At sixteen, Bruce Buchanan was running a handyman business. He was not doing it for fun. His mother had been ill with leukemia for about five years, and when she died he was in Year 10.
His childhood had been scattered even before that. His parents came from the United States and the United Kingdom, and he went to school in both countries before his mother moved him to the New South Wales Central Coast after the marriage ended. After she died, he had few options. He kept going to school, did odd jobs, looked after his younger sister, and lived on a friend's floor for a year, with some help from his father. He has described the period as one that made him grow up fast.
Shoppers at checkout were being shown nothing useful, and merchants were leaving money on the table.
What almost nobody sees behind the polished chief executive is how he started. He had loved computers since he saved up for an early Apple. A part-time job at a CAD and CAM business led to him buying it, paying the seller back over two years. Its manufacturing clients were closing around him. When he finally exited, the money bought a house and an MBA at UNSW.
That road led to Jetstar, where he rose to chief executive. From there he saw a problem in online retail. Shoppers at checkout were being shown nothing useful, and merchants were leaving money on the table. He met Justin Viles, whose company, Rocklive, brought live events into pubs and clubs and had drifted into digital marketing. Buchanan bought it through a Singapore company, split the equity evenly with Viles, and cut about 80 percent of what existed to chase one thing: ecommerce.
He paid for the first year himself. There was no cash flow. Traction took about six months. He has called the early years rough. A Series A arrived at the end of 2013. The Series B, around 2016, was harder than any of it, because growth was good but not yet dramatic.
Then the market moved. Most of the retailers a global network needed were in the United States. For about two years he flew two weeks on, two weeks off, before moving his family there.
Today Rokt works with names like Uber, Macy's and Albertsons, bought mParticle in 2025, and was valued at US$3.5 billion in a secondary sale that year, with an IPO being prepared for 2026.
The pattern in his story is the same at every step. He kept buying and fixing something small, using his own money, before anyone else would. Early on, hardship taught him to rely on himself, and that habit became the company.