NEW ZEALAND START-UPS HAVE TO THINK BIG

The first one hundred days as SilverStripe’s CEO are over for 29-year-old kiwi Sam Minnée. It is time for the founder, and now leader, of the Wellington based software company to look back on the early days and check in to the future with his company.

“New Zealand start-ups still think small when it comes to new business ideas. Just because people live on an island in the Southern Hemisphere they often think that they can only affect that much. But that’s wrong. The World Wide Web turned the world into a global market and anybody can reach anything and anyone pretty easily”, says Minnée.

When Minnée founded the company in the year 2000, with his friends Tim Copeland and Sigurd Magnusson, Minnée was only 17-years-old. It was the time of the dot-com bubble, the perfect time to start something big. Although they had no capital, these graduates were armed with a good idea and motivation to follow it through. They had a couple of clients who needed a website, two computers and access to high speed Internet. The idea to build a cutting edge content management system to support websites was born.

Eleven years later and with 40 staff, offices in Wellington, Auckland and Melbourne, SilverStripe is building websites and web applications for clients like Air New Zealand, AA and Plunket. When SilverStripe was the website platform of choice for the US Democratic National Convention, that supported Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, SilverStripe was established as a key international player.

Minnée’s advice for people starting a business in New Zealand today is easy. “Think big. Don’t be afraid to get offshore customers from an early stage. Find a niche and get profitable early. You might find people to help you out with experience and advice, but venture capital is much more difficult to get in New Zealand than overseas if you are not yet profitable.”

SilverStripe CMS is an open source web content management system used by government organisations, businesses and non-profit organisations around the world. The CMS is an easy to customise power tool for professional web developers and easy to use for web content authors. With over 420,000 downloads and more than 5,500 active members in the online community the CMS is widely known and supported.

The CMS is written in PHP and can be used within a Linux, Windows or Apple environment. SilverStripe was the first Open Source CMS to be certified by Microsoft, in May 2010.

Tim Copeland, Sam Minnée and Sigurd Magnusson founded SilverStripe Ltd in 2000 in Wellington, New Zealand. In 2006 SilverStripe decided to release the CMS under the open source BSD license. The decision to do so was based on the idea that open source simply produces better software through the support and input of the community.

Code, content and design are separated from each other within the CMS, which makes teamwork more productive. Along with the CMS, clients can also use the site monitoring tool Dawn, which was developed by SilverStripe Ltd, in order to monitor site performance. This is especially important for companies in which website downtime would result in major revenue loss.

SilverStripe Ltd offers highly customised web solutions based on the SilverStripe CMS and framework, with customers including local clients like Air New Zealand, AA, Metlink and a number of regional, district and city councils. SilverStripe has also gained traction overseas and was the platform of choice to run the US Democratic National Convention website that supported Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Today, SilverStripe has about 40 staff in its Wellington, Auckland and Melbourne offices, as well as partners throughout the world.

For more information:

www.silverstripe.com and www.silverstripe.org

SilverStripe Ltd
Kerstin Schuman
Product Marketing Manager
Symes De Silva House L5
97-99 Courtenay Place
PO Box 11-804
Wellington, New Zealand
t: +64 (0)4 978 7330
e: kerstin@silverstripe.com
skype: kerstin.silverstripe

This release was published on openPR.