Tag Archives: peter thiel

December 2, 2012 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Xero Raises a Truckload of Cash from US Funds

By Ben Kepes

Last week the announcement came that Xero had secured a huge investment round from US venture funds Valar Ventures (backed by Facebook founder Peter Thiel) and Matrix Capital Management. I’ve spent time talking with these US investors about Xero’s prospects and areas I thought the company would need to improve

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February 1, 2012 Posted in Business 4 Comments

Xero Raises Another Round and Acquires WorkFlowMax

By Ben Kepes

Exciting news today from Xero ahead of their user conference tomorrow that spans two important announcements. I’ll cover them individually. $20M Raised from Existing Shareholders Existing shareholders have reinvested to the aggregate tune of $20M. Sam Morgan, Sam Knowles, Craig Winkler and Peter Thiel’s fund Valar Ventures have all taken

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July 21, 2011 Posted in Business 6 Comments

Xero Buys Paycycle and Clarifies US Market Entry

By Ben Kepes

At its AGM today, Xero announced a number of things, one of which was the acquisition of Australian payroll provider Paycycle in a deal worth $1.5M. When Xero launched they went on record as saying that payroll was outside of what they considered core functionality – this position was in

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May 24, 2011 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Xero and the US Market

By Ben Kepes

In the four or so years since Xero launched with great fanfare in New Zealand, moved on to Australia and gained a modicum of visibility in the UK, many of us have been waiting to see what would happen in he REAL market, that of the US. While I personally

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October 24, 2010 Posted in Business 6 Comments

Xero Gets Some Acid on the Blogosphere

By Ben Kepes

Last week Xero announced that Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and the first external investor in Facebook, was investing NZD4 million to “support Xero’s expansion into the US market”. Not surprisingly the move got significant attention both in New Zealand and elsewhere – I have to admit that while I

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September 24, 2008 Posted in Business, Efficiency, IT, New business, Strategy 5 Comments

On start-ups and paying CEOs

By Ben Kepes

At the TechCrunch 50 conference Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley uber investor was quoted as saying that there is a ceiling in terms of CEO salary for a startup, beyond which you begin to “have issues”. For a more general take on CEO salaries (not tech specific) check out this article.

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The Author

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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