Paul Stovell almost sold Octopus Deploy for A$100,000.
The offer came when the product had no revenue to speak of. He has said he thought it was a great deal, and he would have taken it. It was his wife, Sonia, who stopped him. She reminded him that he had always wanted to lead a software company, and she predicted he would regret a sale. She was right. She is now the company's chief financial officer.
Stovell said later he had been turning away venture capital firms for years, and he never wrote a pitch deck.
The code had begun as a side project in 2011. Stovell was a developer who had noticed something odd: plenty of teams could set up a build server that tested their code automatically, but far fewer could push that code out to the live servers without a manual scramble. Octopus aimed at that one gap. It was not trying to be a whole platform.
It worked. By 2012 the business was profitable and covered both founders' salaries, which gave the Stovells something rare for a young software company: freedom. They did not need anyone's money, so they did not take it. Stovell said later he had been turning away venture capital firms for years, and he never wrote a pitch deck.
What the outside world noticed over the following decade was the customer list. Roughly 25,000 organisations came to use Octopus, among them Microsoft, NASA, Xero, Disney and Stack Overflow. More than half its customers were in North America, even though the company ran from Brisbane.
The change came in April 2021. Insight Partners approached Stovell, and he agreed to sell a minority stake, the first outside capital the company had accepted, for US$172.5 million. He did not need the cash to survive. His reasoning was about speed: he saw that Insight could help sell to large enterprises, especially in the US, faster than he could alone. Headcount, which had been around 80 the year before, was heading for more than 180 and then past 300. Later, the company bought the Kubernetes delivery firm Codefresh.
The lesson sits in the order. For ten years Stovell had room to say no to money, to buyers, and to growth for its own sake. He nearly gave that away for A$100,000. The cofounder who said wait protected the one asset that made every later negotiation easy: the choice to walk away.