you've had a number of approaches you've been through near bankruptcy you're getting to kind of i'm guessing you actually sold the company in 2007 so um who was it that was the one that really got you to the table to have a conversation about buying the company and when did that happen

so i mean the internet was exciting to everyone and so i had approaches every kind of year um but as I say I had a huge amount of ambition and I suppose in the early days I kind of thought you know I'm going to be Mark Zuckerberg I'm going to be Google I'm going to be you know whatever even though those companies didn't exist but I mean in the early days the internet you have to understand they just seem like there's so much potential and so my goal was to kind of have like the world's biggest internet company you know I wanted to be like the you know there was no limit and every year you know people would approach because the internet was exciting with you know checkbooks and things and i had i had some willpower uh to turn them down and i kind of knew you know i believed in myself but what happened is um you know google google did start and then you know kind of facebook started and in the early days it seemed like the isps were like the kings of the of the kingdom and like we're provided the internet and we're this big thing and and then all of a sudden it seemed like oh you know by the end of what I was doing it was like well telcos are kind of not really making any money and the the actual internet companies you know the you know the googles of the world that just you know they don't have to pay for any internet they just provide you know some service that seems to be kind of where it is and you know like you know myspace came along and then it was this you know hundreds of millions of dollars thing and I was like people are starting companies in silicon valley and they're worth hundreds of millions of dollars and I'm grinding away and I'm not even the biggest internet company in New Zealand and I I kind of you know I had a goal of being the biggest internet company in New Zealand and um in actual fact uh every year that I was in business and I was only in business for nine years I more than doubled the size of the company so we had plus 100% growth every year so we basically went from just me in the first year to me and my cousin to me my cousin Mark and an employee to eight people to 16 32 64 and almost bang on that and when I sold it was you know 128 or so so you know I did that and it was you know based on turnover staff numbers numbers of customers we were you know doubling so the year before I sold we were 30,000 and then we were like 60,000 when we sold so 30,000 customers we're signing up 100 a day you know when I when I sold so I was doing kind of real numbers but you know, um, by the time, you know, telecom, which was the number one, you know, telco in New Zealand now spark got into the game, all of a sudden they're just bang, you know, they're just huge because they've got phone bills and they just, they just rolled out and it's like a steamroller.

And I'm like, well, I'm kind of not making as much money as I thought.

I'm not number one.

I had these dreams and I'm, I guess I started getting beaten down.

And then, um, Actually, one of the real reasons I probably sold, and I wish that I'd held on for another three years, but one of the real reasons that I sold was I went to Thailand in 2004.

And you might remember there was a sort of Boxing Day Indian Ocean tsunami.

So what does a 29 year old do when he gets 20 million bucks in cash?