#141 Leigh Jasper: Service stations to Silicon Valley, unpacking the $1.6B success of Aconex, chairing Second Quarter Ventures & LaunchVic

The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal

Leigh Jasper is a leading entrepreneur, investor and business executive. Leigh previously co-founded Aconex, the world’s most widely used cloud collaboration platform for managing construction projects. As CEO, he led Aconex through multiple capital raisings, to an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 2014 and company sale to Oracle Ltd for $1.6 billion in 2018.

Leigh is a founder of SecondQuarter Ventures + Saniel Ventures, and is a director of SEEK Ltd, Salta Properties, the Burnet Institute, Buildxact Pty Ltd, Zuuse, Matrak and the Jasper Foundation. He is also the Chair of LaunchVic.

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Episode guiding points:

Learn about Leigh’s sunrise in Rutherglen in country Victoria growing up around the family business, a car dealership — with his dad also being a member of parliament and mum’s influence raising Leigh and his sister.

We cover a lot in this conversation so strap in — importance of loyalty, meeting his Aconex founder Rob Philpott during boarding school, and how they first decided to start a business together and why it became Aconex. It was fascinating to learn that Aconex was started during a time when the concept of SaaS (software as a service) was quite new with no AWS and no real concept of customer pricing models. Some of the areas of the Aconex journey we dive into include: The importance of doing sales as a founder, their first expansion out of Australia, optimism bias and narrowing focus and Leigh’s most painful learning.

Find out about Leigh’s transition following the Aconex sale to Oracle, learning to say no, tracking his time, setting up a foundation with his life, his advice to founders on selling some equity to be more risk on with a financial safety net and more.

It’s now time to explore your curiosity. Please enjoy!

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