Anthony Moorhouse, a co-Founder of EarthTech Ventures, started his career in the Special Forces of the Australian Army as a counter-terrorism commando. A frequent traveler, Anthony found himself at an airport and picked up a book by Richard Branson that talked about entrepreneurship…a word with which Anthony was unfamiliar at the time.
Anthony became obsessed with the idea that you could literally build something from scratch, from a blank sheet of paper. He realized that a ‘blank sheet of paper’ was literally the most exciting thing in the world for him. This was literally the beginning of his entrepreneurial journey. The idea that anyone, from anywhere from any background can have an idea and turn that idea into reality.
This obsession pushed Anthony to come up with at least 20 business concepts, only one of which made sense for him to execute based on his military background. Dynamiq, a company focused on crisis management, risk management, and international emergency evacuations, was born out of this process.
Twelve years later, Dynamiq was sold to a large insurance company and Anthony moved to Colorado to grow its US business. Ending up in Boulder, Colorado, Anthony became more deeply involved in the startup scene. He also built a social enterprise, did some lecturing, and decided after a time that with two small children, it was time to head back to Australia.
On the way home, he decided to take his children to a place that he and his then-new wife had visited 18 years earlier, the Great Barrier Reef. While the reef was still amazing, something drastic had changed and this was a ‘gut punch’, epiphany moment for Anthony. He wondered, ‘With the resources and skills that I have if I am not making the world a better place for my kids, what will they think of me on my death bed?’Two or three months later he met his co-Founder Brian Keayes and the two started building out the infrastructure and vision for EarthTech Ventures. The core philosophy is that we are in a global crisis around sustainability and that with the proper use of technology, entrepreneurs can have exponential impact attacking the United Nations’ 17 sustainability goals.
Their most ambitious (with more to come, for sure) accomplishment to date has been the EarthTech Challenge, a global competition that inspired 849 teams and almost 1,500 entrepreneurs from over 70 countries “to make discoveries, create the technologies and build the companies” to solve the world’s biggest environmental and social issues.
EP 17 - Anthony Moorhouse - co-Founder EarthTech Ventures - Creating Pathways to Scale Up Those Ideas
