​As the managing partner of Shearwater, I frequently find myself thinking about the quality of our own ‘product’. One of the differentiators of Shearwater is that we’re three founders investing our own money to back the generationally best tech companies in Australia and NZ. Our model relies on helping our portfolio companies via our collective experience and our wider networks.

So it was a privilege and honour to launch our regular Shearwater private dinners with the founder of WiseTech Global, Richard White, as guest speaker.

For those not familiar with Richard’s story, he founded WiseTech Global in 1994, IPO’d it on the ASX at a $1.1 billion valuation in 2016, and remains CEO of the now $10 billion company.

The evening was a masterclass of questions, discussion and insights from Richard on how to scale a start-up. Very few people in the world have achieved what he has on such an impressive scale. As one of the attendees put it: “it was one of the most interesting dinners of my life that I won’t soon forget”.

The night was just a small step towards building out the value for what we believe makes our ‘product’ so unique.