Pipe dreams

A few years ago, while I was working for BRW magazine, I was posted to Brisbane to cover the booming Queensland market. Part of my job was to look for candidates for the Rich 200 and Young Rich list, which was how I first came to meet Pipe Networks co-founders Bevan Slattery and Stephen Baxter.

The pair – who have just sold their business to SP Telemedia – were the quintessential nerds-made-good. After previously running IT businesses in different parts of Australia, the old friends reunited in 2002 and established Pipe Networks.

By their own admission, they opened the business to “the sound of crickets”. These were the dark days following the dotcom crash and nobody wanted to know about the tech sector. Slattery and Baxter quickly summed up the situation and made a decision to build their credibility in a way that every investor understood – by consistently making a profit.

Slattery and Baxter made an engaging pair – humble, laid back, funny and extremely passionate about their business. The fact that their personal wealth was rising steadily with the Pipe share price seemed almost inconsequential – this was a pair of men on a mission.

Indeed, the most impressive thing about Slattery and Baxter was the scope of their vision. This was no little IT services or software business – this was a business that wanted to change how the telco sector operated.

Over the course of just seven years, they have managed to build the third largest network of fibre optic cable in Australia. Last year Pipe went one step further, building an undersea cable between Sydney and Guam that links Australia, the US and Asia, and provides international bandwidth at competitive prices.

It was a bold, ambitious project that almost never got off the ground when the GFC almost scuttled Pipe’s chances of getting funding. But Slattery preserved and the $51 million he will receive from the SP Telemedia deal is vindication of his perseverance.

Exactly why Baxter and Slattery have decided to sell up is not clear, although it’s worth noting that Baxter stood down from the position of chief technology officer in June 2008 and is now working at Google in California as a technical program manager.

Regardless of the reasons, the pair’s success should provide a valuable lesson to entrepreneurs – big goals are achievable.