In 2004, Australia’s future Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, bought a hosting startup called WebCentral for $45mil. It was the second business that FTR Holdings, Turnbull’s technology investment company, had purchased from the Australian internet pioneer, Lloyd Ernst. Following the successful exit, Lloyd went on to found Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company, Cloudstaff. Today, the cloud-based staffing provider employs over 2500 staff across six locations in the Philippines and was named by the Australian Financial Review as one of the fastest growing Australian businesses of 2020. Cloudstaff recently raised $30 million in Series B investment to fund continued growth.

Australian entrepreneur Leah Callon-Butler first met Lloyd in August 2018, when she came to the Philippines to grow a team of web developers and marketers that had been outsourced through Cloudstaff for two years prior. Having done the unusual thing of ‘insourcing’ herself to the outsourcing office, Leah experienced Cloudstaff culture first-hand. Further, with the BPO industry representing 9% of Philippine GDP, she witnessed how the industry was fueling a growing middle class and lifting families out of poverty. Deeply impacted by the experience, Leah now leads a consulting agency focussed on the role of emerging tech in advancing economic development across Asia Pacific.

Leah and Lloyd will chat about Lloyd’s journey as a serial tech entrepreneur and how he came to set up in the Philippines, while debunking some common misconceptions about global outsourcing and offering insights into the cross-cultural realities that tend to define the success (or failure) of remote working arrangements.