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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)

Anumber of big deals in the past 12 months reflect the success of a wave of companies in Australia’s maturing tech sector. Afterpay’s $39 billion sale to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s fintech business Square Inc was the most obvious example of Aussie tech leaders becoming significant global players. Other companies’ valuations soared past unicorn ($1 billion) level as funding rounds got bigger and venture investment funds swelled.

Away from the start-up deals, the impact of tech on public and corporate policy has been front and centre on the rare days the pandemic drops off the front pages.

Since March, when Christian Porter became Minister for Industry, Science and Technology after being moved out of the Attorney-General’s role, until he quit the post in September, there has been almost total silence from the government regarding innovation policy, with industry trying to fill the void. The Atlassian chiefs have kept up their various public crusades as a regular side dish to their business success.

The government’s battle to wring media-related dollars out of US tech giants Google and Facebook was a defining strand of an ongoing push to shift the balance in the digital global order.

1. Mike Cannon-Brookes & Scott Farquhar

Atlassian shares are up by more than a quarter over the year and its co-founders’ wealth rose to more than $20 billion apiece. At third on the Financial Review Rich List, Cannon-Brookes trails only resources billionaires Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest – an indication of the Atlassian pair’s position at the forefront of the industry of the future.

Their respective venture capital funds Grok Ventures and Skip Capital have backed a huge number of fast-emerging companies. They have told Atlassian staff they can work from anywhere for evermore, putting themselves at the vanguard of flexible working. Cannon-Brookes’ lobbying and investment in clean energy is making an impact, and Farquhar is influential in tech industry policy debates.

2. Melanie Perkins

While the steepling valuation ascribed to her company Canva is only “on paper” until it is sold or goes public, it has become increasingly clear that Perkins is building the powerhouse Australian tech brand of its era.

Unlike the Atlassian founders, who have loud voices on myriad industry issues, Perkins keeps a low profile, directing her energies on growing the design software company she co-founded in Perth in 2013. But that growth is enough to make her an industry-shaper; it keeps fuelling the returns of numerous local VC funds that backed it.

Plus, her co-founder and husband Cliff Obrecht has joined the board of the new Tech Council of Australia. Last year’s Power issue described Canva’s $8.7 billion valuation as “eye watering”; its latest funding round could lift that to as much as $US30 billion.

3. Craig Blair

With the notable exception of Afterpay, much of Australia’s booming tech sector has been built on the back of increasingly generous venture capital cheques, and none of the funds are more influential than Blair’s AirTree Ventures, which he co-founded with Daniel Petre in 2014.

A number of other funds, such as Blackbird Ventures and Square Peg Capital, are deserving of similar recognition, but none have backed more companies (23) that have gone on to be worth $100 million. The year ahead will probably see AirTree closing a big new fund and Blair announcing its involvement in more unicorns, to join Canva, GO1 and A Cloud Guru.

4. Melanie Silva

As the local Google boss, Silva’s power comes not from the huge tech innovations being worked on inside the company, which is outside of her domain, but in its commercial success and impact on all the industries it touches.

In the past year, she has taken on the full force of the government and Australia’s media giants in the globally significant debate that surrounded the country’s new media bargaining code. In January, the day before giving birth to a son, Silva fronted a Senate hearing and threatened to close Google’s search engines down in Australia.

While media companies walked away from the deal with big cheques, Silva was ultimately successful in ensuring future negotiations remain on Google’s terms, with its Google News Showcase now an important part of the agreements.

5. Robyn Denholm

Denholm has fingers in many pies across Australian business and the global technology sector, but her most obvious power comes in the fact that she is Elon Musk’s boss as the chairman of US electric vehicle pioneer Tesla.

Denholm has been quietly effective in that role to the extent that the company looks likely to keep her on past her initial three-year term. Locally, she is an operating partner working with portfolio companies at Blackbird Ventures, and became chairman of the new Tech Council of Australia, where she will take an active role in government policy as it relates to immigration, tax rules, employment and innovation policy investment.

And it isn’t profit at all cost - it’s that business must subscribe to corporate citizenship. Sure Canva understands companies need to make money, but along with this comes accountability to all stakeholders including staff and the community. And most of all it means giving back.

Canva is a young company founded by Millennials with a smart idea to develop software to make graphics accessible to non-experts. In seven years the company has taken off.

The married couple behind Canva, Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, now have a net wealth of $16.5 billion. But here’s the kicker - they plan to give most of it away.

The company has the sort of corporate philosophy that makes traditional businesses cringe because they have spent 50 years spruiking their primary responsibility as making money for shareholders.

Canva has a two-step plan - to become one of the most valuable companies in the world and doing the most good it can do. “We have this wildly optimistic belief that there is enough money, goodwill and good intentions in the world to solve most of the world’s problems, and we want to spend our lifetime working towards that,” Perkins says.

For older established companies, typically run by male baby boomers, the concept of a social licence is relatively new. Only in recent years have they turned their minds to issues such as gender representation, a safe and happy workforce free of harassment, a supply chain free of slave labour and broader concerns for the environment and their own carbon emissions.

These companies have years of entrenched cultural DNA working against them but Canva, like other startups, has the luxury of starting with a fresh slate.

It is a wax-cleaning moment to hear the founder of a $55 billion company say they were inspired by meeting an impoverished man in India who was working furiously to earn the equivalent of $1 per day and sleeping in a computer cafe.

Unintentional as it will be, the story of this company amounts to generational shaming. And given that, on paper at least, it is valued at more than Telstra, Fortescue or Woolworths, Canva’s style and culture will afford it cult status.

Canva has not yet listed on a stock exchange so its valuation is derived from the pricing of the company’s successful $US200 million issue of fresh capital. And this growth in value is head spinning - more than doubling since April this year.

And when it comes to raising money Canva - unlike other technology startups - is no beggar. It said there had been a large choice of investors, but it filtered the list based on who were considered “good humans and people whose company we enjoy”.

These now include a who’s who of international investors including T. Rowe Price, Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investments, Blackbird, Felicis, and AirTree Ventures.

They will supply enough growth capital to allow Canva to escape the need for a public listing for now. But the company does not deny the fact that a listing, probably on the tech-heavy US Nasdaq exchange, will ultimately become its capital home.

All its eager investors will be looking to capitalise on a company whose growth has a hockey-stick-shaped trajectory. It has this year boosted its workforce by 1000 and will probably do the same next year, it says.

During Wednesday’s first outing before the media, Canva treated listeners to far more information about the company’s philosophy than its finances. As an unlisted company, it has the luxury of keeping most financial details under wraps. However, Canva will be booking revenue at an annualised rate of $US1 billion ($2 billion) by December and generates free cash flow.

While these are very positive achievements, nothing in the numbers justifies the current valuation. Rather it is priced on its potential to live up to its ambition of being one of the most valuable companies in the world.

The astounding valuation and its Australian incubation make it the latest corporate pin-up for aspirational Australian tech startups and for philanthropy.

While some earlier billionaires such as Andrew Forrest or Bill Gates have given huge amounts to charity and engaged in impact investing, it has taken them decades to amass fortunes.

Thanks to the pace of the technology revolution the new breed of uber wealthy have become multi-billionaires almost overnight.

Those that plan to give back can choose a more give-as-you-go style of philanthropy.