2023 Vic Award
The 2023 Victorian Pearcey Entrepreneur Award was presented to Didier Elzinga, founder and CEO of Culture Amp. The award was presented at a special dinner in Melbourne by the Honourable Ben Carroll MP, Minister for Industry & Innovation, State Government of Victoria.
Colleagues describe Didier as a strongly values-oriented leader, as someone who steps between his team members and failure, gives success away freely to those same team members and creates an environment of trust and safe learning from failure. As an extremely busy person, he still finds time to call back and provide counsel, and is generous in his support of new entrepreneurs.
That passion, self-confidence, experience, motivation and team ethic were all key in convincing early customers like Adobe to take a chance on this ambitious, Australian start-up.
Victorian Pearcey Chair, Jordan Green, summarised:
This year the Victorian Pearcey Entrepreneur Award recognises the creation of a global success story, from right here in Melbourne.
Didier and his team are applying computing technology to help organisations of all sorts meet and master one of the most difficult challenges – creating, maintaining and evolving a successful corporate culture. This award is testament to his core characteristics and resilience as a person, as a businessman and as a leader. A true technology innovator and an exemplary, inclusive leader and role model, throughout the journey he has remained positive, and more interested in the world's effect on others than his own story.
Didier's journey is far from over, his impact nowhere near fully realised, his adventure has many exciting episodes ahead and I am confident each will include a material contribution to making the world a better place."
Didier Elzinga
Born in Canberra, Didier's family moved to Adelaide when he was 4, his mother was an artist and his father a research psychologist at the University of Adelaide. His father’s work gave him access to computers and he started teaching himself programming, and hacking computer games as a young boy. In year 11 he fell in love with Adobe Photoshop version 1.0 while attending a week-long program at the Technology School of the Future.
He chose a bachelor degree in mathematical and computer sciences at the University of Adelaide, in part, because it came with a free email account which otherwise would have cost $20/year. He graduated with a combined major in computers and philosophy. An early indicator of his journey to combine technology and human behaviour.
During university, he attended a state IT jobs fair in Adelaide where he solved an annoying problem for a young technology company. Turns out, that one piece of knowledge that they needed was all he knew about the topic but, it was enough to get him a job as a sysadmin. After he graduated, he worked fulltime as a software engineer at that company, developing technology and services for the movie industry. His colleagues there describe him as humble, patient and nurturing, with a voracious appetite for new ideas on a diverse range of subjects.
He spent nearly 14 years at that company, Rising Sun Pictures, now one of the great Australian success stories in visual effects and post production. At just 26, he became CEO, overseeing the development of innovations that creatively disrupted the Hollywood film industry, including being a co-author of the Academy Award winning cineSync remote collaboration tool, which directly contributed to making globally distributed film-making a reality.
As CEO of Rising Sun, he stood out as a thoughtful and strategic thinker. His belief in culture, strategy and values underpinned a period of accelerated growth for the business, scaling to over 150 people. To execute the 'Charlotte's Web' project for Paramount Pictures he relocated the business, attracted staff through an impressive immigration effort, and built technical infrastructure and production systems to support growth and scale.
Even after he left the company as an executive and a board member, he stayed connected with the commercialisation of IP which he had initiated, seeing it through to the sale of products to global players THX and F-Track. In doing so, he ensured that his verbal commitments to key staff were honoured, and they were equity participants in those sales.
Along the way he had a chance encounter with the young founders of what would become another Australian success story. They were building a software business for Silicon Valley while he was locked into the conservative business model of Hollywood. The three became good friends, and he watched over the next three years as their business exploded onto the world stage. That company is Atlassian.
Taking a Risk
In 2009, he took the next big risk in his life. With two young children, new opportunities for his opera singer wife in Melbourne, a burning desire to make a bigger impact on the world, inspired by the success of his friends at Atlassian, he decided to move on and pursue his own path and vision. They moved to Melbourne, and he launched his start-up to provide organisational culture tracking and measurement software. His ability to grow that venture to be an Australian unicorn valued in excess of $2b, dominating its niche globally, is testament to his core characteristics and resilience as a person, as a businessman and as a leader. A true technology innovator and an exemplary, inclusive leader and role model, throughout the journey he has remained positive and more interested in the world's effect on others than his own story.
Making a Difference
The company headquarters remain in Melbourne with offices in San Francisco, London, NY, Chicago and Berlin, all supporting a global staff in excess of 1,000 people. It serves over 25 million employees across more than 6,500 companies of all sizes and industries to transform employee engagement, develop high performing teams, and retain talent via cutting-edge research, powerful technology, and the largest employee dataset in the world.
Over the years the company has raised over $400m in investment capital, most recently a $155m Series F in 2021. That same year Forbes magazine recognised the company as “one of the world's top private cloud companies” and this year Fast Company declared his company “one of the 10 most innovative workplace companies” in the world. Last year he signed his company up as a founding member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Parity Alliance, a cross-industry group of global organisations that are taking holistic action to accelerate diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace and beyond.
He describes his motivation, the thing he enjoys the most, is figuring out how to help people be successful. So, that’s what he set out to do with software.
Being an Inspiration
In an effort to make his company the exemplar of what he offers his clients he chooses to do many things differently to convention, e.g. in the early growth years his sales people didn’t get paid commissions and he proudly declares that even today, commissions are very different at his company. Another example is how he greets each new employee. He asks them, “How can I help find your next role?” This open recognition that jobs are not for life focuses on the wellbeing and value of each person. He describes the goal as making their time with his company an inflection point in the trajectory of their career.
He observes that for most of today’s top companies, most of the value is intangible, that value comes from the people. Working out how to maximise what those people are capable of doing, working out how to amplify what those people can be, that's how he helps his clients generate the most value for themselves. Didier believes enabling people that way makes culture a source of competitive advantage.
Beyond his own company Didier is a non-executive Director of the Atlassian Foundation, on the board of Rising Sun Research and an adviser to companies across diverse industries.
Dider's journey is far from over, his impact nowhere near fully realised, his adventure has many exciting episodes ahead, and we are confident each will include a material contribution to making the world a better place.
Press
- ITWire (Wed 6 Sep 2023)
