Shame I couldn't upload the photo - she is a glamour! Joanna...

Shame I couldn't upload the photo - she is a glamour!

Joanna Weidenmiller’s 1-Page licence to thrill

• Jake Mitchell
• The Australian
• December 14, 2015 12:00AM
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• Jake Mitchell

Media reporter
Sydney
Jake has been a journalist since 2012 when he started at The Australian Financial Review. He covered media and marketing, and was most recently joint Street Talk editor at the paper. Jake joined The Australian in 2015 to cover the media and marketing round.
Joanna Weidenmiller; CEO of 1-Page. Picture: James Croucher
Meet Joanna Weidenmiller.
She’s a former FBI agent turned entrepreneur, who sold her first company at age 24 and more recently partnered with the Chinese government on a global media business.
Seriously. Weidenmiller, now 33, is better known in Australia as the founding chief executive of online recruiter 1-Page, which was the first Silicon Valley-based company to list on the ASX.
Since 1-Page’s float in October 2014, the company has enjoyed a meteoric rise, with its share price surging from 20c to $2.49. It has a market value of $382 million, although this has dropped from $726m in September amid investor concerns about the company’s revenue growth.
1-Page’s success has led the way for a flurry of other US tech companies to list on the ASX. Home relocation group Updater listed on the local bourse last week and is trading 45 per cent above its issue price.
Generally, these companies have opted for an initial public offering to avoid the controlling nature of venture capital investment, but are too small to list in the US. “We definitely have a goal of listing in New York at the right time,” Weidenmiller says.
“The ASX listing allowed me to acquire a company that I wanted to buy and given us a really great shareholder base, while not giving up control to venture capital.”
1-Page launched its Source recruiting product in July. It gives clients access to more than 1 billion professional profiles, which 1-Page curates for specific role requirements. The basis of the database was formed in November last year when the company bought BranchOut, a professional networking service built within social media platform Facebook.
1-Page has since signed up several Fortune 100 and 200 companies to the platform, including coffee giant Starbucks last month.
It’s been a remarkable and precipitous ride for Weidenmiller, and one that appears to be only just getting started.
But she faces some big challenges, as investors lose patience with the company’s revenue growth. Fortunately for 1-Page, Weidenmiller’s resume suggests she is resilient and not afraid to take risks. She sums herself up Twitter with the following blurb: “When other girls wanted to be a ballerina, I wanted to be a secret agent.”
It was allure of travel, among other things, that attracted her to the FBI job, which she began while studying a foreign affairs degree at the University of Virginia. “We travelled a lot when I was a kid and I always loved it,” she says. “And I wanted to be a hero. To save the world and have a gun, tights pants and a cool car — that all sounded pretty fun.”
Weidenmiller was stationed at Quantico, Virginia, which is home to the FBI Academy.
As part of the FBI’s international training unit, she travelled regularly to the Middle East and Africa. While she enjoyed the role, Weidenmiller soon discovered the FBI was more about bureaucracy than “cool cars” and “tight pants”. “Getting ahead was based on how long you’ve been there rather than how successful you are,” she says. “I’m heavily motivated by merit.”
So she left in 2005 and set about launching sales and marketing outsourcing firm Performance Advertising. “I found something that I saw an opportunity in and I took a shot.”
In 2007, she sold Performance Advertising and embarked on another ruthless career move.
She packed up, moved to China and eventually joined fashion social media and marketing platform 360 Fashion Network, founded by American-born model and blogger Anina Trepte. “I learned a lot about doing business in China,” she says.
Weidenmiller’s travel routine didn’t wane after she left the FBI. By 2012, she was back in the US and ready to embark on the biggest move of her career.
In 2002, Weidenmiller’s father Patrick G. Riley published the best-selling self-help book The One-Page Proposal. A decade later, father and daughter teamed up to create 1-Page, which was based on the book’s founding principles.
Cadence Capital founder and portfolio manager Karl Siegling bought into the 1-Page float but his fund has since divested its holdings. “It was a master stroke by Joanna to raise money in an Australian listing rather than doing a further round of funding in the USA among the venture capital industry,” Siegling says. “The timing was extremely good and there is a shortage of listed opportunities in the sector on the ASX.”
Siegling says the company struggled to maintain its $700m-plus valuation because it is an early-stage conceptual business with low revenues.
“Revenue is very low at the moment and costs are much higher so that company is cashflow negative and pilot studies and trials will not lead to a cash flow positive business for some time,” he says.
1-Page’s revenue for the six months ended July this year was just $158,900, although this was up by more than 70 per cent on the prior corresponding period.
But Weidenmiller says the best indicator of success for early-stage software as a service (SaaS) companies is signing contracts with new clients that result in long-term, recurring revenue.
“Our strategy of entering into contracts with large enterprise clients and expanding those relationships will ensure that we are able to quickly ramp our revenues over time,” she says.