How Sam Kroonenburg is doing things differently the second time round
The founder, one of Australia's most successful, sold A Cloud Guru for $2 billion. He's bringing the lessons he learned to Cuttable, an automated ad agency.
Sam Kroonenburg is not your average second-time founder. He sold his previous education startup, A Cloud Guru, to Pluralsight three years ago for $2 billion, making it one of the largest deals ever for an Australian tech company.
He joins an exclusive list of Australian founders who exited their startups through billion-dollar acquisitions — and felt the call to do it all again. Leigh Jasper, who sold Aconex to Oracle for $1.6 billion in 2018, is the only other founder in this category. Jasper announced he was launching the business insights startup Firmable late last year.
This week, Cuttable, a first-of-its-kind automated advertising agency, announced it had closed a $5.5 million seed funding round led by Square Peg with participation from Rampersand and strategic angel investors. Kroonenburg is stepping into the role of co-CEO alongside his co-founder Jack White. He’s bringing hard — but well-earned — lessons with him.
One of these lessons, says Kroonenburg, is that he realised he needed to be less “nice” and more willing to move on quickly from people who weren’t working out. He said he had to learn how to “bring people up and when to move on” faster, rather than trying to carry everyone along.
