Matt Lamont, based in Perth, is a proud Western Australian who has experienced building a global technology business from scratch. The now publicly-listed company is evolving beyond its oil and gas roots to service the computing needs of a wide range of industries. This was not in the stars when he headed for the Australian bush as a teenager.
People may be surprised by your formative years. Can you talk us through the period after you left school at 16?
My parents were outraged when I told them I was quitting high school at 16. However they probably weren’t that surprised because I had been quite a handful as a teenager. I was looking for a bit of excitement and headed ‘out bush’ and found work on a cattle station. A few years on, I had become a qualified forest ranger and was supplementing my meagre income by playing for a local Aussie Rules footie team.
What made you decide that university might be a good idea after all?
When I was 27 I spent a couple of weeks in Europe on holiday…. and while visiting an Irish dairy farm with a mate, I met my wife-to-be! That set me thinking that I needed to turn my mind towards getting a ‘real job’. I originally enrolled at Curtin University to study general sciences with the intention of becoming a teacher. (I would have made a terrible teacher!). Geology and geophysics captured my interest and that was what I specialized in.
What persuaded you to leave a flourishing career working as an oil industry geophysicist?
I guess that at heart I am an entrepreneur. Even as a teenager I had tried my hand at running a window cleaning business and a few other ventures, none of them outstanding successes. I guess it was when I was working as a geophysicist in Houston seeing a lot of start-ups at that time. I thought ‘hang on, I could do this too.’ So once back in Perth I set about starting my own business, DownUnder GeoSolutions (DUG).
Tell us about the early years in the ‘shed’ and how DUG broke into the seismic processing world.
Things gelled when I met up with Troy Thompson, who is still my partner in the business. At the time, in 2003, I was one of his PhD supervisors at Curtin and he was a star student. He took a big risk joining me in trying to establish a niche seismic services business. We started our fledgling business in the ‘shed’: the top floor of my garage with a pool table and bar downstairs so our early staff members could share my philosophy of having a little fun along the way.
Did you ever get planning permission for the shed?
No, but fortunately we were moving into proper offices when the local authorities threatened to visit!
DUG must have one of the most distinctive marketing images in the business. How did that come about?
Troy and I can’t take too much credit for that. We have a great in-house team who had a bit of fun with our marketing and gave us a distinctive image. Our ads definitely got us noticed in the early days and we have been building on them ever since.
How have you managed to grow the company in the last few challenging years?
The edge we had when we started was keeping our costs down and prices competitive compared with the big companies and that has always been a key driver. Along the way we have also introduced innovative and cost-saving technologies, like our ‘DUG Cool’ immersion cooling system for our supercomputers. This patented technology not only gives us some of the greenest datacentres on Earth but also reduces our power consumption by around half.
Has the gamble to invest in the huge supercomputing facility in Houston with its patented green cooling system paid off?
The timing of the launch shortly before Covid hit was unfortunate. However, work generated from our offices in Perth, Kuala Lumpur, London and Houston has helped to keep the computers busy. Now the sheer processing power of the facility, which is accessed via our DUG McCloud platform, is gaining traction - and not just in the oil and gas sector.
How is DUG’s diversification working out?
Turns out that all our high-performance computing (HPC) has the potential to be leveraged by other research and scientific endeavours. We are already involved in the worlds of astronomy, meteorology and medicine and I can’t wait to see where this leads next.
