Employers provide one of the most integral things in society, and they approach it with fear instead of confidence.
Ben Thompson's journey to building a multi-billion-dollar company wasn't about creating a business empire from the start. Instead, it began with a mission to solve a pressing issue that he was hearing about firsthand.
After returning from working abroad, Thompson wasn't sure what his next move would be, so he spent some time at his dad's workplace, Employment Innovations. He started chatting with clients about their businesses, and it didn't take long for a common theme to emerge. "Almost every single conversation circled back to the same thing. The hardest part of what they did wasn't the product or the customers; it was employing people."
Confident employers, at scale
What caught Thompson's attention was that things seemed to be in reverse. "These are the people creating jobs, paying wages and building the things that keep communities and the economy moving, and yet so many of them were genuinely scared to employ someone. Scared of getting an award classification wrong, scared of a compliance breach they didn't even know existed, scared of the paperwork itself."
As a practising employment lawyer, he could solve that fear one client at a time. But the maths didn't work. "One-on-one legal advice could only ever reach so many people. Digitising employment was a far more effective way to deliver that same outcome, confident employers, at real scale rather than one client at a time." That moment was the spark that ignited the idea for Employment Hero, a game-changing platform that launched in 2014 with a clear mission: to make employment simpler and more rewarding for all.
Discipline over distraction
Growth in the early years meant running four companies simultaneously out of one floor above Wynyard Station, including Employment Innovations and Power2Motivate. The turning point, Thompson says, was choosing to stop.
He credits a habit borrowed from Vern Harnish's "Rockefeller Habits", running a strict 90-day execution cadence since around 2005. "Every quarter we ask one question: what's the single thing that moves us closest to our long-term goal? That discipline stops us from diluting our priorities into a watered-down compromise that doesn't actually move anything forward, rather than chasing five good ideas at once and delivering none of them properly."
Going fully remote early was another bet that paid off structurally. It let Employment Hero build a team of more than 1,700 people across the world "without being limited by geography", while keeping culture intact through an annual in-person Global Gathering to align on strategy.
Building the operating system, not the filing cabinet
Thompson's read on legacy HR software is blunt. "Most legacy HR tools are just databases and often quite limited in terms of functionality. Somewhere for an employer to store records but then their payroll, or rostering tools is a separate piece of software and the employee experience is an after thought."
Employment Hero was built differently, as what Thompson calls an operating system for both employers and employees. Through the platform and its EH Work app, employees get direct access to onboarding, earned wage access, financial tools and perks, "not just a portal their employer uses to manage them from the outside."
More recently, that same philosophy has extended into AI. Hero AI now runs as three coordinated agents rather than a single bolted-on chatbot: a Recruitment Agent that has cut time-to-hire by up to 50% across more than 21,000 AI-led interviews, an HR Agent giving employees cited answers grounded in their own company's policy documents, and a Payroll Agent that catches leave, timesheet and expense errors before they hit a pay run. Thompson says the technology has reshaped the business from the inside too, "with a 30x boost in output across our deployments."
Two crises, one lesson
Not every chapter was smooth. In Employment Hero's early years, running multiple startups at once meant some pay periods where making payroll wasn't guaranteed. "There's nothing quite like that pressure to teach you cash flow discipline and how to keep operating and keep your head clear even when things are genuinely on the edge." Every decision, he says, came back to protecting the ability to pay people on time, "even when that meant saying no to things that looked like good opportunities on paper."
COVID tested the business in a different way entirely. "The world was uncertain, employment was uncertain, and none of us knew how many people were going to lose their jobs or what was going to happen to the economy." Employment Hero leaned fully into remote work rather than treating it as a stopgap, and prioritised customers above all else, running webinars and pushing out resources to help employers navigate the chaos. Looking back, Thompson says it proved something lasting: "remote-first wasn't a compromise; it was a real competitive strength once we committed to it properly."
Find the problem everyone has and nobody's solved
Asked what he'd tell someone starting out, Thompson goes straight to opportunity selection. "Go after an area where you can find a unique way to solve a pervasive problem. Employment is something every single business deals with, but almost nobody was solving it well, and that combination, a problem that's everywhere but poorly served, is exactly what makes an opportunity worth building a company around rather than just a nice idea."
From there, he says, codify a mission and BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) early, and use them as a genuine decision filter rather than a poster on the wall. "Every single hero on our team knows that if something doesn't make employment easier or more valuable, we don't do it."
His final piece of advice is about appetite for risk. "Ambition is one of our stated values as a business and we reward demonstrating it. It is very important to reinforce that Ambition and risk taking are crucial ingredients to success and your team are expected to model them." Failure, in his view, isn't something to be managed away. "It's learning from failure and committing to ambitious goals that matter more than anything. People are naturally inclined to save face and avoid failure. Don't let your company culture become one of safe bets, you'll under invest in innovation and always be outcompeted by someone bolder."