data driven?

Sonia Boije: You need to articulate the vision, and I find that the best way to do this, especially when you’re doing such a big transformation across the organization, is people to people. A lot of it was meeting with people, sharing with them the vision, and showing them the value of that. Those people in turn became the ambassadors for this vision and then were able to share it and spread it across the organization. We did other, practical things to be able to scale it across our organization of more than 100,000 people. We created, for example, videos providing an introduction to why we need a data strategy, what the operating model is, and how it adds value and benefit.

A concrete example would be around standardizing data management. To democratize our data, we needed to standardize how we manage that data. To do that, we needed to ensure that all of us across the organization have the same standard capabilities and use the same tools. So the first challenge, you can imagine, is that we had to work with practitioners who know their data and have been working with this data for a long time. It’s not that this work wasn’t being done. It’s just that it was being done differently across the organization. A big part of the change management was to show the value for each of these users and stakeholders—that once we started standardizing, you could then find data in another area, which you could potentially cross-pollinate with the data you’re working with.

Another example is what we did to get buy-in from the business stakeholders from across the different parts of the organization. We ensured that we were bringing value for them, and we did this through their strategies and use cases. We were able to show them that, by being part of this change and adopting this new operating model, they would essentially benefit from good-quality data, a clear understanding of what the single source of truth is, the classification of how the data could be used, and an understanding of how the data flows across systems.

Once they started to see the value, it got them more excited. It got them more motivated to be part of contributing to bring in more use cases. And when data-domain teams started to see how thirsty the organization was for their data, they also got excited.

We’ve also set up a data and AI academy to train the whole organization, as well as communication plans that include bringing in external speakers to highlight the value and the possibilities of data.

McKinsey: How is your data and AI academy structured?

Sonia Boije: In terms of building data literacy, we have a strategy where we not only work with the practitioners, but we also provide trainings and literacy for the whole organization.

For practitioners, we focus on upskilling them in the capabilities they require to be able to do their work. We look at not only the processes and ways of working but also the technologies they need, such as data-management tools that could best support them to scale and make the work they do easier.

For the broader organization, we roll out different types of introduction courses. They cover things like data strategy, why it’s important, data quality, data culture, and ethics. We have one coming up now on metadata. We’re helping our organization as a whole, whether employees are in this space or not, understand the taxonomy we use and build the general awareness of the culture around data and why it’s important for us as we move forward.

If we look at the content itself, it’s a mixture of content that we have designed in respect to, for example, becoming a data steward, including practical trainings, then applying those practical trainings, as well as actually sitting for a data-steward qualification exam and becoming certified. In terms of other types of content, we also look at industry standards when it comes to content that’s available on the market and how we can leverage that.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve of course had to work in a more digital way, so we offer a lot of digital content to enable our people to upskill in their own time. But we also balance that with some more personalized trainings that people can sign up for, where they’re able to meet with a cohort and do several sessions.

McKinsey: What advice would you give to an organization just starting out?

Sonia Boije: I would say don’t underestimate the value of clearly articulating the data vision, the purpose, or the why. I think it’s easy to get caught up in the details, but it’s so important to communicate and get buy-in to the overall and bigger picture. To do this, we really worked from the grassroots up, going deep into the organization to share knowledge, so people have the understanding and the context to contribute.

I would also advise being ready to invest time in multiple stakeholders, which in our case is a diverse group of people, from the leadership team to IT. Everyone’s shared understanding is crucial to a successful process.

Online marketplace Kogan has recovered somewhat from disastrous inventory and logistics costs of last year, with gross profit growing 31.6 per cent during the first quarter of FY22 compared to the prior quarter, though remained 1.7 per cent down on the same time last year.

Gross sales grew 21 per cent year on year to $330.5 million, driven by Kogan First memberships – which hit 197,000 members in the quarter – as well as strong growth in Kogan Marketplace and Mighty Ape.

“We set a very high standard for ourselves, and I am proud of the way the Kogan team has continued to deliver on our mission,” said founder and chief executive Ruslan Kogan.

“While overcoming many challenges, the Kogan team has continued to deliver strong growth while investing in the future of the business and incubating new ways to deliver more value to our customers in the long term.”

According to the business, the inventory and warehousing woes that caused annual profit to fall 86.8 per cent through FY21 have been “resolved”, partially by closing a number of inefficient overflow warehouses which reduced its overall warehousing costs.

Looking further into FY22, Kogan has said it will look into logistics projects that do “not require significant capital expenditure and can be supported by the company’s balance sheet”.

“Over the next year we’ll be rolling out new and exciting projects to further support our loyal Kogan Community with Kogan First Membership rewards, new and improved delivery solutions, and further enhancements to [our] online shopping experience,” Kogan said.

• Australia’s startup scene has only grown stronger during the pandemic as more workers look to make a change.
• LinkedIn has analysed how each has grown and engaged staff, attracted jobseekers and pulled talent from major companies to list the best 25 in the country.
• The top contenders range from investment firms and digital banks to IT companies and online platforms.

While Atlassian, Airwallex, Canva and SafetyCulture might hog the headlines, the whole startup scene has never looked stronger, and it’s pulling in a growing number of Australians looking for a career change.

While as many as nine out of every 10 startups are said to fail, the allure of quick career advancement, unique experience and potentially lucrative equity is sometimes more than enough to compensate for the risk.

As a pandemic pushes many to re-evaulate their jobs, LinkedIn has revealed the country’s most promising 25 startups, attracting major talent as well as investment dollars.

To put the list together, the employment platform measured employee growth and engagement, interest from jobseekers and, significantly, how well each startup was attracting talent from some of the best rated companies in the country.

To qualify, companies needed to be less than seven years old, have more than 50 employees, and be privately held and headquartered in Australia. The full-list can be found below.

Topping the list in 2021 was Melbourne-based advisory and investment business Sayers. Founded in 2020 by a former PwC partner, the startup has already grown its headcount to 90 and says it is focused on the ‘new economy’.

Taking out the second spot was online HR platform Employment Hero, which has implemented work-from-home arrangements for its 250-strong workforce on a permanent basis.

Next was mattress and bedding company Koala, which has doubled down on its sustainability credentials, not to mention making early investor and Australian cricketer Steve Smith millions.

Hospitality platform Mr Yum was ranked fourth, having adapted to the pandemic and, within 10 days, launching pick-up and delivery features for restaurant orders.

Ranked fifth was healthcare technology company Eucalyptus, which has leaned into Telehealth, dermatology and sexual health during the pandemic.

Further down, Judo Bank, the unicorn stealing market share from the big four, and burgeoning neobank Volt, which is providing banking infrastructure to businesses and crypto platforms, both nabbed spots.

Many were elevated by the acceleration of trends during the pandemic.

Deeply embedded with online creators and aspiring to emulate the success of Canva, Linktree has enjoyed growing demand for its freemium social media landing pages.

Cryptocurrency exchange Swyftx has, like the digital assets it handles, experienced exponential growth, as its headcount grew almost tenfold this financial year.

Similarly, Shippit, which links online retailers with couriers, and Merivale-backed me&u, which facilitates contactless hospitality transactions, have all seen booming demand for their services. As have Lexicon Digital and Lab3, which specialise in web apps and cloud computing.

The rising buy now, pay later tide has equally buoyed the fortunes of Payright, which specialises in spreading out major purchases up to $20,000 into separate repayments.

Meanwhile, capitalising on the enormous mismatch between demand for tech skills and local supply, WithYouWithMe identifies shortages and builds up talent to fill the gaps.

“If you feel like a startup is the right fit for your next opportunity, take a look at who you may know at each company, [and] see what jobs are currently open,” LinkedIn advises.

Top 25 Australians startups 2021

1. Sayers (Investment)
2. Employment Hero (HR)
3. Koala (Retail)
4. Mr Yum (Food and Beverages)
5. Eucalyptus (Internet)
6. Barrenjoey (Financial Services)
7. Judo Bank (Banking)
8. Linktree (Internet)
9. Shippit (Computer Software)
10. Brighte (Internet)
11. Kapitol Group (Construction)
12. Volt Bank (Banking)
13. Impressive (Marketing and Advertising)
14. Thinkerbell (Marketing and Advertising)
15. WithYouWithMe (IT)
16. HireUp (Internet)
17. me&u (Restaurants)
18. Lab3 (IT)
19. Payright (Financial Services)
20. Roberts Co (Construction)
21. Willow (IT)
22. Swyftx (Financial Services)
23. Valiant Finance (Financial Services)
24. Lexicon Digital (IT)
25. GROW (IT)