How Success Happens: Ansarada CEO Sam Riley on mastering the fundamentals

• Sam Riley on Ansarada's early days and lessons learned.
• On converting risk-averse customers and facing obstacles.

Origin-story context on Ansarada's CEO and company.

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I haven't think about that and I thought about it for two milliseconds and said, yeah, sure, we can do that.

That's how success happens.

From Entrepreneur Magazine, my name is Robert Tuckman.

I self-funded, built up, and eventually sold two businesses to major players in the sports and entertainment industry.

And I am fascinated by other entrepreneurial minds and what drives high achieving people.

So on this podcast, we're going to learn what they've learned and what it takes to really succeed.

Sam Riley is the CEO and co-founder of Ansarata.

Sam's vision is to help millions of businesses raise and protect their potential throughout their life cycle.

Ansarata is doing this through leveraging all its experience.

From running 24,000 M&A deals across the globe into the AI-powered platform, which provides the visibility, insights, connections, and automation.

that companies need to be ready for the most important outcomes in their life cycle, including debt and equity, capital raising, compliance, refinancing, M&A, and more.

Today, Ancerata is a complete operating system for governing critical information so you can reduce risk, boost efficiencies, and drive decision making at every stage of a company's life cycle.

Their portfolio of SaaS solutions now includes deals, board, tenders, and compliance, bringing together the AI-powered virtual data rooms, project management workflow tool, highly secure board portal, and governance and compliance pathways into a single powerful platform.

Ancerata was established with just $30,000 in capital and now has 150 employees around the world and an annual revenue of $35 million.

More than 400,000 professionals use Ancerata's platform and data rooms for transactions such as M&A, capital raising, private placements, IPOs, asset sales, and more.

Ancerata has frequently been listed on the Deloitte technology, Fast 50, and certified as a great place to work.

Sam Riley is passionate about leadership, simplicity, challenging the status quo, and serving those less fortunate.

Sam has in fact pledged 1% of Ancerata's equity, time and product to the Adara group, a unique organization working to improve the lives of women and children from Nepal and Uganda living in extreme poverty.

I kicked off our conversation by asking Sam if he had that entrepreneurial spirit, even as a kid.

Sam, thanks for joining me on How Success Happens.

It's such a pleasure to have you on the show.

And I want to ask you just from your beginnings and as a child, was being an entrepreneur on your list when you were a little guy or is that something that happened later in life?

If you listen to my mother, she will tell you that I was always entrepreneurial.

Like she's got a range of stories dating back to kindergarten.

I think there was this basic commerce exercise.

They made the kids buy some lollies, like a bag of lollies for $0.

50 or something.

And then they said, look, go sell it for $1.

00.

And they were trying to just teach that basic principles of buying and selling.

And what happened was none of the kids had $1.

00 in kindergarten, so they wouldn't buy the whole bag.

So what I did is broke the bag open and sold each lolly for $0.

10.

They could afford 10 cents and that way I got rid of all the lollies, but no other kids sold a bag.

So it was just that creative thinking like how to sell something and what can I do?

I can break down the bags.

So there's lots of, it's in my DNA I think.

Yeah, it sounds like from an early age, especially in kindergarten and all the great entrepreneurs or a lot of them we talked to always had that mind going at that age.

And growing up, was your mom or dad, were they an influence on you in terms of your entrepreneurship?

Yeah, for sure.

I think over the long term, I realized my mother's a much greater influence than I thought.

When I was growing up, my father ran his own business and dad was like, he wouldn't get much attention from dad for anything unless it had something to do with business.

So I think subconsciously, You know, everyone wants the approval of their father and that's something you seek out.

And as I've reflected on it, like he passed away many, many years ago, but I'm like, you know, I still think part of what I do today is deep down.

There's some part of me that's like, maybe now dad would be proud.

Like maybe now he'd be because you're always seeking that from your dad.

And if your dad was a business person, then you're probably going to do business things because you kind of got taught that.

Yeah, it's so true from that psychological end of it.

As you get older and being an entrepreneur as well, you realize why you did certain things or why you're doing.

My father was a small business.

He had a small business as well with this, but I just saw that and learned from it.

And it was always something I didn't want to do what he was doing.

He was in He just was doing something to survive.

He's selling braids to designers and fashion was my, not my strong suit, but I really learned a lot.

And it sounds like you also learned a lot and really wanted to prove yourself.

And what was your first experience with or I know after the lollies, but going to school and coming out, did you go and be an entrepreneur right away?

Yeah, like I was trying to build up, like when I was 16 in school, I think I signed up to Herbalife and was convinced I was going to retire in about three years from building a multi-level marketing business.

So, you know, like, but there was good parts in that, you know, learn a little bit about nutrition and trying to help people lose weight or get healthy and then recruiting people to try and sell in your organization.

So there's all these basic tenants of business that even a multi-level marketing business exposes you to some of those challenges.

And ultimately, I wasn't successful at that, but I learned a lot of lessons that then I was able to use in the next business.

But I found myself about age 19, where I hadn't gone to university.

This multi-level marketing thing, I think it dawned on me finally that it wasn't working out.

And I was like, what was I going to do?

So one of my friends said, There's this brand new ice cream factory that's just opened and they need lots of people because they're commissioning everything.

So it was like afternoon shift, like 2pm to 10pm and it was like $50 an hour pay.

And I'm like, okay, this will be all right.

You know, I can earn a bit of money.

I can work before two o'clock on another venture or something.

You know, whilst I was there, like I found myself curious about improving how things work and helping solve the problems there.

but a long story short is after about three years, every time I went for a manager position or something with more influence, they just had a blanket policy that if you didn't have a university degree, we don't put you in management.

They said, look, if you want to get ahead, you should go to uni and start climbing the corporate ladder.

That really motivated me to create my own ladder, really.

I'm like, I can't see myself doing that.

I learned a lot of lessons there where it was heavily unionized environment and you had management.

And I don't think in all my time there, I heard the word customer.

So you had almost like this daily war where management was trying to outsmart and get the union to do stuff and the union was trying to work for what they wanted.

And they're both highly intelligent and they knew what they should do.

But all this energy and focus just went on.

that and I thought, when I have my own company that I definitely don't want to create that environment.

And remember learning from dad, you know, in watching him, he was very quick.

And if there was a problem, he'd get onto it and he acted really rapidly on anything.

And you learn, I learned a lot of good things from him.

But, you know, also as a child, I got to observe certain ways of doing business that just don't work out.

So one story I remember was just how, you know, it must have been a tough week for him.

He must have struggled to get enough income to pay the salaries and it was about 12 workers and this was back in the day where everyone would get a pay packet.

They were all gathered around on the Thursday afternoon is when they got paid and they were sitting on the edge of the glass table where you cut glass and waiting and there's like a mezzanine level in the factory and I was up there and no one knew I was there but I was maybe making a fish tank out of scrap glass to sell to someone.

You know, I heard them start talking about my dad negatively, but then he came out and he had this bundle of pay packets and he threw it at him and said, take it, you bastards.

You know, I love the old school because I just know he would have been under a lot of stress and all that, but there's no excuse for that behavior.

But then afterwards, when he went back in his office, you know, I heard them talk about dad even more harshly.

You know, and then the following week, like when they could do a job in 30 minutes, they're not going to rush.

They take 40, 50 minutes and like this.

So I'm like, oh, that's not a good, you know, the kind of these experience starts to, you have this vision that one day I'm going to have my company and you start to have a little mental scrapbook of when I do, that's a good thing.

But I'm not going to do that because that doesn't work.

It's great to be so honest and authentic and understand like there were so many good things your father taught you and your mom, of course, as well.

And then taking things and like you said, putting it in the back of your mind and saying, when I have my business, this is how I'm going to run it.

And obviously those were different days and nowadays it's even completely different.

But at the end of the day, really treating your employees the right way and really making them part of the team and feel important to me, too, is just the most important thing.

Because like you said, they're going to go out and they're going to take 30, 40 minutes.

They're not going to buy in.

And you've obviously built a business now that has just risen and has been incredible.

But before we get to Ancerada, Were there other businesses prior and anything that was close to thinking you were going to follow through long term?

Yeah, there was.

There was one whilst I was still working at Unilever pretty early on.

I think one of the habits, I'm always looking at what's emerging and trends and changes in the world.

And around that time, it was starting to be evident that there was a bit of a health craze building.

you know, around 99, 2000 and juice bars started popping up.

And at the same time, especially in Australia, like it's now like radically obsessive, but the great espresso, like great coffee, started to become a thing that people wanted, like that exceptional coffee.

So me and a friend from high school, we said, well, let's open up a juice and an espresso bar.

So His parents had an old sandwich shop that wasn't working out for them and they wanted to get out of it.

So we pitched them on the idea that they should sell it to us.

We're going to rebrand it as a juice and espresso bar, make it like really kind of this medicinal angle on juices.

And, you know, we called them crazy names like the cardio cleanser.

And we had some breakfast smoothie that was gave you a lot of energy, but it also had a lot of fiber.

So we called it the drink and run and run and run and it sort of had a double meaning so.

So we did that and then me and that friend were very competitive so we're trying to out compete each other to make the best coffee or the fastest way of making a juice and there's a lot of good things that you learn from that like you reorganize the shop so that cutting out a couple of seconds here and there and all of that but ultimately.

The fundamentals of that business were so wrong, but I didn't realise it until I had more business knowledge later on.

The location wasn't that right.

The size of the shop was too small.

When we went to scale, if you're just breaking even with two people on staff in a small retail, when you hire a third person, you've just increased your employee cost by 50% but you haven't increased your revenue by 50% and then the perishable nature of fruits and vegetables.

And the other day, actually, we were going through throwing out old papers and I saw some of the, we used to retract everything.

And it was just so obvious to me that we should have gotten rid of all the juice and just done coffee because it was the most profitable thing.

It was growing the fastest.

And it took up like one tenth of the shop and nine tenths was all of this juice making stuff and storage.

And I'm like, gee, I just hiring people and trying to train part time 16 year olds.

Me and that friend too, we didn't have a proper agreement in place and always find in business that even cultures in business, like if everything's perfect today, whatever that is, but say it's perfect, the very next day, things start changing in people's lives.

Like someone goes home and their wife says I'm pregnant or another person goes home and their grandma's very sick and they start to, and people's priorities and change.

It's kind of like a live culture of business that's always evolving.

One of the things that happened to me, my friend and his family became unhappy with us and then he took their side.

We became very messy, but we never had an agreement in place to go back to, like no partnership agreement or shareholders agreement that regardless of what's going on in your life, you can go back to what you agreed.

I just ended up saying this isn't because I was just married at the time and my wife was getting stressed out.

I said, look, you can buy me at this price or if you think that's too expensive, I'll buy you out at that price or we can just sell it together.

But they chose to buy at my share and I left.

But that left me technically on paper.

That left me bankrupt.

I remember having more outgoings and incoming.

way more debt than assets.

And I've always been this so-called entrepreneur.

So I'm 23 years old.

Haven't gone to uni, stuck making ice creams in a factory.

I'm behind on all my big mouth promises to everyone.

Feel like I failed my wife and put her through stress.

So that time was difficult.

But I remember I never wanted to file for bankruptcy.

I just thought there must be a way.

must be something I can do.

And I think that situation created a lot of urgency in me.

I have to find a way to improve my circumstances.

I remember distinctly going outside and just looking up to God and saying, listen, I keep trying what I think is good, but I think you've got a better idea what I should do than I do.

So I remember just handing everything over to him and saying, look, you point me in some direction, I'll just follow because I've kind of don't think I'm good at figuring this stuff out.

So pretty soon after, that's when I got a phone call from my sister who took a different path to me.

She went to university and she became an accountant and she was working at KPMG and she was working on this, preparing this company to be sold.

And she got to know the financial controller at that company.

And she also got to know the chief information officer as part of preparing for the deal.

And she said, oh, hey, you should come and meet them because they created this product called a virtual data room to help with the due diligence process in a deal.

You might like to take a look at it because she knew my circumstance and knew I needed a fresh opportunity.

So that was the beginning of the four founders of Ansarata getting together.

You know, I can go into that story, but it was quite serendipitous at my lowest point, became like a door opened up, all that frustration and disappointment I'd had in the years preceding suddenly magically transformed into this tremendous amount of energy that I could direct into this slither of hope could be promising.

Which is really incredible because, you know, now someone hears about you or you're on this podcast and people think everything's so easy.

It's a success.

I just interviewed a guy from Lulu Lemon.

He was about to go bankrupt five times before they got one last reprieve.

And like yourself in this situation, what I love about it is you learn from each thing, whether it was being a partner and having agreements in place, you know, just some of those things and you took and you turn them into positives, even going back to like you said with your dad and you were resilient.

And that is very difficult because a lot of people after one failure or doesn't work, it's hard for them to pick themselves off the mat.

But you did it, your sister calls and you start this business.

How did it go from that meeting to you and your three partners starting Ancerata?

Yeah, so that meeting we met at a coffee shop in Sydney.

I understood enough about business and due diligence to know broadly what the problem is and how software could be a good solution.

The prevailing way to do due diligence back then was physical.

People would go to offices usually run by the lawyers and physically look through contracts, agreements, financials and leave all the information there and then it's like clearly that's not going to survive in the digital age.

So there's going to be some change.

So we met up and I said, well, let's have a look at what you built Andrew.

So Andrew is like, you know, from Belarus, he immigrated out to Australia, super smart, you know, physics major, Russian software engineer, and very logical.

So Andrew built something where you could upload documents, you know, track them, let people access some report on who's doing what and make sure that access like is secure in the sense that only the right people can see the right things at the right time.

That looks pretty simple.

He only took three months to build it, so it's pretty rudimentary, but you could see it.

Then Daphne is an accountant.

She's a financial controller and Rachel's an accountant.

I'm like, okay, we've got two accountants and a Russian software engineer.

It sounds like the start of a joke.

The other thing I'd come to appreciate is people that have different strengths than you do.

I remember at the time I'd just finished reading a book and I forget which one it was, but it was going into, it had a statistic.

You might know it, but it said, businesses that start with multiple founders are far more likely to be successful than solo founder.

I was licking my words basically from my mistakes.

I'm like, oh, here's what I'm good at.

I'm like, okay, I've come to realize I'm not so good at these things.

I realized it'd be better for me to have people around me that were good at those things.

And I was just, I remember sitting there going, well, they're very, very good at accounting and Andrew's very, very good at the logic and the data.

Like, okay, I'm creative, I'm entrepreneurial and strategy and sales and marketing.

We didn't make any business agreement.

I just said, listen, let's go speak to people we know and see if this is a problem worth solving.

So we made a list of the CFOs we knew.

some general councils, some investment bankers, some corporate lawyers.

And I remember going and seeing several of them and interviewing them around like, what's your role about?

How does it deal?

What happens in a deal?

How do you do it?

How much time does it take?

What about your diligence?

How long is that process?

And they all said it was a nightmare.

They hated it.

It's stressful.

They wished things could be easier.

And I thought this is a great opportunity because you've got the people running their business are already busy.

But when they go to sell it, They're just exceptionally busy getting it ready and preparing and with all the lawyers and bankers and accountants.

Some like that they need as much efficiency as possible.

The lawyers, bankers and advisors, they're mainly concerned with their reputations as a dealmaker and they don't want anything to go wrong.

So they want, you know, risk to be reduced.

Everyone's very expensive, like thousands of dollars per hour.

So definitely we could add value here if we make life easier for these people because of the process they're running and it's so important to them.

They will think we're valuable.

That's how we will get paid.

Very much my mindset was on what value can we provide and how should that value look for these people?

One positive thing I got out of Herbalife was it was American business philosopher Jim Rowan.

and Jim Rowan was, I think Herbalife used to get him to tour around and I remember sitting in an audience when I was 14 listening to Jim Rowan taking notes furiously.

He repeated it like six times, but he goes, you get paid for the value you bring to the marketplace.

So if you want to be paid more, bring more value to the marketplace.

I was on a referencing this to retail juice bars and going, okay, there's so much value you could bring making coffee for people and juice, but with multimillion dollar mergers and acquisitions with the world's smartest people trying to make things happen.

It's a bigger canvas.

There's a lot more opportunity to bring a lot more value given the context of who would be using it and why.

That was kind of the mindset.

After we diagnosed there's a problem to solve and we showed them the software, they started saying, oh, look, it's good what you guys have, but I don't always need that feature.

Could say, can you make that on off control?

optional.

We're like, yep.

So I would constantly, in my part time, no one left their jobs yet.

Rachel's still at KPMG, Daphne and Andrew are still at the company.

I'm still making ice cream.

But at the time it was good because I was on this shift roster, which was 12 hour shifts.

And you do two day shifts, two night shifts.

And then you had four days off.

So in this four days off, I would load them up with showcasing what we'd built.

Based on the feedback they gave us whatever a few weeks ago and then they tell that's great.

And they go actually I was thinking about you guys more and one thing you don't have is there's a lot of questions that get asked in due diligence from loads of people.

And we've got to route them to people who can answer them across various topics and then they've got to be approved by someone senior before they're disclosed.

That's a nightmare and it happens on email and do you have anything for that and I'm like.

No, we don't, but then I sat down with Andrew and we mapped out a whole Q&A system and workflow for it.

We started showcasing that back to these people that we'd built a relationship with, who would be our future customers, but at this stage it was R&D.

Again, they had little feedback as we'd show things.

Eventually, after about one year, a couple of them we'd built up trust.

And I wouldn't say it was a deliberate strategy to build trust, but that's what I learned happened because we realized for people to put their reputation and multimillion dollar deal on the line, they're like, who are you?

Who's used you?

What have you done?

Just listening to people and responding.

That shows you listen, you care, you deliver on your word.

They said, look, we've got a small property deal coming up.

Do you guys want to run it?

And I said, yeah, we'll run it.

We ran this small property deal and It went okay, but there were some things in our software that didn't quite stack up, but nothing catastrophic.

But we thought that was good.

And that gave us more confidence to start.

I started asking the other people we'd been meeting, like, hey, do you have anything coming up that maybe we could do?

Something small like you could try this software out on.

Part of the network we had was from KPMG because Rachel and my sister worked there.

So obviously their corporate finance team were helping us.

happy to give their feedback.

And one of them said, oh, yeah, actually, we've got this, um, surfwear company that needs to raise capital.

Otherwise they're going to go out of business.

So it's sort of a distressed capital raising, but it was a famous surfwear company by brand name.

So we ran that deal and we did a really, really good job.

And the team at KPMG loved the service.

We gave them a product.

But unfortunately what happened was.

they didn't raise the capital and that company went bankrupt and we never got paid.

We never got paid anything for it.

But it actually turned out to be a very, very good thing because the KPMG team felt really sorry for us and they said, well, we'll give you guys some more deals to make up for it.

And that was actually far more important to us at that stage.

Totally.

It just reminds me sometimes in those situations, you had the confidence, you did it, they realized it.

but it probably turned into so much more business because they felt bad.

But I want to ask you, when you were starting the business at that time, it sounds like you were kind of at a lower point in your life.

You had had some failures.

For you personally, what was your mindset like?

Was it, I've got to do this, I've got to get this?

Like, what were you thinking during that year where you were really testing and then getting out there.

Yeah, I think I took a stock take of my life up until that point and I remember writing a list of things I'm good at and things that I like and things that energize me and where I actually, when I touch something, it actually did help someone and did provide value and it did work and also a list of where I don't like that it doesn't energize me, I'm not good at it.

And I remember wanting to go back to basics.

Because I think as a young male, I just got too caught up in wanting to skip to the fruits of life without putting in fundamentals.

So I remember being obsessed about fundamentals.

I had to curb all my spending and I just had to focus on what do people find valuable and how can we give it to them?

And I was just back to basics, really, really back to basics was.

What I realized is you just can't skip the fundamentals because that's what got me in trouble all the time.

That was a big part of it.

Yeah, it really sounds like a lot of your story was taking all of those things that you realized weren't helping you or helping you build that really helped you finally get over that home and create this incredible business, which I want to talk about because Ancerata, you started it, like you said, with three partners.

one being your sister.

He started it with $30,000, which a lot of companies today, which yours publicly traded, aren't started that way.

What were those early days like when you finally did decide this is our product?

We're moving forward.

What were those early days like for you?

How did you gain success?

Thinking back, but because of that obsession, we have fundamentals and wanting to get everything right.

And that started with, like I just said, okay, before we get carried away, let's go meet people who actually would be future customers and diagnose things so we can build stuff and then showcasing it to them, getting feedback and all that.

It was so step by step, just validating every little piece.

That's where we agreed.

The next meeting we had was pizza and we made up the shareholding at that meeting because we said, look, Andrew created the software like, see, done the most.

He should have 40%.

Sam's going to have to get this thing off the ground and get customers and sales and build a brand.

So that's critical.

So Sam should have 30%.

And then Rachel and Daphne took 15% each because they were part of helping found the company and adding value.

But everyone instantly agreed on that.

And one of the lawyers we met and back to my juice bar story, not having agreements in place.

The first thing we did was go and get a shareholders agreement.

and we documented all that and implemented that agreement pretty quickly.

But I just said, look, we don't need much money to run around saying people have got to put up a website, we've got to get some business cards, etc.

Needed a little bit of capital, but $30,000 was enough for that next year before we actually got the confidence to sell the product.

We had one Dell Tower server that was co-located, a data center.

So we had to pay for that little space in the rack and that server and the connectivity to the internet.

We had one I don't know the brand, I forget, but it was this bright red firewall that was sitting there.

So they were at basic costs that the $30,000 contributed.

We got very lucky actually after about four deals.

One of Sydney's best corporate lawyers who we'd been introduced to, he gave us a small deal.

He loved us.

I remember I was travelling to work, got a phone call and he said, hey, mate, I've got a deal for you, but I want you to come in my office because I need to look into the whites of your eyes before I give it to you.

I said, yeah, sure.

So I went in and he sat me down and he goes, listen, because this is a very high profile transaction.

It's going to be bigger than Ben Hur.

And if you guys get it right, it's going to be great for you.

But I warn you, don't say yes unless you can do it because if you screw it up, you will struggle to get any work because there's going to be such high interest in this deal.

I haven't think about that and I thought about it for two milliseconds.

Like any good entrepreneur.

I said, yeah, sure, we can do that.

And it turned out that it was Australia's largest media family is called the besides Murdoch is called the Packer family.

And James Packer made a decision to recapitalize his business and get out of all the media.

say it was the sale of the most popular TV network, hundreds of magazines and other media assets.

It was a very interesting deal.

They set the price at $5.

8 billion and they said to the bidders, which were a stack of private equity firms, they said it's the first firm to get comfortable paying the price.

So what that meant in terms of our product and due diligence is the due diligence process was even more intensive because The only way they can get comfortable writing that size check is they got to understand the business and the risks and the opportunities, which all translated into our product getting smashed with activity, which, you know, me and Andrew would be up all night.

You know, we were 24 seven support.

I was like constrain monitoring emails like said, so for that six weeks I hardly slept because it was.

Such a rush of adrenaline where you'll start up suddenly has a $6 billion deal the country's most high profile person.

So I'd always be thankful for that trust and opportunity that that person saw in us.

Andrew Bullock is his name.

Great guy.

Yeah, that deal got done.

And when it got announced, everyone was surprised, which was a good thing because our products meant to keep secrets and keep it confidential.

That really.

Besides boosting my confidence even further, it allowed us to have a great reference story.

Because everywhere we went, there was established competitors and they said, who's used you guys?

I've never heard of you.

And now we had this awesome case study and everyone's like, oh, wow, I can see why they chose you guys.

That's much more advanced.

That's simpler.

And that was a big catalyst for us.

It must have been for you as the sales marketing person, but obviously doing everything because you were making sure it was working monitoring emails obviously Andrew was doing the tech.

But once you got that deal done and it was complete, this must have just opened up the gates for you to be like, let me go get a lot of business.

Yeah, definitely.

So we got paid for that, which was great.

And it was about 20 days after that, I left my job at Unilever.

I said, this is definitely going to work.

So I was running that deal from the car park of the ice cream factory.

You know, there was these little, you know, everyone hot spots off their phone these days.

But I had this big, big two toned Dell laptop that had this big card that you could slide in from Vodafone and it was internet, but it was like GPRS.

Remember that?

Exactly.

And it was so slow, but you know, I was able to do support requests and my colleagues at work were really good.

They'd cover for me.

I had some holidays, I used all of them.

I'm like, okay, I definitely can leave work now because that set us up.

It was really interesting afterwards.

That same lawyer was about to work on another deal.

He says, look, I'll come to this meeting with you because the bankers don't want to use you because they've never heard of you.

That's the one thing I learned a lot around is people who are risk adverse and getting them to adopt and change that skill that we've built up.

and how to do that is more important than the technology, I think.

But he knew that if he was there with me, that it might help them.

So it was Deutsche Bank, so they were very structured and organized around everything.

And they said, what do you guys, do you have 24 seven support?

Because we've got international bidders here around the clock.

And I rattled off some, yeah, yeah, we have that.

But this lawyer had since learned that we were only a two person startup.

I don't think he knew that at the start, but he did discover that he then piped up in the meeting and said, look, the only reason answer out of his 24 seven support is because Sam works very, very, very, very hard.

And I'm thinking, what are you doing to me here?

Kill him.

You're killing me.

But but he actually uses a positive.

But that was a bit of a shock.

Another story, I think, is worth telling.

You know, that question and answer facility I told you about that we were developing, because everyone said it was such a pain, I started using it to book meetings to build relationships with other firms.

So I set up some meetings in Melbourne, you know, so I got on a plane.

And again, remember, Andrew still hasn't left his job, I haven't, but this is like two days I had off or something.

So I flew to Melbourne.

And I've got all these demos set up of our product, including Q&A, because it was a good door opener and it's got people interested.

They want to see this.

And I remember getting to the lobby of this building 20 minutes before the meeting and I thought, I better go make sure everything's set up and prepare.

When I clicked on Q and A, I just got this error screen.

This error is everywhere.

And I refreshed it and did everything I know and nothing's working.

So I ring Andrew.

Andrew's at work.

I said, Hey, Andrew, what the product's working.

But when I click on Q and A, it's just complete error screen.

And he goes, Oh yeah, I was working on it last night and I didn't finish.

what I wanted to do.

He goes, yeah, but we've got no customers anyway.

So he said, no one's using it.

So what does it matter?

I said, I probably should have told you, but I've actually come to Melbourne and I've got six meetings.

I've got to demonstrate this.

So Andrew, we came up with this plan.

He goes, I can get a taxi back to my house.

It'll only take me 10 minutes to get it back up and running.

So we're like, okay, you're going to take 30, 40 minutes.

My meeting's in 20.

I said, you do that in the first part of the meeting.

I'll I'll chit chat.

I'll show everything else we have.

You send me a text because when I feel my phone vibrate, I'll know that Q and A is working.

That phone did vibrate.

And then the people when I was demoing it, they're like, oh, yeah, this is great.

Well, what's that Q and A?

I said, yeah, yeah, we'll get to that.

And I clicked on it.

And sure enough, it worked.

That's one thing that Andrew, you know, is never, ever, ever let me down.

you know, and just that's the biggest story of it.

But that's like what startups are like, those kind of things.

Totally.

You know, amazing.

And as I always said, people see you now, but they don't remember or don't know the early days, the things you went through to be successful.

Today, I think I read you guys have been involved in over 24,000 M&A deals, you're public, you're expanding into new markets.

But one of the things that I was most impressed with which I don't know how it came about.

I'd love for you to tell me that I guess Ancerada has pledged 1% of your equity, time and product to the Adara group.

I believe it's an organization working to improve the lives of women and children from Nepal and Uganda living in extreme poverty.

How did that come about?

Because a lot of companies donate, they get money.

Not equity.

Yeah.

Well, we've moved beyond the pledge.

We actually did give them the equity.

We also did something else I'll tell you about.

So the lady who founded that Audet Excel, she was a career banker and she wanted to help people in poverty.

She saw all the wealth and power that sits in the commercial world.

But how do you bridge that world over to people living in poverty?

She met a lot of bankers that kind of wanted to use their skills.

to do good.

They could write checks all day, but if you're an investment banker or a dealmaker, there's not really a lot of pro bono avenues for you.

So what she set up is, yes, they've got a neonatal clinic that they run in the middle of Uganda, and she broke all the rules around you should not do sophisticated care in remote settings, but they do it.

They're successful, and now the UN's learn a lot from them and they're amplifying what they're doing.

She runs schools and the community support up in the Hormla region in Nepal.

So not in Kathmandu, but this is way up in the mountains where there's a lot more issues and risks and things going on for them.

So they do great work, but the funding model, how it's funded is the dealmakers, the best dealmakers, they say, hey, I'm going to do one deal per year where I'll be an advisor and the fee I'd usually get for my advice will go to Adara.

and Adara will use that money.

So they've got a panel, she was smart, she put together a panel of Goldman Sachs Banker, best lawyer, best, and then they would go and pitch to corporates to say, look, when you're doing this work, consider us because if you use us, the fees that you pay us for your deal help.

So it's a good model for the companies that want to support.

other projects and be charitable.

It's great for the bankers who have all these skills, but they want to directly use them to add good.

Someone from Deloitte, you know, would get very innovative and she'd mapped out, you know, they need software to collaborate, do the deal and, you know, being a charity, they don't want to pay for it.

She wanted to build something and there was this innovation hub in Deloitte where she said, this is what I want.

She talked about what she wanted.

Someone in the meeting knew us and they said, oh, look, you should just go see Sam at Ansarata because they already have this.

She came and saw me and I remember sitting in our boardroom and I was like, heard her story and what she was doing.

I said, you can have our product free for life.

You can use it as much as you want.

Then some of our teams started using their time to go, look, how are you running Adara as an organisation and with your IT and stuff like that.

you know, a couple of our developers did some side projects to help them and we got to know them and then I heard about this pledge one percent movement.

One thing I'd learned probably from my mother is like money and success just makes you more of what you already are and whatever habits and things you put in place when you're small tend to grow and stick with you and I thought, you know what, Ancerota hasn't done anything where we've committed to use our money and smarts and influence and connect whatever to help others.

What can we do?

And because of Adara, I said, no, we should support Adara and go all in.

So we pledged them 1% of equity.

We pledged 1% of our people's time and profit to help them.

And then we never raised any capital to this point.

But in 2018, we did go raise $24 million.

Who do you think we used for the capital raising?

We say our fee for their advice helping raise the $24 million was about half a million dollars.

So that was another half a million dollars that we were proud to write the check and it went straight to charity.

Another interesting thing that happened recently was when we were doing our IPO, we were originally going to do our own IPO.

We were going to do a roadshow to all the investors in March 2020.

And then COVID happened and everyone said, look, there's no way you can get an IPO away.

three months later, emerged to be a better idea where we could team up with a smaller company that was already listed.

We could do a merger and a reverse listing.

It was a bit complicated, but it made sense that we could piggyback off the fact they're listed, but together our companies, because they had software, we didn't have them vice versa, but shared customers.

It made sense.

We went to get that away, but one of the advisors we recruited, to do our original straight line IPO, which didn't happen because of COVID.

When we eventually did list, by via this merger, I hadn't heard from them for six months.

But then I got a phone call saying, oh, hey, you're going to pay a bill.

And I'm like, what bill?

They sent us a bill for like 200 grand.

I'm like, yeah, but I know you guys started doing this work.

And we had both had good intentions, but that past never happened.

And they said, hey, who turned into this argument that we were in this meeting and our chairman was there and I was there with my CFO and the guy who runs this company, he goes, I don't care about the money, you can give it to, it's not, it's the principle of it, give the money to charity and they actually supported a charity that they were passionate about.

And you know, like in business, you just go, oh, this could be a legal battle, it's not worth it.

You know, like, we weren't happy about it, but we thought, you know, why don't we call him on that and say, you know, so we said, can we have five minutes?

they left, they came back in the room.

We go, yeah, actually, we'll pay the 200.

But like you said, you don't care about the money, so let's do 100 to your charity of your choice.

And we'll do 100 to mine.

As soon as I got out of that meeting, I called Audit and I said, hey, I've got you another 100 grand.

Because I remember going into that meeting being so annoyed and I had all these rational reasons why it was unjustified to charges and it was stressful.

You don't feel good.

But then, even though we had to pay 200, you walk out of there really happy.

Yeah, that's the best of a tough situation and many you faced.

And in the time we have left, I want to ask you about your plans.

You guys have been growing and just getting out there, obviously, here in the States as well.

people learning about you and just from the thousands of customers you have, what are your plans for Ancerata over, let's say, the next year to 18 months?

Yeah, good question.

So the DNA that we started with around diagnosing problems and ideating how can we make things easier, reduce risk, how can this deal go quicker, that never stopped.

And eventually, where it got us was the realization that These deals are risky and they take a long time and their stress will primarily because the way companies structure their information, the way they manage their business day to day is not aligned to what investors and purchasers want when they're inspecting your business with an x-ray.

They're finding all these gaps and issues.

And that leads to the business that's raising capital or selling or IPOing, not getting the outcome they wanted because they didn't realize that when the best judges in the world look at your business and rip it apart, that it leads to worse terms.

And you've realized, I didn't know that and I should have fixed it.

So we started shifting our energy and attention to say, we've got to make it easier for companies.

that as they're operating day to day, these things that do affect them, they should be getting benefited out of them now, not waiting for years and years later for some major event down the line to find out what they should be able to act on now.

The way contracts are managed, how do you operate risk assessments and risk management in your business?

The way your financials are structured, what about governance?

Do you have a board?

How's your board function?

Do you have board minutes?

hundreds and hundreds of things that go under the microscope in due diligence, but we kind of try to create an operating system for the C-suite.

So our vision is sort of like what Canva's done for design is if you go to Canva, it's just like, oh, I want to do a print product.

And then the next level down is what do you want to print a hoodie or a business card?

And you click on the hoodie and it's just everything you need and nothing else to do a hoodie print with design.

So for us, it's like for the C-suite, it's like, what about risk?

How are you managing compliance?

You want to raise capital?

You want to do an IPO?

Great.

Here's a template.

Here's a workflow task list that you need to follow built from 24,000 deals of experience that outlines what you can do to get a good outcome.

So we moved a lot more into the operational things around risk management, compliance management, We've got a board product so you can run your board, you can run committees, do it properly and make it easy so that simultaneously companies improve the way they're operating today.

And when they go to raise capital, IPO would borrow money and have any outside experts do due diligence on them.

They pass with flying colors.

They say one or the other areas that's critical that I'm seeing emerge in the world that no one has a good solution for.

is everyone wants to do ESG really well.

People want to be a good corporate citizen.

They want to show their companies acting in best interest for the environment, social needs, governance like transparency and anti-corruption.

We run the business well with governance.

We do good social things.

We do good for the environment.

trillions of dollars, I think it's 50 trillion in assets under management of forecast to be underpinned by ESG decisions from investors.

So everyone in the world wants their retirement savings or any investment they make to do good, just like we wanted Adara to do good.

Plus, we want to grow our business.

We want to do both.

So everyone in the world wants to do both.

They want to grow their retirement savings, but they want to know that it's funding good things in the world as well.

So all of this leads back to a company, how well and how fast and easy can they demonstrate their ESG strengths credibly to investors.

It's not just investors because employees want to work for companies that are purpose driven.

And if you can showcase with confidence what your company is doing with ESG, then you will attract better employees.

Also, people want to spend money with companies that are doing that, and they're inclined to spend more.

So you'll attract customers.

So what we're really doing is to do ESG.

Well, underneath it is, one of the ease is could be your environmental policies and compliance and how well you do on that.

It's like, do you have a system to manage that?

Do you actually have a policy who owns it?

Where's the information kept?

So instead of these things coming out of people's drawers or deep in file systems four years later in a deal, It's like, no, you should structure and manage that today and you'll get better investment.

You'll attract better employees.

You'll do this stuff.

So we're really obsessed about anything that helps companies improve the way they're operating today, mainly based off witnessing the pain down the line if they don't.

Yeah, it's genius.

I love how you went from the other way and then realized these other things.

It makes so much sense.

from a standpoint of a business to expand further earlier in the process because, you know, going through it and been through two small deals on my businesses, but there were data rooms and you brought up the memories of like, but this is not how we want it.

This is the right way.

Then you have to create to go back and forth to go first and have that is genius and such a great opportunity for expansion within your business and the positive effect, like you said, that companies do want to work with companies that are doing good, good for people, good for the world.

I mean, it's incredible.

Incredible what you've done and appreciate coming on how success happens and continued best of luck.

I just keep seeing you guys expanding and growing and It must feel really good from those days sitting outside Unilever with the old laptop trying to figure out how to do a deal.

And now look at just so.

Thanks so much, Sam.

Yeah, thanks, Robert.

And there's one parting thing I could say.

Looking back, we've had so many challenges and near-death experiences.

I didn't share some of them, but I read a good book the other day, or last year actually called.

the obstacle is the way and it's kind of book on stoicism but you know looking back and look those obstacles that nearly killed us it forced us to conquer them and get smarter or wiser or leaner or whatever and when we got on the other side of the obstacle that is the way so one tip for everyone is don't avoid your obstacles like they're painful and you don't really want to do but they are the way I love that because when you're going through them And you're thinking, oh, you know, this could ruin my business.

It's so amazing to me at this point seeing a lot of other businesses, how that in itself, like you just said, could change your business, make it better and make it grow.

But in that moment, it's so hard to see.

It's easy to say on the podcast, but listening to you say that made me realize the way I felt through some of this, you know, I think when you get betrayal.

that's the hardest thing to deal with.

And when times are good, everyone supports you.

But when we had a tough time and I suffered some betrayal, gee, it really affected me.

Now, if someone would have, at that lowest point for me, if someone would have came along and said, you know, Yoda like fashion and said, oh, this obstacle is the way I would have checked them.

Yeah, 100%.

But then you look back two years and it's almost as if you're happy.

to sometimes those things that they did happen.

And I've got so many of those stories.

You have so many of them, but it's such a great point that especially we have tons of entrepreneurs who listen to this show and they see this as sex of all the people we have on the show, but to understand and it's so hard to do when you're going through that moment in a year or two, that might have just been the turning point of your business.

Yeah, it's that suffering that you don't turn away from.

The great athletes, they're great because they'll push themselves through the point of pain.

They'll persist.

They'll get up the next day, even though they saw.

It's the same in business.

I think David Goggins is the most extreme where people go, oh, this water's freezing.

you know, whatever he goes, I wish the water was colder.

So I think in business, sometimes if you're going through a challenge, you just got to somehow talk to yourself like that and say, oh, I wish this was harder.

Like, yeah.

And don't avoid it and know that you'll get on the other side of it and you'll be grateful for it.

Like you just said, and when you're in the middle of it, it's very hard to feel like that.

But anyone's listening on the middle of it, keep going.

Yeah, so hard.

Well, one last question, you know, you just talked about resiliency and being able to push through.

Where do you think that comes from within you?

Was that from growing up?

Yeah, I talked about my dad, but I didn't talk about my mother.

So my mother, you know, she had tuberculosis when she was 13.

She nearly died and she spent like two years in and out of hospital and she missed a lot of school because of that.

Obviously, she spent a lot of time around nurses.

from that point on wanted to be a nurse.

So from the time she could, she became a nurse, she trained as a nurse and she did this in England and then she moved out to Australia and because we needed a lot of nurses and they offered them these incentives to move out here.

And her whole life she was a nurse from 16 till she's now 84 and she worked everywhere like ER, children's ward, oncology, retirement home, every all sorts of areas of nursing.

She is a creature of habit, unlike my dad is really quick and rapid.

She's very like a tortoise.

Like she'll get up, she'll make her cup of tea, she'll go do stuff.

But her whole day even now is serving other people like community dinners, helping out with their mothers of preschool children, giving them a break and they look out like lots of little things.

So just watching her methodically have like these habits that she just keeps plotting along through the day.

She doesn't stop.

And at the end of the day, you're amazed at what she's achieved because she's so slow about it and methodical, but she doesn't stop.

And she's so persistent.

She always has this great trust in the future and things that will work out.

She always says, oh, there's a reason for everything.

And I think just witnessing her, like when we had tough times in the family or anything, she would never deviate from healthy behaviors and those habits.

And she'd just show up the next day.

and go and do her thing.

So, you know, watching her care for people, the value of habits and methodical stuff, you know, when you're like a high energy young teenager and you want to start a business, it's not that attractive to you like you're a nursing mother who does these boring slow things.

But the older I get, I get actually those things that mum does are probably more influential on me than anything else, especially around resilience, persistence, care, passion.

consistency discipline they say more is caught than taught and mums never sat down and says let me teach you about these things verbally.

I've just observed them over and over.

I love that.

Sam, thank you so much for coming on.

It's been a pleasure and I can't wait to keep seeing Anserada just keep growing and getting bigger and really doing more good things.

You know, as you said and focused on, that's a big part of your DNA and culture.

And I think right on that's every business has to be doing that nowadays.

And you guys are ahead of the game.

So thanks again.

Thank you.

Thanks very much for the opportunity.

I appreciate it a lot.

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