0:00 Welcome and guest introduction

Welcome back to season five. Hard to believe here we are, Season 5 Episode One. Super exciting, 2024, and an epic guest to kick off this season. Today I’m going to introduce you to Jonno, and I’m going to let Jonno introduce himself. I’m sure many of you will already know some of the things he’s done in the past but might not be aware of what he’s doing right now. So Jonno, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

2:00 Entrepreneurial background and early career

I’d still describe myself as an entrepreneur, having been on this journey for over 10 years now. Originally started with Airtasker, our first startup, in 2012. Long story short, that was a great journey over 10 years. We were able to IPO that business in 2021. Also fortunate to have run Tank Stream Labs and Tank Stream Ventures, getting our feet wet in terms of backing other founders. And now on to my latest proptech AI startup, Soho.com.au. You’re living in Singapore now, pretty much permanently, so we’re lucky to have you here in Sydney today.

5:00 How Airtasker was born in 2012

I had trained as an engineer and originally done corporate work, three or four years at IBM working on Westpac. I was fortunate enough to join a startup called Opus at the time. Me and my buddy Tim joined as the first two employees. We helped build that telco business up, which was innovative, a SIM-only operator. Eventually, about a year or two in, we caught the startup bug. Airtasker kind of came from circumstantial situations. The iPhone was coming out; I thought I’d pay someone to queue for me. Tim needed help moving. That was the formation of the idea.

8:00 Early fundraising in a pre-VC Australia

Initially we put a bit of our own money in, but we were able to raise some early capital from investors who already knew us from Opus. I remember sitting in big meetings of 20 investors at Macquarie Private Capital. After we pitched, there was a heated debate. Half the table said this is a business; the other half said there’s no way that’s a business. Startups and investing just wasn’t the flavour then. There wasn’t a VC ecosystem in the way there is today.

11:00 Hardest lessons: building the right team

The hardest thing was understanding our role in the team and building a successful one. When you’re starting a business, you focus on obvious things: build a platform, raise money, get some people in. The critical thing is building the team, but you don’t realise how important that is until you’ve delivered the first couple of phases and then realise these people might not be the right ones for phase two. That’s where growing pains came in. I think in general you have to learn that on the job; a book can’t teach you what good people mean.

14:00 Tank Stream Labs: from accident to institution

When we started Airtasker we needed space, and there was no WeWork. The only other operator was Fishburners near Haymarket. We crashed a vacant floor belonging to one of our investors on Bridge Street. As the weeks progressed, more founders were asking to rent desks. We thought, great, let’s rent them out to help pay our own costs. We made a couple of mistakes setting it up. We tore up carpet we couldn’t replace, then tore down ceiling tiles that crumbled. The warehouse look was completely by accident.

17:00 Leaving Airtasker and founding Soho.com.au

I moved on from Airtasker operationally around 2017 when I relocated to Singapore. I stayed on the board strategically until about 2019-2020. Personally I didn’t find leaving the day-to-day difficult; being an engineer made me quite logical about it. When we sold our apartment to move to Singapore, I was charged close to $4,000 just to put the property online before anything even happened. That was a huge shock. Looking at our experience with Airtasker, Uber, Airbnb, listing on a platform is free. That contrast prompted Soho.

20:00 Soho’s AI engine, the future of AI, and closing thoughts

Soho is primarily an AI recommendation engine. Rather than search-based platforms that only work when you’re actively using them, we ask you for your criteria once, produce results, and you rank each one. That explicit feedback produces better and better recommendations throughout your entire property journey — very similar to how Netflix works. By early 2024 we had a quarter of a million users per month and 20,000 agents using the platform. On AI broadly: every business moving forward will have AI or be AI-based in some form. There’s no reason not to. It’s that powerful a technology.