Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 2)

Phil Copeland: I had started that business from home. My wife was working at that time and it was self-funded. Five or six years later, I think we had about 70 or 80 employees. We’ve become established as one of the significant distributors and service providers around client server computing in the Asia Pacific region. In 1996, we were acquired by a large US software company Open Environment Corporation, which had recently listed on NASDAQ. They were looking for a business partner and a base to establish their Asia Pacific operation as well as acquire some of the products that we built along the way. That was my first exit from a company. In fact, the irony of that story was that six months later, I stepped in as the acting CEO of Open Environment for a year during its sale to Borland.

Sramana Mitra: This is happening in 1997, right?

Phil Copeland: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Did you leave after this Borland sale?

Phil Copeland: At that time, seven years had gone into building the business. My wife was pregnant with our first child at that time as well. We actually bought a boat and spent a year cruising the Australian east coast and sailing from Sydney up to the Great Barrier Reef. I was very lucky to be able to do that along with our newborn baby. That was a very enjoyable year of our lives. I came back to Sydney and started doing some research and looking around what was happening in the marketplace. I was doing a bit of consulting work at that time. Obviously at that time, the Internet was really starting to explode. We eventually came up with an idea for another product. It was an Internet-based browser to help individuals surf the Internet more easily. It was a consumer-based product. We actually got funded by a large US VC by the name of VantagePoint at the end of 1999. It was actually December of 1999 that we had our first round of funding for that business. I should also mention that an Australian VC co-founded that as well. We had $7 million in funding.

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept of the business?

Phil Copeland: The initial model was to make it easier to find your way around the Internet. We had a fairly sophisticated plug-in for browsers that was an online bookmarking service that enabled you to share and recommend favorite sites with a group of colleagues. It actually evolved to become what that we call web tools. It enabled people to record a series of visits across a number of different websites and to share them with others. If you’re selling cars, for example, you could actually play back a series of web page visits through your browser. It almost became an online selling tool to the marketplace.

The trouble we had with that business is when we founded it, the Internet was just absolutely on fire. The business plan back then was to build up a large number of registered users and go from there. Unfortunately, when the whole dot-com crash occurred in March of 2000, which was two months after we launched the product, the whole business plan just became largely invalidated. We kept operating for another six months trying to see if we can make it work. In the end, we just decided that the original business plan and model that we had come up with was no longer viable. We wound up shutting down that business. Unfortunately, it just never went anywhere.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you shut that down?

Phil Copeland: That was in 2001. We kept going through to the end of 2000. It was early 2001 when we decided that it just wasn’t viable.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland
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