Victoria Ransom and her Swiss-born husband Alain Chuard continue to focus on giving back, following the sale of their social media marketing company to Google.
Ms Ransom has been raising the couple’s four-year-old daughter, and offering words of advice for up-and-coming entrepreneurs.
The Palo Alto, California-based entrepreneur is also now a board member of the Carnegie Endowment, a philanthropic organisation founded in 1910 by US tycoon Andrew Carnegie.
While many young New Zealand business people would like to follow in her footstep, she recently told the Kiwi Landing Pad’s Founder series that many are simply not thinking big enough.
“When I’m generalising about Kiwi entrepreneurs I’ve spoken to, I see really great ideas but sometimes a lack of big thinking about how they’re going to get their product to market, especially globally, and a lack of understanding about the true competitive dynamics, globally -- and sometimes a lack of willingness to think about giving up a stake in the company to make that happen. This is coming from the person who didn’t want to raise money,” she said.
She added, “If you’re trying to build a global business, you have to be very, very aggressive. You have to think very big. So if you’re thinking big right now, think bigger than that. And be really realistic about what it will take from a resource standpoint – particularly monetary – to get to that vision.”
Ms Ransom and her husband, whom she met at university in the US, certainly had no shortage of ambition.
The pair founded a New Zealand-based adventure-travel business, which was relatively successful but, more importantly, turned out to be the accidental pathway to their high-tech fortune.
In 2006, just as Facebook was hitting the mainstream, the pair decided to promote their company – only to discover the social network had few marketing or measurement tools. The couple decided to create some of their own – and soon realised that should be their main business. Wildfire Interactive was born. By 2012, it had nearly 400 staff, offices in eight countries and roster of blue chip clients.
Suitors came calling, and it was Google who ended up buying the business for a reported $US250m plus a potential $US100m earn-out bonus.
Google folded Wildfire into its main advertising platform in 2015, and Ransom and Chuard left the company the same year, ready to step back from the rat race for a while.
Her corporate success in the US is a long way from Ms Ransom’s upbringing on an asparagus farm at Scotts Ferry, near Bulls.
Having attended Whanganui Girls’ College, Ransom won a scholarship in the US where she completed her university education and went on to receive an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
Before co-founding her adventure-travel business, she worked as an analyst at Morgan Stanley. It was a brief spell, but at the tail end of the dotcom boom when the investment bank was putting a lot of money into startups; it gave her a taste for that sector.
In addition to her World Class New Zealander Award in 2015, Ransom was also invited to the White House in 2013 to receive a Champion of Change award from President Barack Obama in recognition of her contribution as an immigrant entrepreneur.
Despite living in the US, 41-year-old Ransom stays in touch with New Zealand and has become a trustee of Pure Advantage, the business-led green growth organisation founded by fellow Rich Lister Phillip Mills.
Photo: Getty