Trailblazers

Many people doubted them and sometimes they even doubted themselves. But these four tech pioneers kept the faith and now their innovations are being used in Australia and around the world.

Technology has spawned many trailblazing Australian companies – none more so than software juggernaut Atlassian, founded 15 years ago in Sydney by Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes (above, from left). Atlassian’s collaboration tools have created entirely new ways for business teams to organise, discuss and finish shared projects.

In late 2015, the company was listed on the United States’ NASDAQ stock market and is now valued at around $US7 billion. It employs about 2000 people and its products, including Jira, Confluence and HipChat, are used by more than 68,000 customers in 170 countries. “It’s even more rewarding,” says Farquhar, “to realise what it means in terms of the impact we’re having on team collaboration around the world.”

These visionaries had to push well outside their comfort zones to forge a new path. Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes started Atlassian with $10,000 of credit card debt – and no outside funding – straight after finishing their business IT degrees at the University of New South Wales. Their initial financial goal was to at least match the graduate starting salaries they could have earnt at a big consulting firm.

With the tech industry in the doldrums after the dotcom crash of 2000, Atlassian ran on a shoestring, selling its products only online and without hiring any salespeople. It was immediately profitable and Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar are now valued at about $US2.3 billion each. They’re sharing some of that wealth through the 1-1-1 philanthropic model, developed by Salesforce, where companies contribute one per cent of their technology, time and resources to improving communities.

Stevan Premutico can pinpoint the moment when he knew his startup would succeed. He was at soccer practice three years ago when a teammate asked about his job and he explained that he was the founder of online restaurant-reservation site Dimmi. “He replied, ‘I love Dimmi, I use it all the time,’” recalls Premutico. “That was when it occurred to me that we were having an impact.”

Since then, Dimmi has grown to dominate the Australian market, seating about one million diners a month at more than 4000 restaurants around the country. Its 50 staff at the company’s headquarters in Sydney oversee 20 per cent of Australia’s restaurant reservations. Dimmi is now owned by global travel site TripAdvisor.

But success didn’t come easily. Premutico threw in a well-paid job and risked everything to turn his big idea into a reality. It was 2008 and he was director of marketing for the Hilton hotel chain’s UK division, watching how portals such as Booking.com were starting to disrupt the travel industry. His boss agreed with Premutico’s assessment of technology’s likely effect but warned him that change at Hilton took time.

“Those words stuck in my head,” says Premutico, who resigned the next day. “I didn’t know where I was going but I knew I had to go. I wanted to make a mark in some way.”

He remained in London for the next year, working 20 hours a day on a business plan for using technology to connect people with restaurants. “Not a day went by when I didn’t want to throw in the towel. I’d work at a Starbucks and have one coffee and a muffin for the entire day. One day I fainted – that was a bit of a wake-up call – but there was something inside me, this calling.”

When he couldn’t raise any funding in London, Premutico returned to Sydney and launched Dimmi in 2009 after a family friend invested $300,000. It was a “tough slog” for several years until Dimmi signed with Google, Qantas, TripAdvisor and American Express as their Australian restaurant-booking agent. “We felt we’d arrived,” says Premutico of those milestone deals from 2013 to 2016. “But I didn’t think I was a trailblazer or a pioneer; I just hated the status quo. I loved innovation, I loved disruption; I was kind of anti-Establishment.” If Josephine Barbaro has her way, the diagnosis of autism in young children will be revolutionised. Her early-detection app, which came out last year, flags warning signs in toddlers, flying in the face of conventional wisdom that autism can’t be diagnosed early.

“When I began my research in 2005, it was very rare that anyone would look at autism in children under three,” explains Barbaro, who has a PhD in developmental psychology and is a research fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne. “It was very cutting-edge.”

Fast-forward 12 years and her free smartphone app, ASDetect, has been downloaded about 14,000 times in just over 12 months, despite nothing being spent on a marketing campaign. It was a finalist in the 2016 Australian Google Impact Challenge, which rewards non-profits with big ideas for a better world. The app also won Research & Development Project of the Year at the Australian Information Industry Association iAwards in 2016.

“This is a world first; it’s the most accurate surveillance tool for autism in the world,” says Barbaro, adding that about one in 50 Australian children has autism but currently only three per cent are diagnosed by age two. Early diagnosis helps children reach their full potential through sessions with speech therapists and psychologists.

The groundbreaking app is based on more than a decade of grassroots research by Barbaro. She trained 350 maternal and child health nurses to screen children aged 12 to 24 months for social and communication indicators such as consistent eye contact, imitating others, waving goodbye and returning smiles. The screening, of more than 30,000 children, was 81 per cent accurate in detecting autism.

Barbaro and her team at La Trobe University’s Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre partnered with global software company Salesforce to build the innovative video-based app over 12 months. Salesforce’s engineers, designers and developers donated their time as part of the company’s 1-1-1 philanthropic model.

“I’m interested in research that can have an effect on people’s everyday life,” says Barbaro, who had to overcome some scepticism in the medical profession. “Whenever I start a new project, I always look at the end product.”