Building a Billion Dollar Business in WA | Fireside Chat with Michael Malone
Thu, 02 July
|Venture UWA
From a garage in Padbury to a $1.56 billion sale. Michael Malone built iiNet from nothing into Australia's second-largest ISP over more than twenty years as CEO. Join us as Charlie Gunningham sits down with Michael to hear the real story behind one of WA's greatest business journeys.
Time & Location
02 July 2026, 8:00 am – 10:00 am
Venture UWA, 35 Stirling Hwy, Crawley WA 6009, Australia
Guests
About the event
There are very few people in Western Australia who have built a business from nothing and taken it to a billion dollars. Michael Malone is one of them.
Michael co-founded iiNet in 1993 from his parents' garage in Padbury because he didn't want to lose his internet connection. In those early years he was sleeping in that garage, answering customer calls through the night, figuring it out as he went. What started as a scrappy workaround became Australia's second largest listed internet service provider, with over one million customers, 2,000 staff, annual revenues exceeding $1 billion, and a sale price of $1.56 billion when TPG Telecom acquired the business in 2015.
Getting there wasn't straightforward. Over more than two decades as CEO, Michael led over 50 acquisitions including iHug, OzEmail, and Westnet, built a customer culture so strong it became a competitive advantage, and fought and won a landmark copyright…