Q+A: The Aussie startup success turning employment on its head
episodePreviously titled “Q+A: Why Employment Hero now wants to become the employer” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
Transcript
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What is Employment Hero and its significance in the startup ecosystem?
Welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A. I'm Sean Aylmer. You may not necessarily know the next company we're going to talk about, but there's a very strong chance you deal with them all the time. Employment Hero is an employee onboarding and facilitation platform running employment workflows from hiring and onboarding to HR and payroll tasks. Its software is used in more than 180 countries across 300,000 businesses. Ben Thompson is the CEO and co-founder of Employment Hero. Ben, welcome to Fear and Greed. Thanks, Sean. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. How'd you end up with Employment Hero? I think you're a lawyer by profession, aren't you? What gave you the idea?
Yeah, that's exactly right. So I started a technology law firm and whilst looking for clients, I sort of stumbled into a lot of small business owners and started helping them with asking them the same question, what's the thing that keeps you awake at night that I can help with? And the consistent answer was employment. I ended up becoming an employment lawyer and spent a decade doing employment law and then realized along the way that there was a huge opportunity. Frankly, I didn't meet and still haven't really met any small and medium-sized business owners that started their business to be an employer. And they don't have the experience or expertise to manage employment confidently. And when small businesses aren't confident about employing people, it's a huge handbrake on the economy and everybody's worse off.
So we started Employment Hero to address that problem, to make employment easier and more valuable for everyone on earth. And we've been chipping away at that ever since. So how long ago was that? That was 14 years ago when I originally started the business here. Okay, so what's your business model? How do you make money? So I guess until very recently, we would be considered a traditional SaaS, software as a service business model. We charge a per user per month fee for businesses that use our platform and each of their employees is a user. So that means we manage recruitment, HR, payroll, benefits for businesses around the world.
Okay, and until recently, so I mean, there are other revenue streams?
Yeah, obviously with AI coming into the mix, we've started to explore different revenue models. So one is we have a recruitment agent, an AI recruitment agent that will interview and shortlist candidates for you and we charge on a token basis there, so a consumption basis. And we've recently launched a service called HeroForce, which is where we are the employer of record. We will do employment for you, utilising our technology, our talent pool of two and a half million candidates and our payroll expertise, etc. We'll be an employer and supply your business with all of the labour and skills that you require on demand. And that is, I think, the direction of travel for the business over the coming years.
Okay, so a sort of outsourced workforce provider. Yeah, I mean, I would put it this way, that in history, there are certain times when it makes more sense because of technology, it makes more sense to centralize and outsource things. So you had the power stations where factories would run their own power source, but then they could plug into a power station and consume electronics or electricity, sorry.
How did Ben Thompson transition from law to co-founding Employment Hero?
And then you had things like I used to run a server room with my own servers, and then I moved that over to AWS. And so I think we're at a point now with AI and the ability to do all parts of employment where employment can actually just be something that you plug into. The right skills in the right quantity is delivered to your business for you to direct. You choose who you hire and how they're managed. But we are the employer of record and we do all of that back office for you. That I think is the big unlock that AI has given us.
Okay. So AI, friend and foe or friend or foe?
I would say I'm a very optimistic person. I feel very optimistic about AI. I believe that it gives us special skills that we never had before and that it enables us to do things that previously seemed impossible.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is Employment Hero and its significance in the startup ecosystem?
0:06–3:40
2
How did Ben Thompson transition from law to co-founding Employment Hero?
3:40–5:55
3
What challenges do small businesses face in employment management?
5:55–9:06
4
What is the business model of Employment Hero?
9:06–10:56
Speakers
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