Today's guest is  David Jones, founder of Threatmetrix the Unicorn Australian company that many of you probably have never heard of, that very quietly sold last year to UK based Relx for $850 million USD. 

David is an old friend of the Main Sequence Ventures team and we wanted to get him on the podcast to talk about the lessons he learned during the 14 years it took to get to an exit. 

For the listeners who haven’t heard of Threatmetrix, outline what it did, how big it grew and what it sold for.

100 million transactions per day across 35,000 websites from 5,000 customers, housing one of the largest repositories of online digital identities in the world, encompassing 1.4 billion unique online identities from 4.5 billion devices in 185 countries.

Threatmetrix was not your first rodeo. What was your path into launching Threatmetrix? 

Tell us how you got started? Did you know you wanted to be an entrepreneur from school age? 

Tell us about raising capital and managing that process over changes in the business, is there any lessons for the startups listening? 

After many years you graduated as the CEO of Threatmetrix and became a board member, stopped working there day to day and started a few other businesses? 

You seem to have emerged from it all still friends with everyone and with an amazing exit. This is often not what happens when a founder steps down as CEO. Tell us about that transition and how you managed it. 

The startup space has changed a lot in 15 years, what do you think about the ecosystem now and what are today's challenges? 

I believe you were still a significant shareholder in Threatmetrix when it sold, so presumably, you don’t have to worry about working for a living? 

Yet you still seem to be super active in your new startups + angel investing. No temptation to call in Rich, tour the world? What is David Jones working on now? 

How have you found the challenge of starting again? 

You have graduated to becoming an investor in your own right, given your background what do you look for in an investment? 

What are the common mistakes you see other founders and investors making? 

What do you strongly or controversially disagree about with your fellow startup founders and investors?