About.
William Digby
Growth capital investor and entrepreneur. William is Chief Investment Officer at the Thurin Family Office, headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.
He was previously a Partner at Jameson Capital, a Melbourne based private equity fund; and a Partner DCE Holdings, a South African based private equity fund headquartered in Cape Town.
He is a former Green Beret Commando with the Australian Army Special Forces and Afghanistan War veteran, is an Oxford University MBA graduate, as well as having earned a bachelor's degree in commerce from the University of Melbourne.
He is, in addition, a mentor at Stone & Chalk and the University of Melbourne, a regular speaker at the University of Oxford, and a former member of the investment committee for the Oxford University Venture Capital Fund.
Sixbay Capital is William’s investment holding company and not related to Jameson, or the Thurin Family where he now works.
The Sixbay story:
$50 million.
20+ companies.
31.6% IRR and 5.0x return over 7 years.
I started in 2012 with a simple idea:
We wanted to be on the forefront of a technology leapfrogging revolution that was imutably heading towards developing markets. Looking for the implementation of new technology in areas where the previous version of that technology has not been deployed.
In short, these areas are where I saw the biggest opportunities;
Classifieds: for decades, classified ads were the domain of newspapers, which offered advertisers cheap, small-type notices sorted under specific categories. But the writing was on the wall in developed countries. Print classifieds were no longer a cash cow for print giants. The ‘Rivers of Gold’ were ending for the newspaper industry. Online classifieds properties were to be the biggest beneficiary of this structural shift to digital.
Classified winners usually become quasi-monopolies. It can be a long road, but the prize for dominance is large.
Payments: the growth in economic power within the emerging markets and their ability to leapfrog developments in mature markets was set to aid the creation of a state-of-the-art payments ecosystem in many countries. Nearly 90% of people under 30 reside within the emerging markets and these markets are currently finding themselves at a ‘sweet spot’ where population trends favour the growth of online transactions. Technology has leapfrogged from branch banking to e-banking and now mobile money, which has helped to create pockets of strength even amongst the less financially inclusive countries.