RUBIX
How it started
Registering the company in 2011, it took a few years before Dylan Smith won his first client, opening the doors at RUBIX in 2014, which he considers the true start date of the company.
“I was a bit early. Not many people really understood what I was talking about, or were ready for that sort of innovation,” Smith tells SmartCompany.
His overarching goal was to turn Melbourne into the ‘Silicon Valley of Asia’, and help clients avoid being overtaken by tech startups. One such client was Foxtel, with Smith advising them how to adapt to Netflix’s entry into the Australian market.
Growth
After a hard slog in the early years, things started to pick up around 2017/18 for RUBIX. Smith attributes the improvement to the general seven-year cycle of IT, in which companies tend to renew their software and hardware.
Starting out RUBIX as a broad business touching on digital, cloud, analytics, and Internet of Things (IoT) services, Smith realised in 2018 that the market was changing, and the business needed to adapt.
“I looked at the industry, where tech was going, and what we were best at, and it turned out to be data. That was still unsexy, but what we were best at,” says Smith.
After the pivot, the company kicked off several years of strong growth.
Where to next?
Smith isn’t aiming low. “We want to be the world’s leading data and AI company,” he tells SmartCompany.
The plan to achieve that is to build a stable of ten leading data products to scale globally, sell off three, and bring on three more each year, before exiting the business and donating a lot of the proceeds.
Smith’s team is currently working on an e-sports product which automatically generates highlight clips of each sports game.
“The original plan was to reach $1 billion, keep $100 million, and give $900 million away,” says Smith.
Now, the stretch goal is to reach $10 billion, keeping 20 per cent and giving $8 billion away.
