Tag Archives: rod drury

April 18, 2013 Posted in Business 1 Comment

SMB Stock and Inventory from Quote Stock Sell

By Ben Kepes

Inventory is a critical part of any business that works in the real (ie physical) world. However given the seeming unquenchable excitement for the virtual world, inventory is sadly often dismissed down the priority list in favor of “sexier” functional areas. This oversight however proves an opportunity for people with

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March 27, 2013 Posted in Business 1 Comment

The Xero Share Price – One Pundit’s Analysis

By Ben Kepes

In recent weeks the share price for listed cloud accounting vendor Xero has risen at an incredibly fast rate. The company, which has around 140000 paying customers globally and is yet to turn a profit, is now valued at close to $1.5B. This is a staggering achievement and something I

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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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September 30, 2012 Posted in Business 4 Comments

Xero Rolls Out Some More Network Effects and Faces Some Criticism. Some Lessons on Viral Strategies

By Ben Kepes

Xero (disclosure – I’ve done a tiny bit of consulting for Xero and am co-founder of LiveMigrate, a service that migrates businesses from desktop accounting applications to Xero) rolled out a new update this week which included some interesting and valuable features. The introduction of online invoicing is a bit of

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July 29, 2012 Posted in Business 2 Comments

Xero Hits Escape Velocity With 100000 Customers Count

By Ben Kepes

Xero held its annual meeting last week and detailed its current performance. Xero annual meetings are always an interesting event, Xero has an incredibly supportive shareholder base, while most publicly listed company AGMs include a fair dose of critique and questioning, Xero’s events instead ring to the sound of hand-clapping

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July 15, 2012 Posted in Business 5 Comments

Rumors Suggest Xero to Announce Acquisitions at Xerocon

By Ben Kepes

Update 2 – Well, it seems I was right – as I predicted Xero did not acquire Vend and did acquire a practice management vendors (Spotlight Workpapers whom I referred to in a previous post). This gives Xero a more credible practice management suite and should stand them in good

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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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January 25, 2012 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Xero Market Update–Hockeystick Achieved

By Ben Kepes

Xero has just given a market update in advance of heir partner conference next week. The numbers are all heading in the right direction despite the fact that Xero is yet to break even – previous market announcements indicated that Xero was following a strategy that put market growth ahead

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November 4, 2011 Posted in Business 2 Comments

Easing the On Ramp–Xero Makes a Logical Move, Three Years On

By Ben Kepes

Around three years ago, before some “heated” discussions made communication between us a little strained, I spent a fair amount of time talking with Xero CEO Rod Drury around the Cloud/SaaS market generally. Those conversations started well before the Xero IPO when he was still shopping little more than a

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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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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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