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James Goodnight
Born
Cary, North Carolina, from 1976. Goodnight and his co-founders built SAS beside North Carolina State University, whose statisticians and agricultural researchers were its first users and recruits. Low costs, a campus-style headquarters and benefits such as on-site childcare kept staff turnover unusually low, which mattered more than proximity to investors because SAS never took outside money. It helped make the Research Triangle a technology region.
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Hermann Hauser
Born
Cambridge, England, from 1978. Hauser and Chris Curry founded Acorn when Cambridge had a university but little technology industry, drawing on engineers such as Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber from the university. Winning the BBC Micro contract gave Acorn a national market through schools, and its ARM spin-off in 1990 stayed in Cambridge. He later backed many local start-ups through Amadeus Capital, helping create what became known as Silicon Fen.
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Mike Lazaridis
Born
Waterloo, Ontario, from 1984. Lazaridis co-founded Research In Motion with Douglas Fregin while studying engineering at the University of Waterloo, whose co-op programme supplied a steady stream of trained students. RIM's BlackBerry, with secure push email and a thumb keyboard, became the business phone of the 2000s; Jim Balsillie ran the commercial side. The company was slow to respond to the iPhone, and its decline hit the town hard.
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Mark Shuttleworth
Born
Cape Town, from 1995. Shuttleworth founded Thawte in his parents' garage while a student at the University of Cape Town, issuing the digital certificates that secure web connections. South Africa's position outside American export controls on strong encryption let Thawte sell to customers worldwide, and it became one of the largest certificate authorities before VeriSign bought it in 1999. He used the proceeds to fund Ubuntu.
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Jaan Tallinn
Born
Tallinn, Estonia, from the early 2000s. Tallinn, with Ahti Heinla and Priit Kasesalu, was one of the Estonian engineers who wrote the peer-to-peer software behind Kazaa and then Skype for Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Estonia offered skilled, inexpensive programmers and a government keen on digital services. Skype's sale to eBay in 2005 seeded a generation of Estonian start-ups, including Wise, founded by early Skype employee Taavet Hinrikus.
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Mike Cannon-Brookes
Born
Sydney, from 2002. Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar started Atlassian straight out of the University of New South Wales and sold its software online to teams worldwide, so they never needed a sales office in California to grow. Being far from Silicon Valley kept costs and staff churn lower, though they eventually moved the company's legal home to the United States. Atlassian became Australia's best-known technology success.
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Tobias Lütke
Ottawa, from 2004. Lütke, who moved from Germany to Canada, started Shopify in Ottawa with Scott Lake and Daniel Weinand after building an online snowboard shop. Ottawa's government and telecoms engineers, a base of Nortel veterans and lower salaries helped Shopify hire and keep developers, and it grew into Canada's most valuable technology company. It later went remote-first, partly abandoning the idea of a headquarters city.
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Rod Drury
Wellington, New Zealand, from 2006. Drury built Xero in a small market where he could test cloud accounting with local accountants and banks, then expand to Australia and Britain with a proven product. Listing early on the New Zealand stock exchange gave access to capital without moving. Its growth turned Wellington into a software employer of note, while its later move of the main listing to Australia showed the limits of a small home market.
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Juliana Rotich
Nairobi, from 2008. Rotich co-founded Ushahidi, open-source crisis-mapping software written by Kenyan developers, and then BRCK, a rugged router designed and partly built in Nairobi for patchy power and networks. Being in Nairobi meant designing for the conditions their customers actually faced, and the iHub community space gave them a pool of developers. Raising hardware capital locally remained hard.
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Markus Persson
Born
Stockholm, from 2009. Persson wrote the first version of Minecraft alone in his spare time and sold it directly to players online while it was still unfinished, so he needed no publisher or investors. Revenue from those early sales funded Mojang, founded with Jakob Porsér and Carl Manneh, and Sweden's strong game development scene supplied staff. Microsoft bought Mojang for $2.5 billion in 2014; his later public comments led Microsoft to distance itself from him.
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Melanie Perkins
Perth and Sydney, from 2013. Perkins and Cliff Obrecht first tested their design idea with Fusion Books, a school yearbook business run from Perth, one of the world's most isolated big cities, before co-founding Canva with Cameron Adams. Investors in Silicon Valley turned them down many times, but staying in Australia let them hire from a less contested talent pool and build a large Sydney campus. Canva became one of the world's most valuable private software companies.
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Sridhar Vembu
Rural Tamil Nadu, from 2019. Vembu, co-founder of Zoho, moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to the village of Mathalamparai near Tenkasi and built rural offices where Zoho trains local school leavers as programmers through its own Zoho Schools. Lower costs and loyal staff support a bootstrapped company with no outside investors. It is a deliberate bet that software can be made far from any hub, though Zoho's main operations remain in Chennai.
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