Wilson Projects Pty Ltd trading as
ACN 086 377 040ABN 86361375884
Ph. 07 3376 3557Fax 07 3376 6046
Mob. 0416 285707
Email:
Web:
IN CONFIDENCE
Transcript of Interview
file number:Interviewee: / James Chin Moody (JM)
Interviewers: / Vicki McDonald (VM)
Ray Weekes (RW)
GAME CHANGERS
Interview conducted at the State Library of Queensland, Stanley Place, South Bank
on 13 October 2016.
STATE LIBRARY OF QUEENSLAND
State Library of QueenslandInterview Transcript: James Chin Moody
File Number:Date of Interview:13 October 2017
VM / Good evening everyone. My name is Vicki McDonald and it's my great privilege to be the State Librarian CEO of this fantastic library. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land and pay respects to the ancestors who came before them. The location of State Library is, of course, on Kurilpa Point which is historically a significant meeting, gathering and sharing place for Aboriginal people and we proudly continue that tradition today. I acknowledge and welcome our speaker for tonight, James Chin Moody, cofounder and CEO of Sendle, Ray Weekes, chairman of The CEO Institute, Robert Bryan AM 2009, 2009, sorry, inductee of the Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame, members of the Library Board, the Queensland Library Foundation and the Business Leaders Hall of Fame governing committee and, of course, our generous donors and partners, Crowe Howarth, Channel Seven, Logan City Council, Morgans, NAB and RACQ. So thank you all for joining us tonight for another highly anticipated Game Changers conversation session. This event series is designed to bring innovative leaders from business, technology and creative industries to share their insights with us. It is a rare platform enabling Queensland's leading game changers in business to share their pathways to success and some of their battles and triumphs along the way. Game Changers is a Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame initiative. Established in 2009 the by the State Library, the Queensland Library Foundation and the QUT Business School, the Hall of Fame is focused on celebrating, recording and retelling stories of Queensland's outstanding business leaders and their many contributions to the development of our State. Each year, six Queensland businesses are inducted into the Hall of Fame. The 2016 induction dinner which was held in July saw six iconic enterprises and innovative entrepreneurs inducted into the Hall of Fame. I had the opportunity to attend the dinner prior to commencing here as State Librarian and it was a fantastic event and I recommend it to you for next year. The 2016 inductees are Sir Manuel Hornibrook for his distinguished contributions to Australia's construction industry, Rod Wylie in recognition of his significant contributions to the public accounting profession and Queensland's economy, Margaret Mittelheuser for her groundbreaking achievements as Australia's first female stockbroker, North Australian Pastoral Company Pty Ltd recognising 140 years as an innovative cattle breeder, beef producer and leader in landcare practices, Mincom in recognition of its pioneering contribution to Queensland's information technology industry and Suncorp Group for its important and sustained contribution to the Queensland economy. For more information on the inductees or to view the digital stories make sure that you explore the Hall of Fame space which is located on level 4 in our John Oxley Library or you can go online to the Hall of Fame website at hallorfame.slq.qld.gov.au. As I said earlier, Game Changers provides a rare platform for innovative leaders to share their insights, pathways to success and some of the battles and triumphs that they experience along the way. Their stories will not only fill you with inspiration and knowledge to incorporate into your professional endeavours, but will help shape Queensland's economic and commercial development and the social fabric of our State. Tonight, we're lucky enough to hear from the cofounder and CEO of Sendle James Chin Moody. We encourage you to our live stream viewers to tweet your questions and use the hashtag QBLHOF. Similarly, audience members with questions feel free to tweet your questions or hold onto them until the Q and A session. Ray and James will address as many questions as possible at the end of the conversation. I would now like to welcome Ray Weekes to the stage to produce James and begin tonight's discussion, so Ray (clapping).RW / Thanks Vicki, and welcome to our third Game Changers event this year. You know, I was saying to James earlier as I was driving in tonight, I was thinking about a time in 2002, 14 years ago when I was announcing at a QUT outstanding alumni awards breakfast that QUT Alumni Young Achiever Award 14 years ago and as I was letting that audience know why James Moody was the award winner, I remember so clearly the hairs standing up on the back of my neck, the back of my head with amazement at what this 26 year old had achieved within three years after graduation. I was completely blown away with James' achievements in the international space industry. He was a leading member of the team that built Australia's first satellite in over 30 years. He had made major contributions to the international environment debate through his work with the United Nations and various international advisory boards and committees and commissions as well. It was an incredible statement of major awards, achievements, community support at the age of 26. I should say that James, he asked me not to say this, but I'm going to say this. I should say that James achieved the highest academic result ever obtained by an engineering graduate at QUT in its 30 years of existence and the person he beat in achieving this great academic result is here with us tonight and that's his father and professor, that's his father and professor in electrical engineering at QUT Miles Moody, so welcome Miles as well (clapping) and welcome Lyn too. Thanks for being with us tonight. Now at the ripe old age of 40, and by the way he's celebrated his birthday yesterday, so happy birthday (clapping). He at the ripe old age of 40 has really continued to make a remarkable impact in all his endeavours. He has continued the strong family tradition of mixing engineering, entrepreneurship and humanity for the community. While I'm just in this vein for a minute and I'll get off this very shortly, can I say apart from this that James plays five musical instruments and he speaks five languages. Some better than others, but he still speaks five languages. James Chin Moody is a cofounder as Vicki said and CEO of Sendle that makes parcel deliveries simple, reliable and affordable. It simplifies logistics and it modernises postal services and in the interests of full disclosure let me tell you I'm an investor in Sendle and a very happy investor in Sendle. James has held various roles including Executive Director of development at CSIRO and Australian Commissioner for UNESCO. He's a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council and Technology, Values and Policy and was a panellist on the ABC TV program The New Inventors. James has a PhD in Innovation from ANU and is a coauthor of The Sixth Wave How to Succeed in a ResourceLimited World and the book is available for sale by the way after this session and James agreed, has agreed to be available also to sign those books. So please welcome a globally recognised leader in innovation and sustainability, a true game changer, James Moody (clapping). I should say that James was asked to bring me a Tshirt, an Sendle Tshirt, but he didn't have one. James, you've had an incredibly wideranging career to date and I just want you to give us a brief overview of your journey and also how this has led you to the work you're doing with Sendle today. Maybe just start by telling us about how your childhood shaped you and what were you like as a child. Then we'll get some confirmation over here.
JM / Yeah, look, a good question Ray. Look, I think you could probably read into the background that I was a complete and utter nerd throughout my entire childhood. I was always, so I think my childhood, I was very fortunate. I had a wonderful childhood. I pretty much knew from the very beginning that I was going to be an engineer. I think I've never not known that I was going to be an engineer, mainly because I love to build stuff and I love science and technology. I was very fortunate to grow up in a family where I think we had one of the first computers that got brought home probably on the holidays from QUT because that's where my dad worked, so I got to play those in early days. I got to really have, but on the other side my mother was very creative and we would always be building things and writing books and playing games and stuff like that as well. So I think being able to bring together the creative side as well as the very analytical side in the engineering side was pretty much something that I got to do as a young child and probably it's something that I'd like to continue to do and I think trying to marry, you know, you might say the people and the technology pieced together has been, you know, something that I've always tried to do. So that's probably trying to sum me up.
RW / Yeah, sure. Just take us through some of the highlights of your journey to date.
JM / Probably one highlight was, so yeah, wanted to be an engineer. Got the space bug. I watched Star Wars far so many times as a child and when I was 17 I read about through another program that I was in, I read about this program to basically go and do cosmonaut training in Russia and interestingly, if you think about it this was, I think it was 1993 or '94. Russia had just opened up and the French space program had, had basically found a way of taking some French citizens to do cosmonaut training in Russia as a goodwill program between France and Russia and at the same time I think the Russian space program just needed a lot of money because they were running out of money like anything and they put out this invitation and said would anybody else like to come? And I think no one else in the world was crazy enough to actually say, you know, yeah, I'll do it as well. It was a lot of money to do it, but as a 17 year old it was like you know what, cosmonaut training sounds pretty fun and so I was very fortunate I fundraised, didn't I? I fundraised and I got sponsors and all this sort of stuff. We didn't have that much money ourselves and basically got to do it and I was very fortunate I had parents who would let a 17 year old disappear into Russia back in 1994 and in fact, I think I managed to get one phone call out to say I'd arrived, but I think at that point, you know, I think I learned a couple of things. One was, well, one I was really passionate about space. You know, I got to do in the, I think it was three weeks that I was there we got to, you know, do missions on the Mir simulator and, you know, I was hanging out with Bonnie Dunbar and Norm Thagard who was, who are American astronauts. Like, we were all staying at Star City, you know, in the same place and Russian cosmonauts coming back. Anyway, so I learnt about a passion which was really great. I also learnt in some ways, you know, not to be afraid. You know, I think I, there's a certain thing I call strategic naivety. Sometimes it is good to, to not know what you're really facing, but you know Russia at the time was a pretty interesting place. I remember Star City had run out of milk, you know, so we're having porridge with butter. You know, all this sort of stuff. Right. It was a really interesting place to go at the time and, but I basically learnt a little bit of fearlessness I think at that point.
RW / So with this book The Sixth Wave and let's just talk for a moment about TuShare and moving from closing that down into the Sendle business and also as part of that talk about your urge, where this urge to innovate, to build a business and take risks come from at such an early stage?
JM / Yeah. I think, so I went from the space thing. I was fortunate enough to get a job as a systems engineer for Australia's first satellite in 30 years. Built that, launched it which was great. At that point, my career took an interesting turn. I was headhunted by CSIRO to go and, I always had this hobby, at the time it was more of a hobby around sustainability around the environment and I did a lot of tree planting at university. We had sort of things and through that was, I think anybody who does a lot of stuff in space realises that we're just on one spaceship, right. We've got this tiny little thing called the atmosphere on that spaceship and, you know, it's pretty precious and you'll find the same sort of philosophy in a lot of folk who are a bit space crazy. But interesting, so that there was all this space and environment sort of mix and I was headhunted by CSIRO to go and work for their land and water division. The division was taking satellite data and turning it into environmental intelligence. I did business development for that, so I wasn't actually an engineer at that point. I was actually going into the business world. I did that for about seven years, eventually looking after business development for all of CSIRO and at that point, it was a really great sort of experience around, yeah, creating lots of new ideas, but in 2012 I had this realisation, I guess, that I wanted to go back to building. I want to go back and build something and the thing I decided to build, we had two young, two young children at the time and if anybody who's got children realises that one thing that happens to you the moment you have a child is your net assets by weight pretty much doubles overnight, right. You end up with all this stuff, right, and we worked out that, and then you use that stuff for maybe six months or a year and then that stuff is no longer useful to you. And so we actually started out, you know, Sendle, what you see now as a business didn't start as a logistics company. It actually started out as something completely different. It started out as a peertopeer giving network. It was called TuShare and what we realised was there's actually 100 billion things that gets sold brand new every year that are not going to see their full life span with the original owner. Right, your kids' clothes and your, you know, your golf clubs and your, whatever it might be, all these things, sports equipment, the upgradables, stuff like that. So we created a network called TuShare which helped people to give this stuff to each other. In the space of about a year we had about 50,000 people on this network that were all giving items to one another and that was great. We were saving a lot of stuff from landfill, but the hard part was, and this is what got really interesting, and I think in business you're very fortunate if you can find a really good problem to solve. The hard part of that entire giving network was getting the items from one person to another. So we started to try to say how are we going to solve this problem of getting items from one, a person who has it to someone who needs it? So what do you need? You need to satisfy three things. You need one, it's got to be doortodoor because giving, if you're not picking it up from somebody they're not going to give again. Right, if they're lining up at a post office to send a package it's just too hard. It had to be doortodoor. It had to be low order quantities. Right. We had to be able to pick up one thing at a time and it had to be cheap. You know, we knew it had to be under 10 bucks and so basically what we did is we built a logistics network. We built a logistics network and we found all this idle capacity and idle infrastructure, and we can go into this if you want later...
RW / So you're using an existing infrastructure far more efficiently, weren't you?
JM / We found that there's, basically there's two types of logistics in Australia. Right. On one side, you've got the post office and that's great. You know, you can send one thing at a time, but you have to line up to do it and believe me it is not cheap. On the other side, you've got this really interesting set of infrastructure that big business uses every day, right. It's the Tolls and the, you know, it's all the Ecom infrastructure. The cool thing is it's really actually very affordable, right, but the thing is it doesn't, and it will pick up from your house, but it doesn't like smaller quantities and what we found a way of doing is taking that infrastructure, all the idle assets of that infrastructure because you know it's delivering lots of stuff into neighbourhoods, but those trucks are going back empty. So we went and said if we can fill those trucks can we get decent rates and we got to the point where I can, our business can now send 25 kilograms anywhere in Brisbane for $9.75 doortodoor.