30under30 is an Anthill initiative that was launched in early 2008 to encourage and promote entrepreneurship among young Australians. Each year, we invite our readers to nominate young Australian entrepreneurs deserving of recognition for their outstanding entrepreneurial endeavours. Anthill’s editorial team then trawls through hundreds of applications and identifies and profiles the top 30 Australian entrepreneurs under the age of 30. The process culminates in an event held in Melbourne where the 30 winners network and celebrate. We’ve been releasing profiles of this year’s Anthill 30under30 winners via our Twitter account – youngest to oldest. After a brief hiatus for Venture Capital Month, these profiles continue.
Name: Samuel Yeats Age: 25 (b. 1984) State: NSW Industry: Internet Hosting Services Company:Ultra Serve, Rejila
While most people hang out with mates during lunch breaks in Year 10, Samuel Yeats was negotiating with the receiver of a failed telco to acquire its hosting customers.
Nine years later, Yeats is now the founder and CEO of Ultra Serve, a leading Australian managed internet hosting service provider, competing and winning contracts in head-to-head competition with industry giants such as Telstra, Macquarie Telecom and Web Central.
“Ultra Serve has rapidly grown over the past few years,” says Yeats. “Clients are looking to reduce CapEx costs and find ways to work more efficiently – both are the business’s key value propositions.”
In 2008, when Microsoft, Google and Amazon all launched their respective cloud services infrastructure, cloud computing became the new darling of the ICT industry. But Australian businesses are not spoilt for choice when it comes to locally-based services.
Yeats and his Ultra Serve team pioneered the launch of Rejila, the first Australian cloud infrastructure platform, at CeBIT 2009. The service allows users to share a large pool of computing resources and dynamically change their share depending on their needs at any given time.
“Cloud computing has quickly risen as a flexible and scalable hosting solution that is both cost effective and environmentally responsible,” says Yeats. He is not expecting the company’s rapid growth to plateau any time soon, with cloud hosting projected to grow into 78 billion dollar industry by 2012.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP ACCORDING TO SAMUEL:
What motivates you as an entrepreneur?
Closing the next business deal, the challenge and stimulation of keeping up with an ever-evolving and developing industry, seeing the business grow and seeing our clients grow (working with fast-growth clients stimulates my entrepreneurial brain).
With artificial intelligence automating a lot of the consumer interactions through the likes of chatbots, it means customer service teams can prioritise the tasks that matter the most and the interactions that could make or break the business. If there was ever a time to adopt artificial intelligence and chatbots in your business, it really is now.
Last year, the Pearcey NSW ICT and Digital Media Entrepreneur awards celebrated much talent, including that of Lars and Jens Rasmussen for the pinnacle award. The awards are back and the committee needs some nominees!
The SproutX Accelerator will run regular workshops from its co-working space in Melbourne, however startup participants will be able to work from anywhere in Australia, ensuring they are close to their existing and potential customers.
Picture this, you’ve been living and breathing your startup now for nine months. You’ve scored a seed round of funding from some reputable investors. You’ve consciously sifted through a lot of the BS and, started to build a really awesome product that the market really wants. You’re almost ready to take your industry by storm…
70 per cent of Aussie companies that are eligible for government grants are unaware or simply do not know how to go about accessing the funding available
