When you’re trying to build one of Australia’s next great companies, you need lots of things to right.
The right technology is the starting point. Funding is vital, of course. Great talent and a finely tuned sales and marketing function are crucial.
But for Sam Kroonenburg, the founder of online education business A Cloud Guru, which raised $US33 million earlier this year, one of his biggest growing pains was the seemingly simple issue of finding a physical home for his business.
The pain of finding premises is of course magnified by the rapid growth of the business, which has gone from 23 staff to over 130 in the space of about a year.
But leases aren’t built for rapid growth. They tend to run for five to eight years, and are extremely difficult and costly to break. For a company that has got to $10 million in revenue even faster than the iconic Atlassian, this is an distraction.
Read more from James Thomson, the AFR’s Chanticleer columnist here