Al Bentley and the 3,290-kilometre detour to Wall Street

Al Bentley drove 3,290 kilometres across Australia to join a startup accelerator in Sydney. Then he slept in his car for four months. The person telling this story was Toby Heap, the accelerator investor whose money Bentley was trying to preserve. A founder had arrived with a financial research business to build, and apparently accommodation was a line item he felt could wait.

There is something awkwardly appropriate about a future investment entrepreneur treating his own living arrangements as a capital allocation problem. The arithmetic was personal. Money spent on a room could not also be spent developing Simply Wall St. Heap described Bentley wanting every cent invested in the company to go into its growth. That is a memorable opening balance sheet, even if the sleeping quarters leave much to be desired.

The road trip carried him away from naval engineering and offshore oil work in Western Australia. It also brought a practical problem into focus: how could an ordinary person understand a listed company well enough to make an investment decision? Bentley had encountered that problem himself. His response was to start building. The car journey came after the experiment, when a side project had become something worth crossing a continent for.

An engineer meets a spreadsheet

Before he became a founder, Bentley studied at the University of Southampton. His subject was ship science and engineering, and his early jobs included graduate engineering at BAE Systems, naval architecture at Austal and Crondall Energy Consultants, and project engineering at Apache. Ships and offshore projects supplied the professional background to an eventual career in financial software.

Naval architecture is an unusually concrete preparation for a business dealing in abstractions. A vessel has to work in the physical world. A stock research interface has to work in the head of someone who may never have opened a financial statement. The connection is an editorial one, but it helps explain the appeal of Bentley’s career: both jobs involve making complicated systems intelligible enough to use.

The software habit had begun much earlier. Bentley says he started coding at twelve and launched a website design business at sixteen. So the financial project was a return to an existing interest, alongside a new one. While teaching himself investment strategies, he became concerned about services whose commercial incentives could conflict with users’ interests. In 2013 he began experimenting with an alternative. In 2014 he left naval architecture to work on it full time.

A weekend idea finds a second chair

The early version had a name with rather more martial ambition: Ninjavest. It emerged from a Startup Weekend competition in Perth in 2013. Those events compress the first stages of a business into a weekend; Bentley’s entry eventually escaped the weekend altogether. The company launched as Simply Wall St in May 2014.

His co-founder, Nick van den Berg, found Bentley through posts on AngelList. An email led to coffee. Van den Berg brought a background in banking, sales and online marketing, while Bentley brought engineering. Their introduction lacked the ceremonial drama of a boardroom announcement, which is part of its charm. Two people met because one had put an idea somewhere the other could see it.

By November 2014 they reported more than 350 users and no revenue. Both were working on the business full time. The pressing question was which suggested features deserved scarce development resources. That early dilemma would remain recognisable years later: people asking for improvements are useful evidence, but a product cannot become every product requested of it. A small user base had already supplied the founders with a very substantial queue.

A company, reduced to a picture

Bentley’s central design choice was to make stock research visual. Simply Wall St became associated with its Snowflake, a compact picture of company fundamentals. It gave people an initial shape to examine before diving into the underlying financial details. Finance has plenty of numbers; the scarcity Bentley addressed was a usable way into them.

Early versions organised thirty financial checks into five areas. The picture let users compare the resulting profiles without starting from an empty spreadsheet. A graphic can make a difference visible more quickly than a table. Its usefulness depends on what happens next: the reader still needs to understand the business and the assumptions behind the analysis. A pleasing shape cannot do the thinking on somebody’s behalf.

The underlying material came from professional financial datasets, including S&P Global. By 2018, the service was drawing on reported results, forecasts, market ratios, dividends and information about management and boards. That combination helps explain Bentley’s approach. Make the entrance approachable, then give the interested person somewhere deeper to go. The visual surface is an invitation to research, rather than the end of the visit.

“Simply Wall St helps investors make better informed decisions by turning complicated data into simple visuals.”Al Bentley

When users join the cap table

A different kind of validation arrived through funding. In 2015, a seed round involved Michael Quinn of Innovation Capital, Sydney Angels and the Sidecar Fund. Bentley’s advice at the time was to concentrate on finding the right lead investor. A young company needs money, of course, but the first committed backer also helps other people decide whether to take the proposition seriously.

Then came funding from people already using the service. The company’s 2017 round raised A$2.4 million from its own customer base. It is an appealing reversal of the usual pitch: some of the people being asked to finance the software had already had a chance to judge it on their own screens.

By March 2021, Simply Wall St had more than three million users. Bentley’s conversation on the Startup Playbook podcast covered organic growth, customer feedback, hiring and resource allocation. The subjects sound less glamorous than a fundraising announcement. They are also closer to the daily work of keeping a business useful. The distance from a weekend prototype to millions of accounts is travelled through many decisions that would make terrible confetti.

There is a human distinction here, too. A customer can say that a feature would be nice. A customer who becomes an investor has made a further commitment. That does not settle every question about the business, but it gives this particular chapter a pleasing symmetry: an investment research company found investors among its researchers.

The $400 animals

One of Bentley’s more revealing stories concerns the bull and bear associated with Simply Wall St. The early identity had involved a Lego figure in a suit. Van den Berg warned that using it seriously could invite legal trouble. A replacement was needed, but Bentley wanted to retain the friendly, playful feeling.

They ran a design competition on 99designs. Bentley remembers a field of mostly unusable submissions, followed by one promising direction and a few iterations. The original branding cost $400. That little sum belongs comfortably beside the car story. In both cases, the business was being assembled through practical choices rather than the appearance of limitless resources.

The animals also convey a preference about how investing should feel. Serious financial research need not arrive dressed for a disciplinary hearing. A warm visual identity can give a newcomer permission to engage. It does not change the numbers, but it may change whether someone stays long enough to understand them.

A decade of product work eventually made the old identity insufficient for the business it represented. A refresh began in 2025. Bentley described wanting to keep the original playfulness while explaining a broader product: a place to build and manage a portfolio, including the decisions along the way. The $400 animals had acquired more responsibilities.

The weekend comes round again

Bentley also returned to the format that had helped him get started. In September 2016 he organised a fintech Startup Weekend in Sydney, held at Stone & Chalk. Marcus Holmes facilitated the event, and Andy Lamb joined them as a mentor. An early participant had become one of the people making the next weekend possible.

That is a useful connection in his story because it offers an observable action, rather than a flattering label. Organising an event means dealing with other people’s fledgling ideas, deadlines and uncertainty. It places a founder inside a community at a moment when the participants are still trying to work out what their businesses might be.

Spacecubed later recalled Bentley as a past Startup Weekend champion when promoting its twentieth Perth event. The association survived the move east and the growth of the company. His first experiment remained part of the local record, a reminder that a global software business can have an origin small enough to fit inside a room for a weekend.

The lesson comes with a sail

Water never disappeared from Bentley’s life. His personal profile describes him as an Australian and New Zealand windsurf freestyle champion, and his video links lead to windsurfing footage. A 2011 feature showed his freestyle sailing in Brazil, filmed in Jeri, Lagoa Azul and Camocim. His Southampton activities also included windsurfing and skiing.

More recently, he has introduced financial education videos as sailing trips. One explains discounted cash flow valuation; another tackles dividend investing from a boat. The setting is a fine antidote to the convention that a financial explanation requires a desk and a very solemn jacket. There is no reason a useful lesson cannot have a horizon.

The connection to the original problem is direct. A valuation displayed on a screen can look authoritative while leaving its reader unsure how it was calculated. Teaching the machinery behind the number continues the work of making research approachable. Bentley’s chosen classroom happens to float. The engineer who once worked on vessels now uses time aboard one to explain financial models.

A larger map, the same question

Today Simply Wall St describes a platform with more than eight million registered investors, analysis of 120,000 stocks and coverage of ninety markets. Those are company figures, and they describe registered accounts and coverage, rather than how many people are actively investing on any given day. They nevertheless show how far Bentley’s personal experiment has travelled.

The current business brings company research, portfolio tools and an investor community into one place. It says it is profitable and grows through its product and the people who pay for it. For Bentley, the expanded scope means returning to a question that started the whole exercise: what does an individual actually need to make a considered decision? A report answers part of it. Managing a portfolio asks for more.

His career offers several answers in miniature. Write code when the existing tool is awkward. Find a co-founder through a conversation. Let a picture open a complicated subject. Teach the calculation as well as displaying the result. Give the company a face that someone might willingly wear on a T-shirt.

The most memorable answer remains the journey to Sydney. It is easy to admire the distance and overlook the reason for making it. Bentley was carrying a tool built for his own confusion toward people who might share it. Years later, with a much larger audience, that remains a wonderfully ordinary starting point for a financial business: somebody wanted to understand what was in front of him.