Software, surf and tech toys

Rod Drury has lived out his career increasingly in the limelight, building Xero into a powerhouse that employs more than 1800 staff in New Zealand, Australia, Britain and the United States.

Who is Rod Drury?

New Zealand’s most famous software entrepreneur. He’s the driving force behind cloud accounting company Xero, which listed on the NZX 10 years ago and is now worth more than $4.4 billion, with its shares rising more than 3000 per cent over the period.

Why he is in the news now?

He is rarely out of it, but he is selling about a sixth of his stake in Xero for $95m. He has sold shares worth $25m before but this is his biggest cash-out.

Expensive tastes?

More of your Kiwi outdoors type with a liking for tech toys. He ordered a Tesla X a couple of years ago. He lives in Havelock North and has been a keen surfer in the past. Now 50, journalists who call him up are more likely to interrupt him exercising on his bike.

Pretty down to earth then?

In many ways. He doesn’t have an office at Xero, for example, but he overcame a stutter earlier in his career and is now an effective showman when he needs to be on the conference circuit. So not the retiring type either.

What will he do with the cash?

We’ll have to wait and perhaps see. All we know so far is he has said it will provide ‘‘an important foundation’’ for what he said were ‘‘future plans to pursue a range of philanthropic and social endeavours’’.

How did he make his money?

He developed an interest in coding at Napier Boys High in the 1980s and had what has been described as a middleclass upbringing in Hawke’s Bay. He made his ‘‘hundreds of millions’’ through Xero – though most of that is still on paper – and before that ‘‘tens of millions’’ through establishing and selling an email technology company, Aftermail, which he set up in 2003. His initial ‘‘millions’’ came from software development firm Glazier Systems, which he sold in 1999. –Stuff