Evan Thornley: management consultant -> politician -> 14 x co-founder <->CEO

Evan Thornley is a seasoned serial entrepreneur and co-founder of 14 diverse ventures spanning businesses, non-profits, and membership organisations over 40 years. He began his career as a lawyer and student politician, helping to found the National Union of Students and running commercial arms linked to student organisations. After earning a Law/Commerce degree, he worked as a management consultant at McKinsey for 4.5 years before returning to entrepreneurship by founding LookSmart in 1995, one of the earliest internet search companies that later became Australia’s first tech unicorn listed on NASDAQ.

Following his success at LookSmart, Thornley shifted into public service and activism—co-founding GetUp!, setting up progressive think tanks like Per Capita, and serving in Victorian Parliament as Parliamentary Secretary for Innovation. Later, he embraced a global tech leadership role with Better Place, an electric car charging company, before turning his focus to housing with LongView, a unique enterprise pioneering innovative housing fund solutions to address Australia’s housing crisis. Throughout his career, Thornley has embraced change, chance, and social purpose, often following opportunities driven by passion, sometimes facing setbacks but continuously seeking impact and innovation at scale.

Here are the key takeouts from the interview about his career. Read the interview below.

Key Takeouts

• A chance experience helped launch LookSmart: “A lot of the things that I stumbled upon, like the internet in 1995, that was almost pure luck. I was working at McKinsey in New York… ten seconds later, we’re looking for apartments to rent in London… ‘Oh my God, I’ve just seen the future.’ Six weeks later, I quit my job and founded LookSmart.”

• A chance meeting shifted Thornley’s career from politics to a startup: “The guys at Better Place were coming out to Australia… eventually they were told: go and see Evan Thornley… I ended up leaving politics and joining them. Again, there’s no reason why that conversation necessarily would have happened, but it changed my life.”

• Opportunities only matter if you act on them: “These happenstances only become material because you chose to do something with them… when that hits your radar screen, you’ve got to grab it or it’ll go.”

• Happendipity shapes careers when you let it.: “We encounter chance events all the time. The ones that can end up changing our career are because we choose to let them, or we choose to make them change our career.”

• Pursue chance with passion and careful planning: “My advice would be: embrace chance with passion and rigour… If you come across some happendipity that opens that window for you, you should absolutely pursue it, but you should pursue it with rigour, and say, ‘What are the risks? What are my alternatives?’”

• Your response decides if events change your life: “We can’t control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond… You can determine whether it becomes a life changing thing, or it passes without comment, never to be seen again.”

These takeouts show the importance of recognising and embracing chance opportunities, acting decisively to transform them into life-changing ventures, and balancing passion with careful risk assessment – demonstrating that while luck opens doors, the true power lies in how one responds and follows through to shape a meaningful career path.

Read the full interview below.

Q: What is your career story? What what have you done previously?

ET: I think the central governing fact has been, I’m a serial entrepreneur, a serial co-founder, and I’m a big believer in founding teams, not heroic individuals, but that having been said, I tend to be the one who carries the CEO title.

So I’ve co-founded 14 different ventures, and when I say ventures, they’ve been businesses, non-profits for purpose ventures, a whole range of different things, membership based organisations. So co-founded 14 different organisations, and have been the leader of most, but not all of those 14 organisations over the last 40 years.

I’m a recovering lawyer. I did a Law/Commerce degree at Melbourne Uni, and for my sins, was far too involved in student politics, and was president of the Student Union. And then one of the organisations I helped found was the National Union of Students, which is, I’m happy to say, still going, although I don’t always agree with what it does!

Even then, I was starting my entrepreneurial career, so the first organisation that I didn’t found – I took over – was a small commercial arm that was owned by the Student Union, by the National Student Union and I started running that and turned it into a proper business, and set up a chain of computer stores on campus and did a bunch of other things.

But that was probably second to the first organisation I co-founded, which is indeed the National Union of Students. I was one of the first, the inaugural year, of that organisation. After that setting up this thing called Student Services Australia, and finishing my law degree, because I was doing somewhere north of a full time load in my law degree for my last two years, while I set up that business, which ended up having nine staff and a multimillion dollar turnover.

I had my articles lined up to be a lawyer, but I ended up getting the opportunity to be a management consultant at McKinsey and Company instead, and so I chose to do that. And you know, that’s the greatest finishing school in business. I learned a huge amount about business in 4.5 years there and then went back to entrepreneurship.

And so I founded my next company. The first thing I founded (because the other things I took over) was a tech business called LookSmart, right at the beginning of the internet – 1995.

We were one of the early players in internet search, both in the search engine and directory space a few months after Yahoo started. Then when that space got too crowded, we ended up building search advertising tools, like those you see with Google AdWords. These tools were essentially invented by two companies, one of which was my company, LookSmart. The other one was a thing called GoTo.com.

That business was, to the best of my knowledge, the first Australian tech unicorn that was listed on NASDAQ. Went to $14 billion in market cap, which was real money in those days. I did that for seven years, found my hand-picked successor, handed over the keys, and took myself and my family back home from San Francisco to Melbourne and then started trying to fix the Australian Labor Party, which in retrospect, was a heroic aspiration.

I set up public policy think tanks and activist organisations. I was one of the co-founders of GetUp!. I led the team that set up the Per Capita think tank, which is still going, and probably the premier progressive think tank in the country. And took over the Fabian Society, which was a long-standing think tank on the progressive side of politics.

Then Steve Bracks asked me to be part of his government, and I said yes, and ended up in the Victorian Parliament and was the right hand of the premier as his Parliamentary Secretary for Innovation (given I was the Silicon Valley guy) and Federal State Relations. Which was actually very interesting.

Then I realised parliamentary life was not for me, and I was asked to go back, effectively, to the world of tech. I joined what was the most exciting tech company in the world at that stage, way back in 2009 which was an Israeli company that was setting up charge networks for electric cars. Big ones, like national scale charge networks for electric cars. A company called Better Place and so in 2009 it was doing this, way ahead of its time, and raised literally US$1 billion in venture capital to do it. It was a very serious venture. That’s probably the only one I didn’t found. I happily joined that. They were looking to expand into Australia. I was the CEO of the Australian business, because they were all over Israel, and their second country was Denmark, the third country was Australia, the fourth country was the Netherlands. It was rolling out that way.

But things went wrong back in Israel, and they eventually ended up firing the founder and CEO and asking me to come over from Australia and run the global business way too late in. The thing was already a mess at that point and couldn’t be salvaged. That’s a whole fascinating story on which there is literally a book published and case studies in all the major business schools – Harvard, Stanford, etc. Because you can’t smoke $1 billion of other people’s money without it being an important story.

After that the Australian team, we felt that we were doing an incredible job down here in Australia, and it was super disappointing that things went west back in head office in Israel, because we were just about to have this thing roll out all over Australia. We had a $50 million deal with Shell to roll out our network all over their service stations. And we worked with Holden to engineer an electric version of the Holden Commodore, and they were getting ready to run 20,000 of these things off the line in the Elizabeth Factory in South Australia, which was the last best chance to save the Australian car industry. And sadly, none of that ever happened, because Better Place didn’t make it globally.

So my Australian team and I went down to my farm and said, Well, we did good work, probably the best work of our careers. Unfortunately, it came to nothing. Let’s do something different, perhaps something a little less heroic than national scale electric charge networks in, you know, 2013 as it was then. We ended up looking at a number of different opportunities. And did two startups, one of which failed, which was in the recruiting space, which is a whole other interesting story. As always, you learn a lot more from your failures than your successes, in many ways. That went for three years and got funding from SEEK. But ultimately, we couldn’t execute on what we tried to do in that recruiting startup.

The other thing is what’s become LongView, which is the business I’m still running. A very, very, very different business in the residential property and housing space. We’re doing things that nobody else does or has ever done. We’re 10 years into that, and I think we’ve arrived at the starting line, and with a bit of luck, we’ll be an overnight success by about year 15. That’s a quick potted summary.

Q: What are you doing now?

ET: LongView is trying to solve the Australian housing crisis, which goodness knows, is the single biggest issue in the country, and everybody’s got an opinion on how it should be fixed. But to my frustration, almost none of the solutions that are proposed today are any different than the housing debate that has been going on for literally 50 years. I don’t know why people think that any of those ideas have any more likelihood of solving the problem than those that have abundantly failed to do for 50 years.

We’ve done a huge amount of research. Among other things, we’ve managed 4000 rental properties and we do it really well, actually, possibly better than any other company in the country. We buy 1000s of homes for clients through our professional buying advisors, and we’ve built a data science team that’s analysed every sale of every home in Australia for the last 50 years to really understand how it works.

We’ve formed a vision about what’s needed to transform the Australian housing environment, and it’s a completely different vision to anything that is being articulated in any of the gallons of ink on newsprint that is spilt every day, or in the digital world now reiterating the same old tired debates about negative gearing and interest rates and supply/demand imbalances and all of these other things. All of which are important, but none of which are going to be central to solving the problem.

In very short summary, we believe that Australia is the only country in the civilised world that doesn’t have a housing fund industry. We have a superannuation fund industry. It is the envy of the world, but most other nations also have a housing fund industry that’s different to superannuation. Obviously, the purpose of superannuation is to give people dignified, secure retirement. The purpose of housing funds is to give people dignified secure housing. These are different things. They have different risks, different skills, and need a different approach. Though, you know, super funds can invest in housing funds, and ironically, the Australian super funds do invest in housing funds all over the world, except in Australia, because there are none.

We are trying to pioneer the creation of a housing fund industry in Australia. And our vision of that is partly that we stop having two and a half million landlords, each owning, in most cases, one or possibly two or a couple more properties, and have the landlords invest in the housing funds, and then the housing funds actually deliver proper housing solutions. Whether that’s dignified, secure, long term, effectively, institutionally owned rental housing, like there is in large parts of northern Europe, or whether it’s through shared equity or other mechanisms helping co-invest to allow people to obviously get to the preferred housing solution, which is owner occupierships.

We’re trying to pioneer the creation of that industry. We’re just starting now. We just launched our first fund about a year and a half ago. We’ve co-invested now in 88 homes across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane that are worth about $140 million between them, but that’s starting to really move. I suspect that what we’re doing there will probably be 10 times that size in two years and on from there with a bit of luck. So that’s what I’m up to in a nutshell.

Q: Why have you made the change between different roles in your career?

ET: I guess I’ve never really thought about it as a career, if I’m honest, I’ve just done the things that I’ve thought are worth doing, and I haven’t been too fussed about how I do them.

Mostly, I’ve seen things that somebody ought to do something about and no one has. Then I hope to start an organisation that does. But I happily worked in Steve Brack’s government. Obviously, I didn’t start that. I joined Shai Agassi, his team at Better Place as well. And, there were really two co-founders that drove GetUp!. I was one of the founding board members and donors, but I wasn’t the driving force there.

I kind of left out a really big one in there. The one I’m actually most proud of. I came up with the idea during the global financial crisis, when the biggest childcare network in the world went broke, which was ABC Learning that really we should be doing early childhood development for the good of the children, and that we should therefore get a consortium of charities to buy the entrails of ABC Learning and turn it into a social venture that is run for the good of the kids.

My friend Michael Traill and I therefore set up what is now the Goodstart Consortium that did that, and Michael should take most of the credit. I came up with the idea and helped set up the consortium. But then I got busy with Better Place, and he actually sort of took it right through to conclusion, to where Goodstart is today. Again, other people drove that. I haven’t always been the driving force, and therefore I haven’t always had the CEO title or the co-founder title.

I haven’t undertaken a lot of career planning, if I’m honest. And look, you know, given that things obviously went very well at LookSmart, I had the great privilege to be able to pursue the things that I was most passionate about after that with financial security. Obviously, for most people, that opportunity doesn’t come along, or doesn’t come along till a lot later in life. I was fortunate.

Q: What role has happendipity or chance played in your career?

ET: On the one hand, I’m obviously a fairly self-directed individual, and I’ve pursued things that I’ve felt were important. But on the other hand, how those things came about, or the people that I ended up working with, or the way the external environment happened to turn at any given point in time, all of those things were, of course, completely outside my control. You either use them to your advantage or you’re a victim of circumstance. I am a religious person. I’m a person of faith. I think things happen for a reason.

A lot of the things that I stumbled upon, like the internet in 1995, that was almost pure luck. I was working at McKinsey in New York. I’d been reading a little bit about this thing called Mozilla, at this tiny company called Netscape, and friend of mine actually had a browser on his computer. He was a chap called Richard Blue from the London office. We’ve been playing around in all the previous computer networks, all the Unix based ones, CompuServe and Delphi, that were just dreadfully user unfriendly and awful, So he fires up his computer, opens this thing called a browser, and then 10 seconds later, we’re looking for apartments to rent in London, point and click. And I’m just like, “Oh my God, I’ve just seen the future. This is going to change the world.” To me, that was just like an earthquake. Six weeks later, I quit my job and founded LookSmart.

The guys at Better Place were coming out to Australia to set up the Better Place Australia business. They came through the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce and they were trying to find anyone who’d done anything in Silicon Valley. Eventually they were told: go and see Evan Thornley, but he’s actually a politician now. They came to see me. Not to talk about politics and to get money from the government (though they may have had designs on that later) but just because I was the only person they could find to talk about Silicon Valley. I ended up leaving politics and joining them. Again, there’s no reason why that conversation necessarily would have happened, but it changed my life and gave me the chance to go to Israel again, because I’d been once before, interestingly enough, as a student politician, but I wasn’t Jewish. This got me back to Israel 25 more times, and that led to me converting to Judaism. All of that came out of that pretty random connection but then I happen to think that that was not an accident, right? But that’s just my understanding of life.

Q Are you someone who embraces or rejects happendipity?

ET: I think you can see from those examples and probably ten others I could reel off pretty quickly. I am at the extreme end of that spectrum, right? I am an embracer of change. And, you know, one of the things I’ve learned is that I’d like to think I’m a pretty good entrepreneur. I’m a lousy investor, and the reason I am is because I’ve never seen a new idea I don’t like, right? And, you know, that’s probably a good orientation for someone who wants to be an entrepreneur. It’s a terrible orientation for someone who wants to be an investor.

Q When you say embracing change is that the same as embracing chance for you?

ET: Well, yeah, because chance comes along and puts something in front of you that didn’t exist before, and then you choose to change whatever it was you were doing to grab it, right? So, I mean, those happenstances only become material because you chose to do something with them. I mean, the events in themselves are pedestrian events. Conversation with a work colleague at eight o’clock one night, right? You know somebody who knows somebody says, I’ll go talk to Evan about this, and you take a cup of coffee with someone. I mean, these are entirely pedestrian events. But they then created opportunities. When that hits your radar screen, you’ve got to grab it or it’ll go. And I’ve tended to do that.

Q What have you learned about the process of changing careers?

ET: Well, I will say this from my personal experience, but also from the experience of many others. I’ve just turned 60, so I’ve got a cohort of colleagues – we’ve known each other since university 40 years ago. You see everyone’s life and career. This will probably surprise you, what I’ve learned is that risk matters and risk is dangerous, and before taking risks, you need to actually make sure you fully understand what those risks are and think about the consequences if they go badly.

That’s probably the last thing you would have expected me to say. But not all of my changes worked out. Not all of these organisations survived. I probably look back on the 10 years I invested in the Labor Party and feel like that wasn’t the best use of my time. By no means have all of these things turned out for the good, and that’s been true professionally, it’s been true personally, it’s been true financially.

Whilst I have been an embracer of change, I’ve probably done so in many cases without thinking it through and was probably lucky early on that I took some extreme risks that happened to pay off. Probably didn’t realise the extent to which I’d taken extreme risks or the extent to which I was lucky with how well they paid off. I had to learn those lessons later in life. And you know, you get hurt, right?

Whilst I might be the poster child for embracing change and risk, I’m actually quite sanguine about it. As you can imagine, particularly after LookSmart, I’d have entrepreneurs, or people thinking about leaving their job and becoming entrepreneurs, come to me all the time, and one of the things I’d end up saying to them is: “Hey, be careful here. Can you afford to take this risk? What is Plan B? If it doesn’t work out, this is risky stuff you’re talking about here.” So not trying to talk them out of it. Goodness knows I’ve always tried to encourage people to be entrepreneurial, or encourage them to go into public services, as the Americans call it, or politics or other things, but also tried to help them have a realistic understanding that career changes are risky and they can go wrong, and that can end badly.

It’s very hard for people to calibrate risk, and all the more so when their emotions and passions get aroused. Is this a one in a million risk? Or is this a one in 100 risk? Or is it a one in 10 risk? There’s big differences between those things, if the consequences of that risk not playing out are catastrophic. Most of us, when we make a career change, have to accept that after our late 20s, early 30s at the latest, we’re probably going to have to go back before we can go forward. Right?

I’d gone from being the billionaire tech wizard to being the junior kid on the block in politics, and I can tell you, I got no help from anyone, because they all hated me because it wasn’t part of the system. That was hard to do, and it was a massive step back on the career ladder – being a backbencher in a state parliament, from billionaire. And it didn’t work out! I hated it. I ended up leaving, and I wasted a bunch of years of my life achieving very little, in my view, except I snuck off when no one was watching, and founded Goodstart, didn’t tell them about it, because I was still in the parliament. When I did that, I knew that if I told them, they’d say it was too risky and I had to stop, so we just set it up anyway. But that’s probably not what you’re expecting to hear. It’s not clearly an argument for people not embracing change and happendipity, as you call it, but for people to make considered decisions about things that are big changes in their lives.

Q: What advice would you give to someone else faced with a chance event, as in, happendipity that could change their career?

ET: My advice would be: embrace it with passion and rigour. We encounter chance events all the time. The ones that can end up changing our career are because we choose to let them or we choose to make them change our career. I can only speak from my own experience, but I suspect it’s not uncommon. And usually the reason we do that is it because it ignites some passion within us that in many cases we can often be unaware of. But suddenly this new event and this new perspective gives us a window into something, maybe it was something we always wanted to do, and this was just the chance to do it. You know, you met the casting agent in a restaurant, and now you’re in the movies.

But in many cases, it’s created opportunities we’d never thought of. And the ones we might consider seriously taking, the ones that ignite some passion within us. I’m a huge one for following passion. You know your passion, the things you believe in, the things you think really matter, the things where you want to make a difference. If you come across some happendipity that opens that window for you, you should absolutely pursue it, but you should pursue it with rigour, and say, “Okay, how can I do this? What are the risks? What are my alternatives? How do I mitigate the risks? How do I know that this is the right thing for me?” I mean to pursue it with a positive intent, but with a degree of seriousness that it deserves.

My definition of happendipity is actually…there’s an old saying in life, it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you choose to respond that matters. And we often say that about things that can be painful and difficult, things that happen to us. But what that really means is, we can’t control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond. Well, I would say you can’t necessarily control what new, fresh, life changing thing comes in front of you, but how you choose to respond to that. You can determine whether it, in fact, becomes a life changing thing, or it passes without comment, never to be seen again.

Check out my previous interviews on happendipity with:

• Agathé Kerr: an IT consultant turned pastry chef
• Sonia Singh: science communicator to Tree Change Dolls creator to speech pathologist
• Amit Turkenitz: software developer -> business owner and photographer -> entrepreneur and product creator -> UX consultant -> product manager -> data engineer
• Stephanie Ifrah: architect to founder of the brand The Rose
• Bianca Havas: film production assistant -> environmental advocacy campaigner -> leadership consultant
• Holly Trueman: scientist <-> science TV producer -> CEO

If you are interested in career storytelling coaching, find out more here.

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