Our team loves to help businesses, accountants and bookkeepers automate, collaborate and grow. Seeing your company on the NZX Main Board and then in the nightly news was crazy, but it is a double edged sword and we have to deliver to our shareholders. They have been joined by many more and today, we have over 3,500 people working to bring Xero to millions more small businesses and their advisors around the world. Xero provides training and education to small business owners, accountants, book-keepers, financial staff, CFOs and partners as it believes that they are the cornerstone of the Company’s existence.

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We now, truly, are a global company with our executive teams spread all over the world, and I think it’s much more mature now. Xero’s innovation extended beyond accounting software—it was also funded in a unique way. In New Zealand at the time, the biggest VC deal was about two million dollars.

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Craig Walker was working around Wellington as a technology contractor for a range of small business clients that couldn’t afford to have their own chief technology officer. A decade later, the company has more than a million business customers. The share price has risen from $NZ1 on debut to around $NZ27 now. This week it is hosting 3000 customers at its annual event, XeroCon, in Melbourne.

The Xero Story: Building a Global Platform Out of New Zealand

The Guardian’s revelation, coming just days after Thiel donated $US1.25 million to the Trump campaign, forced him to apologise. Winkler had indeed made more than six times his initial investment by the time he sold off $NZ15 million of shares in November 2012. xero founder At the same time, Xero co-founders Drury and Hamish Edwards also wanted to cash in $NZ5 million and $NZ2 million respectively. “It was actually a private banker’s office. I took out some coffee, which he thought was strange — but we always do that.”

So we have about 600 certified apps, and these numbers are crazy, 40,000 developers now connecting to the Xero platform. So a lot of our small businesses are doing bespoke integrations to the platform, because they can build really nice workflow systems using all sorts of scripting tools and things like that. “That was the technology scene in the 1990s, because it was really hard and personally very difficult with all the travel, to build long-term businesses. So you get into a point and you’d sell them, and everyone was happy.” “We probably could’ve raised money on the US west coast, but if we were looking for $NZ15 million, the company would’ve had a valuation of around $NZ20 million, meaning the venture capitalists would’ve got most of the business,” he says. “From a financial perspective, New Zealand technology’s ‘Big Bang’ was the sale of TradeMe in 2006. A company started in 1999 was sold less than seven years later for $NZ750 million to Fairfax.” It is still yet to turn a profit, having stuck with its strategy of pursuing growth over earnings.

That is very different from most businesses and it’s the right thing to do. But I am looking forward to when the lines cross over and we can also say we are a profitable company as well. It will be a strange feeling after having our heads down for so long but one I really want to experience. So, you want to get to a point where everyone understands where we’re trying to get to, and then that allows them to make decisions and move forward. We’re about 1,800 people now, so I spend a lot of time repeating the vision, getting feedback, [and] if I hear a good idea from the team, that’s even better. Your brain needs time for unconscious thought, so if I’ve got a problem, you know, by the time I’m coming down the hill after a ride, it’s usually solved.

• Software-as-a-service, as the industry called it, was still rare for small business use.
• But now Matrix and Accel have invested and Xero has just hit an annual run rate of $250M in Revenue.
• Also in 2020, Xero Shoes partnered with private equity firm TZP Group for additional funding.
• Join our team of talented thinkers, creators and educators and help make life better for small businesses globally.
• And then we started really trying to look for some killer experiences, and we brought a fantastic designer onto the team, and we followed small businesses around, because what we noticed, the three main desktop vendors were all kind of doing the same thing.

Hopefully this doesn’t sound too cheesy but when I see our team doing awesome work that was even better than I imagined (which happens a lot) I get a huge buzz. On this day 15 years ago, our founder, Rod Drury, registered Xero as a company in Wellington, New Zealand. Xero is now one of the top 20 companies on the New Zealand Stock Exchange and is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.

It was only in November 2012, that it went public on the Australian Securities Exchange. From the period 2009 to 2013, it raised a total funding of NZD 230 million to give it a valuation of approximately NZD1.4 billion on the NZE. It acquired various companies like Paycycle, Spotlight Workpapers and WorkflowMax to improve the product offerings to its customers. Rod Drury is the Founder & CEO of Xero, a multi-billion publicly traded accounting software company. Xero began in New Zealand and is going head to head with Intuit’s Quickbooks across the globe.