In a story that contains all the plot points of a barely believable TV miniseries, Jessica Sier revealed that investors had been left high and dry by former Young Rich Lister Robert Bates, who raised about $15 million from wealthy individuals for his wellness start-up Aurum+ but failed to issue shares to any of them. She then kept on Bates’ trail throughout the year as he used a fake bank transfer to attempt to pay for a diamond ring for his girlfriend, Francesca Packer, before bizarrely re-emerging as a half-decent polo player.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March briefly threatened to be a cataclysmic event for the start-up crowd in Australia and overseas. Readers were fascinated as Paul Smith teamed up with Jessica Sier to reveal how Canva and other well-known Australian firms were struggling to recoup the money they had deposited. As the dust settled, Jonathan Shapiro wrote that the collapse was a “cultural moment”.
Journalist Jessica Sier leads a panel at this year’s Financial Review Cryptocurrency Summit. Peter Rae
Staff picks
Aside from these crowd-pleasing yarns, the Financial Review tech team has also shared its favourite stories of the year.
Tess Bennett | “There are few women in Australia’s tech sector who are willing to openly talk about the types of discrimination they’ve faced in the workplace. Generally, they are CEOs or founders who aren’t worried about upsetting people, or they’re so fed up they don’t care if they do. When I spoke with Gretchen Scott earlier in 2023, the founder, CEO and software engineer clearly articulated the forces pushing women out of the tech sector: sexual harassment, and being overlooked for promotions.”
Nick Bonyhady | “When the technology industry wants to lionise founders, it paints failure rates as incredibly high. When it wants to attract investment, it claims they’re low. This approach serves no one – especially not founders, who are robbed of a fair benchmark. After puzzling over endless SEO-driven statistics sites online that all pointed to each other, I wrote this to get a more realistic picture. It’s one of my favourite pieces of work that I did this year.”
John Davidson | “It’s not often you get to review something genuinely new in consumer electronics, much less something that really could change the way we use technology. At its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple erected a temporary building behind its iconic Apple Park headquarters, just to show off its upcoming Vision Pro mixed-reality headset. I got to wear the headset for about 35 minutes, and what I saw blew me away. Vision Pro is not the first mixed-reality headset – and it’s certainly not the most comfortable headset – but it’s the first to do it right. If Apple is able to make the Vision Pro lighter and cheaper, it could be another iPod moment.”
Jessica Sier | “Crypto traders were already suspicious of Binance’s platform when ASIC moved to cancel the global exchange’s local derivatives licence in April. They’d been trying to move money for weeks, but there had been all sorts of banking issues. I’d been keeping an eye on Binance since FTX collapsed and the stability of all the crypto markets was under threat. We were so relieved to break this news and get some quality information out there.”
Bill Gates speaking in Sydney in January. Peter Morris
Paul Smith | “And finally, in an act of peaking ridiculously early, my favourite story (or experience, really) came on my first day back after last year’s summer break, when I got to meet and interview Bill Gates. The billionaire was in town to discuss philanthropy, but was also happy to weigh in on the impact of AI on the workforce, Australia’s resistance to nuclear power, the evolution of renewable energy, and even what shows he had been binge-watching on Netflix in his scarce spare time.”