There were weeks when Ben Thompson could not be sure the payroll software company he had started would make payroll. He has since said that nothing teaches cash flow discipline quite like that pressure.
He was a lawyer first. Thompson went to school and university in Armidale, New South Wales, graduating in economics and law. He became an employment lawyer, and after working abroad he came home and spent time at his father's workplace, a firm called Employment Innovations.
What almost nobody sees about the early days is how crowded they were.
That is where the idea arrived. Clients told him the same thing repeatedly. The hardest part of running their business was not the product or the customers. It was employing people. He could advise one employer at a time. He could see that was a ceiling.
What almost nobody sees about the early days is how crowded they were. Thompson was running four companies at once, from a single floor above Wynyard Station in Sydney. Employment Innovations. A business called Power2Motivate. The software, and a fourth. He has called the decision to stop doing all of it the turning point. He had also adopted a strict ninety-day planning habit as early as 2005, borrowed from the Rockefeller Habits, and he still uses it.
The platform launched in 2014, first as payroll and then as a wider home for hiring, pay, benefits and compliance. It went remote-first early, which paid off when COVID arrived in 2020 and he turned the company's energy to webinars and resources for employers.
Then the money got big. The company bought his own side business for A$43 million, then spent A$112 million on a Canadian rival, Humi. At one point Thompson publicly fired a broadside at investor Hostplus, claiming the super fund wanted to put the company out of business. Forbes Australia has put the company's value above A$2 billion, and it counts more than 1,700 staff.
The quiet lesson sits in the earliest detail. He did not invent a new market. He listened to what clients said was hard, noticed his own advice did not scale, and then stopped doing everything else so that one idea could grow.