The name is a mash-up. Aconex stands for Australian Construction Exchange, a label that sounds humble for a company that ended up managing projects worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Leigh Jasper and Robert Phillpot founded it in 2000 on a plain observation: building sites generate mountains of paper, and when something goes wrong, nobody can prove who said what.
Accounts of Jasper's childhood and schooling are not well documented, so what follows is the business. The product put drawings, instructions and approvals into one shared online record. For the people paying for a tower or a railway, that record was insurance against disputes, which is exactly what makes construction so expensive.
The founder of a company built on trust between strangers was now lending his name to someone else's.
Growth was slow and then global. In 2006 the company won an Emerging Exporter award. In September 2008, in the thick of the financial crisis, the US firm Francisco Partners put in A$107.5 million of private equity, an enormous vote of confidence at a frightening time to bet on property.
The company listed on the ASX on 9 December 2014, by which point its projects reportedly carried an aggregate value above A$800 billion across more than 40 offices. Then it bought its way into new territory: the Incite Keystone platform from CIMIC in August 2015, and Germany's Conject for A$96 million in March 2016. Revenue for the 2016 financial year was A$123.4 million.
The ending came from California. In December 2017 Oracle agreed to pay A$7.80 per share in cash, valuing the business at about US$1.19 billion. Shareholders approved in March 2018, and the Supreme Court of Victoria signed off the next day.
Jasper did not disappear. In 2016, he appeared on the list of angels who backed a young Sydney super fund, Spaceship, alongside Mike Cannon-Brookes. The founder of a company built on trust between strangers was now lending his name to someone else's.
The quiet lesson here is about the choice of problem. Aconex did not promise to change construction. It offered to settle arguments in it. Founders in old, slow industries can take that: sell the cure for the expensive pain, not the vision of a better world.