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by Allan Hoffman
[ More Job Q&As ]
Australian Paul Higgins, 30, is the founder and chief strategic officer of Line56, a B2B e-commerce media firm in Los Angeles. He first moved to the US to attend Columbia Business School, and later returned to his native country to become a consultant with Bain & Company, an Internet strategy consulting firm. And while he now lives in California (where Line56 is based), his life and work still have a particularly international flavor -- Line56 has nine employees from Australia and four Great Britain (out of a total of 45).
Monster.com: How did Line56 get started?
Paul Higgins: One of the founders, Mike Jefferies (the chairman and CEO), is from London, and had a similar play -- not in the B2B e-commerce arena, but in the office products arena. He had a magazine and a company called OPI -- Office Products International -- that became the preeminent magazine and conference company in the global office products industry. it was a very successful model for him. He sold his company, and decided he wanted to do the same thing, but in a more exciting industry -- B2B e-commerce.
Mc: Mike Jefferies is from Great Britain, and both you and Ben MacPherson are from Australia? Why locate the business in Los Angeles?
PH: The reason was primarily because we wanted to attract really good candidates, and we realized it's an incredibly hot market. Everybody is trying to attract good candidates in New York, Silicon Valley and San Francisco, and those places basically offer a quality of life that's very different from the value proposition down here in Los Angeles. For a large part of the population, the Los Angeles lifestyle, especially in the part of Los Angeles in which we're located, is a lot more favorable than the Valley or New York.
Mc: What's the cultural mix among the company's 45 employees?
PH: We have four people from the UK, nine people from Australia, and then we've got a few locals. This is a ridiculously hot market, and to get great talent in this market you end up paying ridiculously, or you end up accepting a lower quality employee. What our company chose to do was to spend an awesome amount of money on paying the legal cost of people getting visas, etc., building that into our recruitment costs and recruiting best-of-breed people from around the world, rather than just narrowing our focus to the local or national area.
Mc: Are there challenges, or rewards, in the cultural diversity of the company?
PH: The challenges are integrating the different types of business cultures, from Australia especially, where a handshake is a handshake, your word is your word, and less legal documentation is required. The greatest challenge we've had, in having a high degree of our senior management from Australia, is actually not understanding when a US vendor or supplier is saying, "Yes, I will deliver by this date," or "Yes, I will provide X, Y, and Z." They don't actually mean that -- they're straight out lying to you to get you to take something. Litigation has stifled American business culture to a degree because people are reluctant to do things, and they may have a cautious approach. We've come over here with the approach that anything is possible, and it's just a matter of how you do it.
Mc: What advice do you have for someone thinking about moving to the US to work in the startup scene?
PH: My only advice would be to do it. The main reason for that is that the environment here is so much more receptive to startups. I think it's driven primarily by the private equity markets, though the recent months may make a mockery of that statement. Two days ago I went to a venture capitalist meeting in Santa Monica. There were a couple of Internet marketing guys speaking and there were 450 people there. You run that sort of thing in Melbourne, and it would take a lot of promotion to get that many people. It's an exciting time. It's not going to last forever. Get over here and sink your teeth into it. You get two things: You get the experience professionally, but you also get the development of living in a different country.