Derek Handley comes under fire over re-election
An otherwise limp Sky TV annual meeting was enlivened when a shareholder objected to board candidate Derek Handley.
The entrepreneur has been on Sky’s board since 2014 and was up for re-election, along with fellow director Geraldine McBride.
With the vote pending, retail investor Coralie van Camp stood up to say: “Since the Government CTO debacle, a lot of information has come out about his business activities that have lost investors a lot of money.”
She said it was unknown if US buyer Meredith Corporation was happy with The Hyperfactory after it bought the startup cofounded by Derek and older brother Geoff Handley for an unknown sum in 2010. Another Handley startup, Feverpitch had lost investors $3 million she said, while a third, Snakk Media, had seen its market cap slump from $60m to below $1m. Handley’s work with Sir Richard Branson’s charitable foundation was all about self-promotion, in her view.
Taking the microphone to respond, Handley said: “I have learned a lot more through my own failures or losses than I have through any successes. And I think as New Zealanders, we really should value more the growth and the character-building of people’s efforts when they don’t succeed in the way you hoped — as opposed to taking them down or taking them out of the equation.”
The CTO candidate said he was “barely 22” when Feverpitch failed. And he said while he appreciated Snakk investors had lost a lot of money, it was still an active, $10m-by-revenue company. Losing money was “part of the game”, when you were an entrepreneur, Handley said.
“Since I graduated from Victoria University in 2000, I never worked for anybody else. I only ever tried to create businesses.” He said he had also put money into around 20 startups founded by others and that as an investor in early stage technology companies.
Sky chairman Peter Macourt backed Handley, telling shareholders: “For entrepreneurs, success and failure go hand in hand and the trick is to have more successes than failures.”