Envato co-founder Collis Ta’eed chats with Antonia Ruffell on his formative childhood and family influences, the importance of bringing humility to your giving, especially when supporting First Nations communities, and that there’s more than one way to be a philanthropist.
You can also watch this episode as a vodcast.
Antonia: This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation StartGiving acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the hundreds of First Nations across this richly diverse continent. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, including to those listening.
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Hello and welcome to the StartGiving Podcast. I’m Antonia Ruffell, the CEO of StartGiving, and your host for this episode. StartGiving is inspiring a new culture of giving in the Australian startup sector. Our goal is to help successful tech founders and executives to start or scale their giving. We want giving amongst successful entrepreneurs to be the expectation and the norm.
In our podcast series, we’ve spoken to leaders in the innovation and philanthropy space like Bill Gates, Peter Singer, and Cliff Obrecht to help inspire this new community of Australian givers.
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My guest today is Collis Ta’eed, co-founder of Envato. Collis with his wife, Cyan and their friend Jun Rung, co-founded Envato in 2006.
Envato helps designers and coders to buy and sell creative assets like graphic templates and images. As one of Australia’s most successful, bootstrapped private companies, Envato delivered over 1.3 billion US dollars in revenue to its authors. Collis officially stepped back from his CEO role in 2020. With Cyan and their family, they moved to Darwin to experience a different kind of life and pursue their philanthropic interests, including a focus on supporting First Nations communities and social enterprises.
Last year, Collis and Cyan, who owned 68% of Envato, exited their business in a $375 million acquisition by Shutterstock.
Now back in Sydney, Collis joins me to discuss the early influences in his life, the Envato success story and their giving journey.
Let’s start at the very beginning. Perhaps you could tell me a little bit about what life was like growing up in your family and how that’s perhaps shaped the adult that you are today.
Collis: Well, I grew up in Papua New Guinea. That’s probably the first place to start. I moved there when I was three years old. My mom’s actually from England, from Liverpool. My dad is from Iran. Though we’d grown up in lots of different places, I was raised in Papua New Guinea, and I think that probably has given me quite a distinct perspective.
One of the things that happened in PNG is I think I just had a real opportunity to see my parents living out their values and like my dad worked in IT, my mom was a language translator because she could speak Hiri Motu and they would often talk about the fact that we were there to serve the country, to serve Papua New Guineans and that this was an important part of life and the reason we were there, and this would take many shapes and forms through life.
But certainly, with my dad, because he worked in this tech company, basically, he would talk a lot about how important it was for Papua New Guinean people to be running Papua New Guinean things. And so, it would be like, oh, well, you know, we have to build capacity and train people, and local people should do local jobs. And that was a big part of my upbringing, seeing this kind of, I guess, ethos of empowerment and service.
And I guess the other big factor in my upbringing was that I was raised as Baháʼí . So probably for anybody, these kinds of beliefs really shape how you see the world. But in the case of growing up in Papua New Guinea, it also meant that we interacted lots with the Papua New Guinean Baháʼí community.
It’s a very hot country, so a lot of my defining memories of childhood are being very hot and sweaty and bored out of my mind, because everything had to be done in multiple languages and things taking forever. But then also just that was what was needed. And I guess as an adult, I can now see that. It’s important, you know, I have two boys, raising them, seeing how important it is for us to realise that some things just need time. Some things have to take a while to do. You can’t just do things always in an efficient way necessarily.
And I saw a lot of different ways of being in the world. Sometimes I think, in a place like Australia, if you imagine like a spectrum of all the ways there are to be in the world we imagine we are in the middle, like we are the norm somehow. That’s, I think, natural, right? Because everybody is the main character in the movie of their life. But the reality of things is that we are just one way of doing things. One way of society running and going out to very remote places in PNG, definitely informs you that societies can work in very different ways.
And seeing my parents operating in those places and I guess how much respect, care and love they would show to people who might come from very different circumstances was very informative.
Antonia: And we might come on in a moment to sort of think about how that influences your philanthropy and your approach in communities now.
But before that, let’s sort of go back to Envato a bit, because looking at the Envato story, it appears that just making money wasn’t the primary motivation for you and Cyan. Could you expand on that a little bit and tell us what that looked like?
Collis: When I think about Envato, there’s two things that come back to me, and one is that it was a little bit of an accident.
At that time, I think I was 25 and Cyan was like 23 when we started the company, and it was not a plan. It was just like we did some things and then some other things happened, and then we were working really hard and then it started to grow. And so, I suppose that’s worth saying out loud because it was not like, let’s do this thing so that we can generate lots of wealth, or let’s like do this thing so that we can impact lots of people.
I think we were just doing some stuff, and it just happened to take off, and so that’s one thing that always sticks with me. And the other is that as it grew, I felt a great sense of responsibility all the time. Like, you know, with lots of staff or lots of people using our platforms I often found myself thinking that we are in this situation where we therefore had a lot of responsibility to the team, but also to the platform and the people who are using the platform.
Our products, without going into much detail, is a platform where people around the world use their creative talents and earn a living and they also learn skills and what have you. And I think that felt sometimes almost a bit heavy as a responsibility of like, oh, okay, well, you know, the stuff we do is going to make all this impact or decisions, we’ll have ramifications to all these people.
To be clear, we weren’t running a hospital or doing anything like really nobody’s life was in jeopardy, but it did feel still, like a lot of responsibility. And so yeah, I’d say it was baked in, in the sense that I think we very quickly realised that we should articulate and think about the values that we thought were important and make sure that we tried to live up to them.
Antonia: And then along the way, you made the decision to establish the Bright Moon Trust as well and formalise your giving. Can you tell a bit about that.
Collis: Yeah, so I, not to make this too much about my parents, but my mom used to always say to me like, if there’s something you plan to do like charity, then if you don’t do it now, you probably won’t ever do it.
And what she meant by that was you can start small; you can just do a little bit. You don’t have to like put something off until, you know, some set of criteria or conditions have been met. Like, oh yes, I’m going to do charity, but only after I have sold the company, for example. Or I will do some like philanthropy, but only after achieving a certain level of something.
Her philosophy was very much, you should begin now, and you should like live this all the time. And so, I think that kind of informed, I guess, our perspective. And then along the way we had an advisor who suggested we create a private ancillary fund as a way to sort of warehouse funds and then have more structured approach to giving.
And it was both good advice, but also, he told us to, again, start small. He was like, just get something going and then figure out what is going to fit for you. And I think that was really helpful. Like, you know, there’s, there’s no wrong first step. Sometimes the path only opens when you go to step, you take your first step and then you start to see, oh, maybe I should take that next step.
But without that first bit of forward momentum, it’s very hard to imagine, or you can overthink things.
Antonia: That’s part of the message that we try and share at StartGiving is the important thing is just to get started and see how it develops.
And then you move to Darwin in 2020. So that was quite a big step for you and the family.
I’d be interested to know what drew you there. And I think at some stage, I don’t know whether it was from the beginning, but your focus with your philanthropy certainly shifted towards focusing more on First Nations communities. Could you perhaps tell a bit about that experience and what drew you there and how it impacted your giving?
Collis: We’d lived in Melbourne at the time for quite a while, and raising two boys there and things had changed for work, and we had a bit more flexibility and we wanted to go somewhere new.
And we kind of thought about different places we could move to in Australia, and we picked Darwin for a bunch of reasons. One of them was that it’s a small city, so it is a city. It’s a capital city, so it has a little bit of capital city infrastructure, but it is still pretty small. There’s maybe 130,000 people.
And in a small place, I think you can better live in a cross section of society. I think in a big city you can easily end up in a bubble and maybe you don’t necessarily always see what else is happening out there. And especially with two boys at times we would worry that maybe they thought, you know, East Melbourne was like the whole world. East Melbourne is cool, but it’s not the whole world.
There’s definitely more world out there. And so, in Darwin, you couldn’t escape the fact that you were living in a place where different people had different life circumstances.
I think for Cyan and I, at least for the foreseeable future, we’re probably going to be wealthy people wherever we are. But in a place like Darwin, you can’t escape that not everybody is wealthy.
And I think if you have a bit more of a bubble sort of idea about it, the issue is maybe you don’t see the responsibility that comes with that wealth. I can remember before getting on the airplane as we were leaving Melbourne, we went to the airport and I needed a book to read on the plane and I was like, oh, well I guess we’re going to this place where there’s lots of Aboriginal people, I should buy a book by an Aboriginal person. And so, I bought the autobiography of Archie Roach, who is the singer and activist, and who was also a member of the Stolen Generation.
I really feel that autobiographies are just a really amazing way to see through somebody else’s eyes and build empathy for another person’s life. Sometimes otherwise it’s a bit hard to imagine what exactly a person’s circumstances are to something like the Stolen Generation. It’s hard to really figure out like what does, like you can sort of academically realise, well, that doesn’t sound too good.
But reading Archie Roach’s autobiography, I think really helped me to understand the raw feeling of what that might’ve been like, at least in a narrow way.
It was just such a moving book, and I think really helped me to internalise maybe some of the unfairness that has taken place in Australia and in different levels and different ways still takes place in the country. And then when we arrived in The Territory, there’s lots of news stories about youth and detention and young people being put in prison.
At the time, my oldest son was 10 and I realised, oh, he can go to prison. At which it’s a very confronting realisation and a very confronting thing to think about. And it was also confronting that when you looked at the statistics, it was 99% of everybody in the prison was Aboriginal. And that also was just very like two major wrongs.
And so early on we thought, oh well, somewhat naively, we should do something in this space and thinking, you know, there’s gotta be things that haven’t been done. And I think there are things that haven’t been done, but I say naive because maybe we underestimated just what a substantive thing that was gonna set us out onto.
But as I say, this is like that first step that sets us off on some journey.
Antonia: But I think a lot of people are sometimes scared about how to approach First Nations philanthropy and how to sort of meaningfully support the community. How did you go about that? Was that a learning journey in itself?
Collis: It was. I mean, we didn’t know much, so exactly as you say, it was a slightly intimidating thing to decide to spend time on. Being in Darwin helped, and this is another moment where actually deciding to go to a place kind of helped set us out on that path. The first interaction we really had in the space was that Cyan, my wife, decided to talk to the teacher of my second grader at the time whose sister knew somebody, and like this is also if you live in Darwin, you’ll realise this is like how things work there.
It’s like, you know someone who knows someone whose cousin was doing that thing. And so next thing we know, we were connected to two people who had been trying to create something in this kind of youth mentoring or youth space. One was Serena Dalton, who’s in Palmerston, and the other Jye Cardona in sort of Darwin proper.
And both of them First Nations people who had been putting their energies towards doing something for their young people already. But who had no funding and no real support. So that was just putting in their spare time, if you like, and trying to get something off the ground. It was helpful for us because I think we quickly realised that there was an opportunity to sort of support people at that early stage, coming from a tech background, being used to the idea of like angel investment way, everybody needs someone to back them.
It’s important to go into those relationships with a bit of a risk aware mindset that you’re like, it’s okay. Not everything’s gonna work out, but it’s still worth trying. And if we try 10 things, maybe a couple will be really flourishing. So, we brought that mindset, and we didn’t really know it at the time, but kind of laid, I suppose, the blueprint of what we still do today, which is kind of multi-year funding, really early stage for people who wanna do something in their own community.
But I think to answer your broader question, it is maybe something that we tried to approach with some caution. Maybe more than caution, actually. I think we tried to approach it with a very humble mindset. I think complex situations require humility. It’s really easy to kind of go in being like, oh, I’ve been successful in something, therefore I should know what to do in something else.
But you know, I’m also terrible at handy work around the house, like my success in one area has nothing to do with being able to fix things in my house. So why should I have anything to do with supporting like something in a completely different space. And so, I think going in humble I think has been helpful.
And that’s certainly for First Nations related things. That’s what I would always advocate for people to be.
Antonia: And you talked, before, I think about two approaches to social change being learning and capacity building. Can you expand a bit more on, on what that means?
Collis: Well, when we talk to people, one of the things we sometimes tell them is like, imagine you had a task you needed to do.
So, let’s say you’re leaving this podcast, you’re gonna go home and you wanna make a chocolate cake. You would go on the internet if you didn’t already know a chocolate cake recipe. There’s lots of preset recipes that you can follow, and as long as you pretty much do those steps, you’re gonna get pretty much that result.
And if you’re not too sure, someone else can come and do it for you. That’s like one type of thing. Now imagine if you will, a different type of thing that you might be trying to achieve, like working on your mental health. So back when I was at Envato, I was always anxious and I spent a lot of time thinking, oh, how do I get less anxious?
And that’s also a place where I could go on the internet and find all these like solutions or things you could do, but the way that they would apply to me was very specific and unique to my circumstances, my upbringing, my background, my way of being, my job, my etc etc. And so, the approach wouldn’t be just follow these steps.
Instead, I would take a bunch of knowledge and then I would try it out. I would go, okay like the first thing I did with anxiety was I started tracking it and then seeing like what things would change, you know, if I did this thing slept better, or if I tried to have less stress or more holidays or whatever.
And over time I had a vision, which in my case was like be less anxious and I would try all these different experiments and I was on a kind of a learning journey to learn how to be in the world so that I could be more mentally healthy.
And so, what I ask people oftentimes at the outset of our relationships with Bright Moon Trust is, do you think supporting your community is more like baking a cake or more like working on your mental health?
And the answer is, obviously, it’s way more complex. You, it’s not gonna be some pre-made solution and even when we think we know the right path, we don’t really know it until we actually do stuff. And so, we always advocate that you come in with a sort of a humble learning mindset that you go, okay, well there’s all this knowledge out there, including our own opinions and our own beliefs and the things we’ve learnt in the past, and we’re gonna try to use them.
Early-stage people in their local grassroots communities, let’s say they say, oh, I’m going to focus on creating jobs.
And so, we say, great, okay, well here’s some funding, and it’s tied to the creation of some number of jobs. This really impacts their activities in the sense that they are tied to whatever that metric was at the beginning.
They might come up with some initiative, they’re gonna do a program, and then if that doesn’t work very well. It’s easy to keep doing it because you’re like, oh, well my funding is tied to doing this program, so I guess I’ll just keep doing it, even though I might think there’s a better way now. So, for us, we try to come in and say, let’s agree on what your vision is.
And we never tell people obviously what their vision is. It’s for them to say, in our community, this is how we see progress. And that progress doesn’t need to be material. It could be spiritual, it could be communal, environmental, social, like in fact, we advocate that progress should be seen as sort of multifaceted, but they should have a vision of what they want to see change in their community.
And then we ask them for what their current idea of how to proceed is, and some questions that they’d kinda learn about. And we tie our funding to learning and we kind of say, well, let’s all agree it’s about that vision, not about your current idea or your current program. If that program doesn’t work, let’s throw it out.
So that to me is like this kind of like learning mindset.
Antonia: Clearly, you’re backing some inspirational visionary people. Sounds like it’s a much more relationship-based approach, or what is a typical partnership? If there is a typical partnership, what does it sort of look like?
Collis: Yeah, it is very much relationship based, and I suppose one of the benefits of starting small is that we’ve had all this time to build relationships in, you know, those first two people then they introduced us to more people, and today we support maybe 25 or so different initiatives.
A typical one is gonna be starting at this kind of early-stage grassroots, we look for people who have a deep connection into their community, ideally lived experience in that community who are thinking about what that community needs. But more than that, actually interacting with the community. So, what we’re looking for is the community’s voice in what it wants in its definition of progress.
One of the other approaches we try to support people with is this kind of capacity building mindset and taking the approach in their early-stage initiatives to build capacity in those around them.
Antonia: What would capacity look like?
Collis: I mean, I think one of the things that people sometimes do is that they will think of capacity as like skills based.
So, we kind of imagine like we have to develop skills and skills is an important aspect of it, but that is like a very narrow conception of capacity. For me, capacity is much more about kind of like the whole picture of a person. Their attitude, their vision for themselves, their vision for society, maybe their skills and knowledge, habits and all of these things combined into a person being empowered to take their life or their community’s life forward.
So, if I were to ask you, Antonia, like what has led you to be here in this position, you’re not gonna say, well, I happen to have the skills to run an organisation and to run a podcast.
You’re like, that’s one aspect of why you’re here, but it’s also your vision for how people should be in the world that’s led you here. It’s your ideas about what responsibility means, and all of these things have combined. So capacity building is about recognising that every person in a community has capacity as a start.
So capacity is not something some people have and others should just benefit from. Every person has inherent capacity and we need to support their development so that they are empowered and see themselves in their future. They see their ability to direct their life and to impact the world.
Antonia: If you were talking to someone else who was just getting started with their giving or setting up a foundation, are there just one or two sort of short bits of advice that you might give to them when they’re setting out?
Collis: I mean, for me, it’s definitely gonna come down to getting started, so taking some action, some small steps, not being too overwhelmed, not seeing philanthropy as something that can only be done one way. So, realising there’s actually quite a lot of flexibility and you can come at it in lots of different ways and you have to work out kinda what fits you.
You know, I know somebody who is super passionate about documentary. You see the impact. I literally get to see the impact. I know somebody else who’s really passionate about supporting homeless people and sex workers, and he’s very strategic about that. I know a lady who’s really into fundraising events. She’s super social, and so she runs fundraising events and loves the Starlight Foundation. She’s like, I just love that, and you know, that’s where I wanna spend my energy and efforts, and also maybe where I’m uniquely placed to be of use.
I think for me, it is about ultimately figuring out how we can be of use or of service. And that means reflecting a lot on like what we are uniquely able to bring to the table beyond just financial resources. So, you know, what is a space that we have time for or energy for, or inspiration for? And then just jumping in and you know, being humble, not thinking we have all the answers.
Antonia: What comes next for Bright Moon Trust and for your philanthropy?
Collis: We’re at a stage now where it’s not just me anymore, so I’ve managed to find two other people to come and be development partners. And so having a little team has been nice and they’re much more talented than me and know a lot more. And so, yeah, I think it’s been also just very helpful for me to have people to learn from.
Antonia: Congratulations on everything that you’ve achieved so far. It’s fantastic hearing about your approach and thank you for sharing it on the podcast today.
Collis: Thanks for having me.
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Antonia: This podcast was written by Catherine Feeney and me, Antonia Ruffell and produced by Audiocraft. Thank you to our guest today, Collis Ta’eed. Visit StartGiving.com for today’s episode’s, show notes, and learn more about what we do. You can subscribe to the StartGiving Podcast on your favourite streaming service or watch this conversation as a vodcast on YouTube.
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