Ted Egan

From daily bus rides beyond Bourke, to a naval life on submarines, and now travelling the world with his global business, Ted Egan was always going to do something special with his life. It was clearly ordained from the time he was a boy, with early influencers like bush artist Pro Hart, Senator Neville Bonner, Dr Fred Hollows and the world’s most famous and loved nun, Mother Teresa.

Ted recalls that “Mother Teresa came to Bourke to set up a charity and visited often, to spend time with the sisters of the local Catholic order; to help disadvantaged children both aboriginal and white.”

Bourke was the ‘big smoke’ for Ted as a boy – he lived a hundred kilometres north-west of Bourke on a small sheep and cattle station. As he notes, “the closest town was Enngonia and I think I’m related to just about everyone in the local cemetery.”

The most famous names to come out of Enngonia – before Ted – were both bushrangers in the 1860s. One, known as Midnight, was shot and killed nearby while stealing horses, and Frank Pearson, known as Captain Starlight, shot a local constable in the pub.

It’s extremely likely Ted’s ancestors had run-ins with both villains given “the family was around the district for a long, long time. I had relatives on farms and in the town, where they ran a few businesses like the post office and the hotel.”

Ted remembers that “when the post office burnt down, in the 1950s I think, some of those relatives moved to the city and some stayed. I felt like I was related to everyone in Bourke, Enngonia and the districts all around.”

Ted’s early education was by correspondence, until his younger brother and sister were old enough to endure the long car trip and bus ride into Bourke. At the time, “the school bus only came fifty kilometres out of town, so Mum and Dad used to drive me to meet the bus. So, that was fifty kilometres in the car and another fifty on the bus just to get to school, and I’d have to do the same every afternoon.

“I was up at five o’clock to get ready for school, while the kids in town didn’t have to get up until about eight, and when I got home I had chores to do before dinner, and then to bed.”

His parents were keen for Ted to get a good education and they sent him to the Catholic Primary School, believing it would be better for him. It led to his close encounters with Mother Teresa, Dr Fred Hollows and Pro Hart.

Happily for Ted, “our art teacher used to get Pro Hart to visit and I developed a passion for painting, in particular landscape painting. And because I had a slight hearing problem as a child, I was taken to see an ear, nose and throat specialist who used to visit Bourke and Enngonia regularly, and that was Dr Fred Hollows.

“Everyone knows of him as an eye doctor, but he looked after me even though his priority then was to improve the health services available to aboriginal children.”

Hollows had such an affinity with the area that he was buried in Bourke when he died aged just sixty-three, in 1993.

So, from an early age, Ted was impacted by highly motivated and successful people, and almost by osmosis, it rubbed off on him. For as long as he can remember he’s been driven to succeed, to do what others couldn’t or wouldn’t.

“I used to read a lot; everyone used to joke that I had memorised the World Book Encyclopaedia but I read it and read it and read it because it was the only thing to read.

“I read it backwards and forwards and in between. Going from school to home you were stuck on the school bus and the only thing you could do was read something or study something and so you just put what you read into your brain.”

The more he read, the more Ted realised the world was bigger than the trip from Enngonia to Bourke, and the bus ride fuelled his drive to travel.

At his high school in the late 1970s, “we started a radio station; it was just a microphone and a turntable. We had a couple of people who sponsored it in the school and we got funding to build two studios.

“We had a library full of records, and, because I still had to go home on the school bus, while I was waiting in the afternoon I would be the DJ. Sometimes I’d even skip class to be on the radio.”

All the students involved rotated morning, afternoon and evening shifts, and “we’d also do the news and all sorts of things. It was great for giving confidence to the students, because we ran it.”

“The school radio station we started as kids is today called 2WEB. The old sports equipment room was our first studio and library for our records before they built us two state-of-the-art studios and a record library. Once it got to that stage we were professional and we brought in a manager for the radio station.

“We loved to prepare our shows on tape before or after class, and we were often in class or going home on the bus when our tapes were played in their respective time slots.

“It was tough in the outback, dry and desolate, and I knew I couldn’t stay there. I wanted to travel and luckily I was surrounded by some good people who were well-educated and I suppose they became mentors.”

One of those mentors spent time in the Air Force, and that seemed an exciting life to a young boy from the bush who dreamed of travelling. A career in the defence forces seemed appealing, but his eventual choice was a total shock to everyone. “Yes, I spent a decade in the Navy.”

The kid from the ‘Back o’ Bourke’ not only joined the Navy, but became a submariner… going from a town where the river rarely flowed to living beneath the ocean in a submarine.

Ted admits “it was scary, and I was there at the time when a couple of guys went missing, so the rules were then tightened. I worked with some great guys though, some of whom are still in the Navy and still closely involved with submarines.

“Ten years was enough and I wanted a career outside the Navy and not in engineering, which was my job there.

“I wanted to earn big bucks; I wanted to travel further. I wanted to do my own thing. I wanted to start my own business, and to do that I needed to learn what to do, and even take a few backward steps before moving ahead.”

Ted believed sales was the place to be, but stepping back took him back to an experience from his early high school years.

Once he was out of the Navy, living in Sydney and highly driven to be successful at something, Ted was job hunting and not afraid to approach anyone he thought could help him achieve his goal.

“It was just before John Singleton bought 2GB (the Sydney radio station) and I asked him for a job. As simple as that.

“When he took over the radio station I joined the sales and marketing team and it was a great opening to where I wanted to go. It was a good learning place and I got to meet some really powerful and interesting people. That’s what happens when you work for someone like John Singleton.”

Ted was fortunate that he mixed with very successful, high profile people such as Derryn Hinch and Graham Richardson, and was highly driven to succeed.

“I wanted to achieve results. I had set myself goals and I’ve been focused on those goals ever since I was a child. From the youngest age, even as a child, it was about setting goals; without goals I feel lost.”

In Ted’s view, he is “where I am today because I continually set new goals. I have long-term goals and short-term goals and I guess sales is no different. You’ve got a number you want to achieve, which puts food on the table, pays your rent and you’re focused on doing that.”

None of Ted’s goals were as significant or as important as when he met and married his wife Diane, in 2001. “She’s been my rock and confidante. Without her I’d be nowhere.” They were blessed with a son in 2002.

There was still something missing though: Ted was still working for someone else.

One of those goals when he left the Navy was to have his own business. His time working for John Singleton had prepared him for the next step which ultimately led to what he’s doing today with ThreatMetrix.

“After the radio stint I got involved in a startup, which was arguably one of the first dot-com businesses to be listed on the stock market.

“I think Liberty One was the first dot-com – it was listed on the Stock Exchange about half an hour before we were. They tried to buy us, but we tore up the cheque and just did our own thing.”

That first business was called KidsNet and it provided safe internet access for kids and families. “It was started by a barrister and his son and I drove around the country selling it.”

It was the late 1990s, the internet was new and exciting, and as the business grew along with that, so did Ted’s list of contacts.

It was a time for the bold, and few were bolder than Ted. “I was meeting people from around the world, they were investing in our company and that’s when I took the leap and did my own thing.”

Ted teamed up with Deutsche Telecom because the talk was that they were going to buy Optus. Ted strategised “it was a good opportunity to get involved in a new space that combined technology and the internet.”

The Optus sale didn’t go as planned, but Ted was then entrenched in his consulting business. After helping Deutsche Telecom and companies like Intel and Hewlett Packard, he had a chance meeting with a tech guru by the name of Andreas Baumhof.

“Andreas was selling a piece of software he’d created and I said why don’t we set up a business to create this technology and I’ll help you take it to market?”

The software’s potential had excited Ted, as it was aimed at security. Spam and malware viruses were hitting the internet and targeting banks and consumers in e-commerce. Security to protect against these attacks was in its infancy.

As is so often the case in startup situations, “we worked at each other’s homes for months, figuring out presentations, a business case, working out what we were actually selling and how to make money out of it. We cut a fifty-fifty deal and started selling it over the internet.

“The idea was you could download the software, just like your anti-virus software, but when you clicked on a bank account it would secure the account before you put in a username and password.”

The idea of selling to consumers was great, Ted notes, “but selling one-by-one is hard yards. We had to come up with a way to turn seventy clients a week into seventy thousand clients a week. The smart idea was to take it to the banks.”

Ted needed the banks to realise that it was to their benefit for their clients to have this software and for them to sell it to their customers.

“We went to a credit union and banking conference to speak to CEOs, and one of those was Ray Battle from the Banana Coast Credit Union.

“Ray took my card and three months later he invited Andreas and I to fly up and, after chasing cows around his farm for a few hours, he agreed to hear our presentation.”

In the end, “it was his secretary who eventually clinched the deal for us, giving us three months to put it together. We met all the security and technical requirements and the credit union basically did the marketing for us.”

Three months after the installation went live, there was a media write-up, and the story was then in the news everywhere. “This little tiny credit union in the middle of nowhere on the mid-North Coast had launched this new security solution. A few months later we had an email from the Bank of America.”

From sixty thousand customers to a potential sixty million, TrustDefender was off and running.

“Originally we founded the business as TrustDefender in 2005, later merging it into ThreatMetrix, in 2011. At that point ThreatMetrix really started to take off. As two separate businesses we struggled to scale, but together it was a ‘one plus one equals four’ outcome.

“The original investors in ThreatMetrix tried to merge with TrustDefender in 2007. ThreatMetrix was originally launched as Spam Matters back in 2006, by David Jones, with Alisdair Faulkner later coming in to drive the product mix of ThreatMetrix.”

There was, however, one more hurdle which proved to be a minor stumbling block: the Global Financial Crisis.

“It was while we were in the boardroom at the Bank of America that the news broke on the sale of Wachovia to Citigroup and that sparked wild scenes.”

The sixty million clients Ted and Andreas had been dreaming about now seemed just that: a dream – in fact, an impossible dream.

Over the next few months the financial failures of companies like Wachovia, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch dominated the headlines, leaving Ted and Andreas in limbo.

“Northern Rock in the UK was the catalyst behind the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Bank of America and Wachovia were head-quartered in Charlotte North Carolina, USA. We were chasing big banks and running between Canary Wharf in London, and Stateside it was Boston, New York and Charlotte, visiting huge institutions like Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, JPMorgan etc.

“We were leaving no rocks unturned as we had been encouraged by Austrade after winning the IAwards, we had support from Goldman Sachs and UK investment firm Anthem Capital (which bought in investors such as Rothschild Investment Fund).”

Ted and his business partner were in Charlotte North Carolina “the day it all broke – in fact in the morning we’d had a meeting with America’s biggest retail bank, Wachovia, and then went to meet with the executives of the Bank of America. We were in the BoA office when Wachovia fell over. Wells Fargo and BoA teamed up to save the American economy and the retail banking system in America against what appeared to be Saudi majority-owned Citibank who was raiding the coffers of Wachovia.”

As Ted recounts, “it was a fascinating time to be in New York. I can remember David Koch, who I’d worked with at 2GB, was talking about this massive financial failure with talk about the end of the world as we know it, and I’m literally there, in the middle of it while it’s all happening.”

In the wash-up, Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo bought Wachovia and Ted and Andreas were back in action. The dream was beginning to materialise.

While Ted can look back on that time with immense satisfaction, it was far from a satisfying experience to actually live through it. Everything which had taken Ted to the point of realising his dream had appeared to amount to nothing because of forces completely out of his control.

It’s in those moments you have to dig deep into your self-belief.

“As a kid, growing up in isolation in the bush, growing up with lots of adults, hearing lots of stories, reading books as a child, I’ve always wanted to do something that other people hadn’t done.

“When you do that, you strive to break the boundaries, to do things that other people haven’t done. It’s like you don’t know what you don’t know when you’re a child, and it’s always been that way with me. I remember as a child in the classroom that the girls were always the smartest, but I always wanted to beat them in exams.”

Ted admits, “I don’t really know what makes me do this or makes me want to achieve more. It doesn’t matter what I do in life: it’s the same thing. Every time I hit a barrier I try to break it. If someone said I couldn’t do something, I would try and do it. I always wanted to prove everyone wrong.”

Ted worries that in today’s world, with so much information immediately available via computers, young people are being bombarded and the biggest problem they have is deciding what is and what isn’t true. It’s an information age where much of the information is nothing more than opinions, so deciphering right from wrong – good from bad – is difficult in Ted’s view.

“Sometimes I think too much data is not good for motivation,” Ted adds.

Ted has a son growing up in the today’s world and hopes his own story of self-belief and being driven to succeed will help him see through the ‘cloud’.

For Ted, “the message for my son is to never give up. To always strive to do better. You know, there are lots of people out there that don’t have the advantages that he has had. I’ve been able to give him those advantages and hopefully he’ll take them and turn them into something worthwhile.”