Inside a $600,000,000 Australian Tech Company

See you, Mom.

Thank you. Some cool shots of the sunrise there, and it is early and a little bit chilly actually. We're off to Melbourne today because a couple of weeks ago I organized with a friend some work experience at a tech company down in Melbourne. And it's— even though I've started at Max Kelson, I'm going down to spend 2 days there to get some more experience, to see how it's run. And this is not a small company either. They have, I think, 1,400 or something staff in Australia. It's REA Group. realestate.com.au is their main site in Australia, I think. They have a few other things, but I'll see what I can film down there and bring you with me. Let's fly!

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you.

Love exploring bookstores when I'm at the airport. So many good reads, but I didn't buy anything. I've got my Kindle today. Need to find out what seat I'm on. We're going the right way. Morning, how are you today?

Wonderful. 7 on the right.

Thank you, my lucky number.

So we're in Melbourne.

It's a little bit colder than Brisbane. I said Brisbane was cold this morning. Melbourne's even colder. I'm going to catch a bus to the city. Good morning. Excellent, how are you?

Good, thanks.

Can I need to get to South Yarra? Cheers.

Thank you.

Possibly one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever been in, and I have to, I have to talk quiet because it's a library. Just, just let me show you. Look at this. It's exactly what you'd see in the movies. It's amazing. How could you not want to study in here? I could spend literally all day, but I've got to go meet my friend before it gets It's dark and I need some dinner. Look, there are even people playing chess down here. So I'm gonna go meet my friend. We're gonna have some food and then I've gotta do some reading for tomorrow. I'm not entirely sure how I'm gonna split this video up because I'm here for 3 days. I'm gonna record a lot of footage. I don't know, I might put it out as one thing or a couple of videos. Who knows? We'll find out. It's early, real early. The sun isn't even up yet, but I'm heading in early to near the place I'm doing the learning experience, and I think that's what you could call it, a learning experience. I'm gonna find a nice little cafe. If you're ever in Melbourne, Melbourne is highly regarded in Australia at least for its cafes and coffee shops and the coffee culture and all this sort of stuff. So, which is something I'm not against at all because who doesn't love something warm in the morning when it's cold? As for what I'm doing today, I think my first meeting is with Nigel, who's the chief inventor of Ari Agri. So I'm excited. Imagine having a title as chief inventor. Not just yet. Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna keep doing some writing. Yeah, we did it in a lady kaab. What's that? In like in a lady kaab. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, that'd be amazing. Thank you.

Cool artworks, hey? Melbourne is full of these things in the streets and alleyways. Look at this, there's Sonic, Sonic the Hedgehog. Show me the way to end it all. But what you saw there was I was answering some questions on LinkedIn, a lot of messages. Here's another one. I think that's Johnny Bravo, I'm not entirely sure. All these memes, but I was answering some questions on LinkedIn after posting about getting an internship and whatnot and a role. Had a lot of questions saying, what's the best way to do it? What are the courses to do? Where do I start? Well, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the best courses are, but I can share what, what I've learned and what worked for me. So it happened by, by sharing my work, by putting it out online, letting people people know what I was working on and just putting myself out there. And then someone reached out to me and then that person put me in contact with another person and then that person put me in contact with another person again. And then I was offered a role. And of course it's important to, to learn the skills and whatnot. That's fundamental. Of course, that's a variable we can all take care of. There is no one magic bullet course. But I think what's really important is to, to not forget that how important relationships are in the field. So if you're looking to break into, whether it's data science, machine learning, or technology, anything, start messaging people, start going to meetups, meeting, meeting people who are involved in what you want to get involved in. That's, that's what's worked for me. Um, will it work for you? I'm not entirely sure. There, as I said, everyone's Everyone's journey will be different, but that's, that's essentially what happened to me. So, start messaging people, reach out, share what you're working on so people can find you. That's, that's my advice on how to get an internship.

Good morning.

Excellent.

How are you?

I'm here to see Nigel, I think.

Yeah. And Nigel will be your host for today.

Beautiful.

So what do you think of our area? Pretty good.

Yeah.

Go back, uh, 22 years.

Yep. And that's not too long.

No, in the '90s it was just the dot-com boom.

That's younger than me.

Totally. And in the '90s it was all about how many URLs can you actually register. And really,.au turned out to be a great one. We've got over 200 from the guys who originally founded the company.

Over 200 original URLs?

Domain names. Domain names. We have to maintain them.

Yeah.

Some of them are hilarious. And many of them never got executed or campaign-based or otherwise, but the one that won was realestate.com.au. Oh, realtor. Yeah, well, we've produced other businesses along the way.

Myfun.com.

Oneform was a business we bought.

Yep.

Real Commercial was an obvious addition.

I wish I caught on to that earlier so I could have registered DanielBourke.com. I don't have that. Oh no. Do you have your name?

No, I don't. But who knows, like, in the world of ads, Maybe that's not important.

Yeah.

But brand names become incredibly important.

Yeah, that's it. And all of these as well.

Yeah, so that's our international family there. And you can see we've just added realestate.com.au homelands by hand. It's not a design error to ever go putting something up because we grow so fast.

Well, that's, yeah, that's what I figured.

So rapidly that it becomes a bit of a challenge. But so really the change across this board is Things have changed from searching through the photographs of secondhand houses on the internet.

Yep. So back in—

through to a world of match.

Yep.

So search.

Search. 3 years.

Match.

Match.

And this is where our strategy now lies.

Okay.

Machine learning, artificial intelligence to match people to things in property.

Yeah.

So they could be content.

Yeah.

They could be a home loan. Like we just saw there. It could be an investment property, a rental property. But this is the thing now, people are just gonna go, I want to spend less time searching.

Well, that's, yeah, that's exactly. I was thinking about that the other day. I was talking with my brothers. When we go on YouTube, I don't think I've searched for a video.

Exactly.

In the last year. Well, I can't remember actually searching for a video like that. It just knows what I want to watch. It knows what I'm interested in. Same for other platforms, right? You get there—

And what happens is trust builds over time. So people, they start out going, "Oh, I've got these suggestions." We've been doing push notifications. We do 18 million a month.

Yeah.

For years. So the biggest question in this company across that whole lifetime, what do you reckon that's been? What do you reckon our research lab every single time comes back with? This is the question.

The biggest question.

Yeah, in real estate today, in digital real estate What's the number one question? If you were the greatest real estate agent in the—

You had to have one of those, a Motorola StarTAC. That's no iPhone.

1996 calling. There's a driver and a co-driver, a pilot and a co-pilot.

Yep.

This increases the quality of what you build and reduces the cost of what you build.

What a day!