Piers Grove: The Accidental Entrepreneur Shaping Australia’s Future

By Daniel Simons

 

Piers Grove’s passion for taking projects from zero to one is mirrored by his desire to have a positive impact on the world.

He is a filmmaker, fund manager, board director, ecosystems builder, and media entrepreneur.

If you ask him how he’s managed to notch up a kaleidoscopic CV that boasts more lead roles than Leonardo DiCaprio, he distils it down to one simple phrase, “I like to start things.”

His fingertips are on a vast and eclectic family of purpose-driven businesses that have played a material role in shaping Australia’s culture and economy.

But his horizon-expanding career was birthed by accident.

When Grove was 19, he dropped out of university and established a theatre company in Bondi. Unlike his later-life projects, the venture was not a success.

“I suddenly owed tens of thousands of dollars to my parents and friends,” he explained, “so I had to put my head down for about three years.”

Grove went into advertising to pay back the debt. While his nose was to the grindstone, his eyes were opened to a new way of viewing the world.

“It helped me to look at problems from the viewpoint of the customers and consumers,” said Grove. “You don’t necessarily associate lateral thinking and empathy with advertising, but that’s what I took from it.

“Now I’m always identifying new problems and looking for lateral ways to address them.”

Grove worked in advertising for around four years, which would later turn out to be his “only basis for paid employment in life.”

When the dot-com boom reached Australia, Grove seized the opportunity and launched a series of businesses that bridged the gap between traditional business models and the burgeoning digital world.

During his 20s and 30s Grove established himself as a creative force. He developed impact campaigns for GetUp, Greenpeace, and the Climate Council, produced content for national television, was founding director of The Daily Aus, and launched the satirical news outlet, The Betoota Advocate, a cultural phenomenon, read by millions which has recently been adapted into a TV Series for Paramount.

Grove also served as a director for The Digital Publishers Alliance, Climate-KIC Australia, and as a Governor of WWF-Australia.

While the death of Grove’s theatre career might have laid the foundations for this ‘high-octane’ stage of his life, it was a series of close encounters with his own mortality that prompted a new set of priorities.

Around the time COVID-19 engulfed the world, Grove was struck with a severe case of diverticulitis — a massive inflammation of the intestines — and was pulled “very close to the edge, a number of times,” with frequent hospital visits over a nine-month period.

“That gave me a lot of time to reflect,” he recalled. “And that’s when I came out and joint-purchased Junkee Media and took over Australian Geographic as managing director. That was really exciting for me.”

The excitement didn’t last long. In May of 2022, just six months into his new ventures, Grove found himself jolted awake by the gleeful bounces of his daughter on his bed.

He woke up feeling groggy, like he was ‘suffering from some sort of hangover.’ Then, terror struck when he realised he couldn’t speak and his face was droopy. At the age of just 46, Grove had suffered a massive stroke.

When he was rushed to the hospital, the hits kept coming. He tested positive for COVID and was whisked away to the isolation ward.

He was diagnosed with semantic paraphasia and was left functionally illiterate for months. He lost his roles at both Junkee and Australian Geographic. It was literally and metaphorically a wake-up call.

“Those two brushes with mortality made me want to focus on doing the things that I really cared about.”

Grove would continue to straddle the media and startup worlds but with a sharpened focus on impact.

With publishing, Grove now aims to ‘use it as a means of creating an authentic community and setting the tempo of the conversation.”

With startups the goal is to support more founders who are tackling society’s wicked challenges.

“I want to think of my career as building human-based communities and impact ventures that provide the infrastructure, services, and resources to people who want to make the world a better place,” said Grove.

“Whether it’s mitigating climate change, lifting inequality, reducing plastics in systems, or improving food, I just want to get down to helping actual founders build meaningful businesses.”

Prior to his stroke, Grove had already founded a number of purpose-led projects, including EnergyLab, Boomerang Labs, and Impact Ventures.

His brush with death propelled him to ‘take things to the next level’. As soon as he was on the path to recovery, the first thing he did (after launching 404Brainnotfound, a podcast for young stroke survivors) was acquire the ethical crowd-funding platform StartSomeGood via his newly established impact company General Good.

“I had been following the journey of StartSomeGood for over ten years,” said Grove “Tom Dawkins, who founded it, is a good friend. Tom is now the chairman and is still very much involved.”

Grove plans to synergise StartSomeGood with his other incubators and accelerators to create a new hub for changemakers.

“Our vision is to use StartSomeGood to support social impact founders through their whole journey however we can, with whatever suits them best,” said Grove.

Grove’s passion for supporting impact founders was sparked by his experience leading EnergyLab.

After capitalising on the dot-com boom earlier in his career, Grove saw a new wave of opportunity swelling on the horizon: the transition to a sustainable and regenerative society.

The race to zero emissions had begun and the energy sector was a massive industry that hadn’t seen significant change for over a century.

Initially, he wanted to start his own energy business, but when his passion for driving change collided with the realities of building a startup in the energy sector, he decided to change routes.

“It proved very difficult. Direct access to customers was challenging because everything was controlled by retailers – testing a startup needed a lot of strategic partnerships, and the sector is incredibly capital-intensive because meaningful climate and clean energy solutions can require a lot of hardware. It’s also a highly regulated industry.”

Grove and his co-founders decided that rather than navigating the labyrinth and exerting an unholy amount of energy to create one solitary business, they’d create the necessary infrastructure so a whole industry of new energy startups could thrive.

“That was the genesis of EnergyLab, a bridge connecting government, big business, founders, researchers and inventors.”

EnergyLab was launched with the support of the Australian Government, Origin Energy and the University of Technology, Sydney.

It is Australia’s largest climate tech startup accelerator and innovation ecosystem dedicated to reaching net zero emissions, and it has already accelerated a whole fleet of world-changing companies.

The accelerator played a pivotal role in the success of Amber Electric, the creators of a breakthrough energy retail model that gives customers direct access to real-time wholesale electricity prices and empowers them to use more renewable energy when it is available on the grid.

“When Chris and Dan came to EnergyLab, their challenge was to prove the Amber business model without a full retail licence. We helped them rent a licence, allowing them to prove the model and raise the capital to get their own retail licence.

“Chris worked from our coworking space in Melbourne and EnergyLab was actually the first company to invest in Amber.”

Amber has since raised over $75 million, including a recent $29 million to expand their battery and electric vehicle automation software internationally.

Grove is also proud of Infravision, a company revolutionising the way we install high-voltage transmission cables.

“It might sound unglamorous,” added Grove, “but it is crucial. We need to double the amount of transmission wires on the planet to diversify and distribute renewable energy assets.

“It has traditionally been done by helicopters, which is dangerous and involves clearing many trees, but Infravision has developed a large drone and system to roll out transmission cables with much less environmental damage, faster, cheaper, and significantly safer than the old methods. They’re already expanding through North America and doing exceptionally well.”

Another project that EnergyLab is currently housing – which Grove is particularly excited about – is the Sustainable Investment Exchange (SIX), a recently launched company that aims to deliver Australia’s first share trading platform to combine activism with investing.

“I was one of the founding shareholders of Future Super and I know that Adam Verway, who left Future Super to set up SIX, will absolutely crush it,” said Grove.