OP EN FOR BUSINESS
Vintage Ceravolo UNBLEMISHED START-UP RECORD ROLLS ON WITH SALE TO ANOTHER FORTUNE 100 COMPANY by Ken Robinson
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t’s early April in the Adelaide Hills and Mr Antony Ceravolo (Class of 1992) is tending to a vineyard like generations of Ceravolos before him. “I’ve just come off the tractor,” he says. “Doing farm work and getting your hands dirty makes you realise how hard some people work for a living. But it’s good to clear the mind and escape from computers and code for a while.”
“I SAID TO MY CONTACTS IN THE UK THAT WERE IN FILM DISTRIBUTION AND DVD DISTRIBUTION, LET’S HAVE A CRACK AT EMULATING WHAT NETFLIX HAS DONE.” Mr Ceravolo’s heritage is rooted in the vines and olive groves of Calabria in southern Italy. His father Joe immigrated to South Australia as a seven-year-old boy, eventually founding a namesake winery. But the son’s path has been more Silicon Valley than Barossa Valley. Antony Ceravolo is one of Australia’s most under-the-radar tech founders with a success rate as sparkling as his father’s chardonnay-pinot noir: two companies built from scratch, both highly profitable, and both bought by Fortune 100 companies. First LOVEFiLM, a European version of a nascent Netflix, purchased by Amazon in 2008
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for a rumoured £200 million. Then Sine, visitor management software, acquired by Honeywell in 2020 for an undisclosed sum. Mr Ceravolo says the cash on offer to tech founders, especially those in the startup phase, can be a poisoned chalice. “The valuations that are floating around – it’s quite tempting to get sucked into taking the money. But be careful because you’ve got to deliver that growth. For me, the lesson learned is keeping things simple: not having a big board, making sure that you can bring your venture capital partners home to dinner, that they can meet your family and you can look each other in the eye. Because these people have their own shareholders and the pressure to grow and scale these businesses is mind-blowing. There’s been some pretty tense moments with shareholders and boards along the way, that’s for sure.” He speaks glowingly of Adelaide and built Sine into an international company from there but he left his hometown at 16 and didn’t return in any meaningful way for 15 years. His first stop was Bond University to study Commerce and Law, graduating in 1995. “I’m a 921. Probably one of the first five Adelaide people to go to Bond,” he says. “My parents were very supportive of that move because they wanted me to get out of my own town, follow the US model and go and meet some other people.” An early career as an investment banker in London and New York followed with Schroder Salomon Smith Barney, now Citi. But Mr Ceravolo could already feel himself being pulled in another direction. “The deeper I got into professional services, the more I realised I wanted to forget about the law and accounting and get
closer to problem-solving in the management team.” He just needed a nudge and it came in the most brutal form. Mr Ceravolo was exiting a cab to go to work at 7 World Trade Center in New York when he saw the first of two hijacked planes slam into the Twin Towers. He remembers running 10 blocks uptown where he gave a deli owner $100 to borrow a phone to call his parents and tell them he was safe. The weeks that followed brought a personal and professional reckoning. “Life is short and those kinds of close encounters make you sit up and assess,” he says. “But it was more of a pivot. Investment banking was sort of dead at that point. When I got off the plane from New York and back on the ground in London 2001, it was a real tech centre. I found myself being swept into the LOVEFiLM ‘Netflix of Europe’ thing very quickly. So 9/11 was the wake-up call to get me off my set piece of becoming an investment banker for life. Which turned out to be a good trade.” He had heard about Netflix in New York. At that stage it was an online DVD rental business and he quickly realised there was no equivalent service in Europe. “I said to my contacts in the UK that were in film distribution and DVD distribution, let’s have a crack at emulating what Netflix has done. My first taste of entrepreneurial life was straight into LOVEFiLM which scaled extremely fast. Amazon took a stake in 2004 and then bought it out in 2008.”
