With hindsight it seems extraordinary that in 1994 three young men aged in their early 30s were taken seriously when making the following proposition to New Zealand’s institutional investors. 

“We want to raise a fund that you commit to for at least ten years.  We’ll invest that capital into private companies but we can’t tell you which ones because we don’t know yet.  We can’t tell you when we’ll make those investments.  They will be minority shareholdings with no liquidity and limited control rights.  And we can’t tell you when you’ll get your capital back or what the returns might be.  But trust us.” 

To be fair, other than amending the minority shareholding mandate to now include majority shareholding investments, very little in that proposition has changed in the thirty years since Direct Capital was established.  The trust placed in Direct Capital by our investors has always been humbling. 

How on earth did Direct Capital’s founders: Ross George, Mark Hutton and Bill Kermode ever succeed?