The Australian Building Industry Finally Gets Sexy
Guilty pleasures have made a comeback. Whereas not too long ago your enjoying Friday night on the couch drinking Slurpees or binge watching The Real Housewives (or both) was something you’d speak about in hushed tones around the lunchroom, now these guilty pleasures have become common topics of conversation and a badge of pride for some. Clearly the crappier the television shows that you like, the more quirky and fun you are.
I’m no different. I’ll not hide the fact that I’m kinda into porn. To me it’s classic entertainment that ticks all the boxes. There’s the drama of overcoming great obstacles. There’s the fantasy element, with the best stories being the ones where you can easily envision yourself in the shoes of the main characters. And, of course, you can always count on a climax.
It helps that there is a thriving community that keeps me from feeling alone in my guilty pleasure: in recent years entrepreneurship porn has become wildly popular. It’s seemingly everywhere — there are numerous websites like Entrepreneur and Smart Company that peddle stories of guys (usually guys) starting vaguely useful and questionably profitable skateboard sharing companies in their dorm room which overnight are worth a millions of dollars. The podcast StartUp provides great audio documentaries about the entrepreneurship life. There are wise celebrity entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk, who spew sage advice on YouTube such as the the virtues of working on your soon to be killer venture from 7pm to 2am after getting home from that day job you hate. It’s even gone mainstream in the form of television shows like the Shark Tank.
It’s mainstream and it’s everywhere except, that is, in the Australian building industry, where porn is limited to boring gray headed real estate tycoons.
Until a few weeks ago. That’s when Aconex, an Australian tech company which provides online project management software to the building industry, sold to Oracle for $1.6 billion dollars.
The Australian Financial Review quickly jumped on the porn opportunity — anywhere there’s a billion dollars and a couple of white dudes you can count on the AFR getting the scoop — writing a few weeks ago about the Aconex shareholder meeting where the Oracle takeover was voted up, and the hugs and the tears that filled the room.
For once I am with the AFR in that this is a story to be trumpeted. Founded in 2000 by two Melbourne guys, Aconex was conceived as many great ventures are, as a way to solve a problem. Construction projects generate stacks of paper — the only group ahead of the building industry on the Tree Killer Ladder are lawyers — and one of Aconex’s founders was challenged by the task of managing the stacks.
Aconex did not blow up overnight based on a flimsy promise of potential future earnings or users or eyeballs, Aconex took the more traditional and semi-stable route to last month’s big payday, growing over 17 years to where it is now ubiquitous in the Australian building industry. If you’ve not used it you’ve heard of it and know it. Aconex is open and running on my computer at this very moment.
It is great to see a couple of guys in my industry start something from nothing and grow it into something successful. It shows that the construction industry can be innovative beyond just pretty 3D pictures of architecutral designs and stacking old shipping containers on top of one another and calling them a building. It also shows that there is room for entrepreneurs in this industry and that they can do things worthy of the big headlines usually reserved for Elon Musk shooting off rockets, on-demand dog walking companies, and bitcoin.
Of course Aconex is just another tech firm like all the rest, and it is a couple of blokes like most of the rest, but those minor issues aside, the Australian building industry should be championing the Aconex win, and be happy with having one of our own make the big time — $1.6 billion big. That’s a money shot we should all get behind.
