Marcus Tan and the art of opening doors

An office above a nightclub is an unusually honest address for a startup. Downstairs, people pay to forget tomorrow. Upstairs, people are trying to finance it. Marcus Tan once shared just such an office with Jonah Cacioppe, who would later invite him to become executive chair of Integral. The proximity is pleasing. Entrepreneurship and nightlife both involve optimism, uncertain endings and someone eventually having to count the money.

Years later, that invitation came with a practical brief: help raise funds, develop Integral’s Able technology platform and expand its leadership programs. Tan would spend around one day a week working with the organization. Here was a former chief executive taking on work with a defined purpose and a place in the diary. The grand language of impact had acquired an appointment.

Tan is known for co-founding and leading Healthengine. But the question that makes his story interesting now is what happens after a founder leaves the chief executive’s chair. A long spell running a company produces experience that cannot be handed over in a slide deck. Where does it go? In Tan’s case, increasingly, into other people’s enterprises.

A career with more than one doorway

Born in Kuala Lumpur, Tan moved to Western Australia with his family in 1980, aged seven. As a child he wrote branching adventure stories on a Commodore 64. At university, organizing student events introduced him to selling tickets, finding sponsors and coordinating teams; it also brought him together with his future wife. The activities around his formal education were beginning to suggest another career.

He graduated from the University of Western Australia and later earned an executive MBA at the Australian Graduate School of Management. Those qualifications gave him experience in two different professional worlds. A business degree does not spare anyone the embarrassment of an unsuccessful idea, but it provides a vocabulary for asking why an organization works, who makes decisions and how the bills get paid.

His early company-building also took place in rooms rather less formal than a lecture theatre. Healthengine’s beginnings included work from a lounge room. By 2020, a podcast about organizational design was asking why the chief executive of a team exceeding 100 people still interviewed new hires. The distance between those two settings measures a particular kind of growth: eventually, the founder cannot know everything, yet still wants to know the people.

When the cheque clears, the work begins

In April 2017, Healthengine announced an AU$26.7 million Series C round led by Sequoia India. It was that investor’s first direct investment in an Australian-owned and headquartered technology startup. Alium Capital joined the round, alongside other new and returning investors. The company already had more than 100 staff, with headquarters in Perth and offices in Melbourne and Sydney.

A funding announcement makes a tidy milestone. Running the business afterwards is messier. More capital permits more products, more recruitment and more decisions that can turn out badly. Tan understood the change in expectations. “With the money comes greater ambition and greater expectation,” he said. The cheque is permission to attempt something larger; it also enlarges the number of people waiting to see whether the attempt works.

He resisted the impulse to spend quickly. Hiring people meant absorbing them into the organization, while assessing acquisitions and extending the product range. His account of fundraising emphasized preparation, confidence and the ability of a team to deliver. Those are sober concerns beside the customary photograph of smiling founders. They are also the concerns that remain when the photographer goes home.

By December that year, Healthengine reported 87% growth in monthly active users and a doubling of its workforce. It placed 23rd in Deloitte’s Australian Technology Fast 50, following 305% revenue growth over the three years from 2015 to 2017. Such numbers make a company easier to notice. They make it harder to run with the informal habits of a lounge-room venture.

The interview he kept doing

Tan’s attention to recruitment helps explain the later turn toward mentoring. In 2017, Healthengine recruited former Citibank IT director Mark Hammond and former LinkedIn Australia sales director Mark Dick. Tan described hiring as intensely personal. He was looking for people who valued the environment they would work in and the ownership they could have in the business.

His argument was practical: attracting experienced people required time, a recognizable company and evidence that the business could fulfil its promises. Equity mattered, but so did the prospect of working somewhere worth committing to. A startup asking someone to leave an established job is asking for considerably more than a signature on an offer letter.

The podcast’s question about interviewing new hires captures the tension neatly. A founder must delegate to let a company grow. Hiring remains one of the ways that founder determines what sort of company it becomes. Tan’s later work with leadership teams follows naturally from that concern. Products can change quickly; the people deciding what to build need time and attention.

The record includes a reckoning

The company’s growth came with serious failures. In August 2020, the Federal Court ordered HealthEngine Pty Ltd to pay AU$2.9 million in penalties for misleading conduct involving personal information and reviews. The company admitted inadequate disclosure of third-party data sharing, withholding about 17,000 reviews and editing about 3,000 others. This occurred during Tan’s tenure as chief executive.

The penalty was imposed on the company. It belongs in an account of its founder’s career because corporate responsibility does not vanish behind a funding milestone. A platform depends on people trusting what it shows them and understanding how their information is used. Revenue, recruitment and expansion cannot substitute for that obligation. The episode makes the company’s history more complicated than a procession of successful rounds.

Leaving the chair, keeping a seat at the table

On 30 June 2023, Tan stepped down as Healthengine’s chief executive after nearly 15 years. Dan Stinton, then managing director of Guardian Australia, was announced as his successor and would join in August. Tan was to serve in an interim role supporting the transition. A founder’s departure needs arrangements as well as sentiment; there are employees and customers who still expect the company to function on Monday.

The handover opened space for a different set of responsibilities. In March 2025, Purpose Ventures announced that Tan was becoming an operating partner, having been a venture partner since the fund’s launch. The change brought him into a greater capacity supporting portfolio companies’ growth. For a former operator, investment can involve more than choosing a business. It can mean helping its founders deal with what follows.

At Plus Eight, he is entrepreneur in residence. The program was launched by Spacecubed in 2016 and combines investment with support for early-stage businesses. It later expanded into entrepreneurial education through its academy. The arrangement puts an experienced founder near people still testing their first assumptions. Advice is most useful when a decision can still be changed.

Spacecubed also lists Tan on its board. Its community brings together founders and changemakers through shared workplaces and programs. The value of such a setting can be wonderfully mundane: someone nearby has already encountered the problem currently consuming your afternoon. An introduction can spare a week of searching. A conversation can expose a flaw before it becomes expensive.

Giving without waiting for a fortune

Tan’s philanthropy runs alongside his business career. He co-founded Meridian Global Foundation, whose early giving-circle model brought donors together to decide where pooled contributions should go. Its original tagline, Mates Who Donate, had the advantage of sounding like something people might actually join. Friendship was part of the machinery, rather than an incidental benefit of a formal institution.

Meridian’s account of its beginnings challenges the idea that philanthropy must wait until someone is very rich. That matters because waiting is an exceptionally easy habit to maintain. There is always another milestone, another bill, another definition of enough. A giving circle offers a starting point small enough to enter and collective enough to do something useful.

The foundation’s annual giving goal is AU$1 million. The distinction between a goal and an accomplishment matters here: Tan hopes that, by 2040, investment returns will support more than that amount in donations and that many more people will participate. It is an ambition for an enduring institution, with giving built into its operation rather than dependent on the enthusiasm of a single evening.

“Giving is a way of turning gratitude into action,” he says. His account includes time, networks and capability as well as money. For a founder, those are meaningful resources. Knowing whom to call, how to prepare and which mistake to avoid can change what another person is able to attempt. This is giving with the address book open.

“Giving is a way of turning gratitude into action.”Marcus Tan

A large ambition and a small instrument

Wellspring lists Tan as founder and executive chairman, alongside Sylvia Tan as trustee and director. Its vision is to improve the lives of more than 100 million people by 2030. Its work includes education and economic empowerment. The figure is a stated ambition, with a deadline attached; it is not a running tally of people already reached.

The scale sits beside some refreshingly ordinary details. In a 2020 staff interview, Tan said he had taught himself the ukulele, played badminton every Sunday and wanted to ski in Chamonix. He recommended exploring local hiking trails, surprised by the countryside close to the city he had known for decades. Even a busy founder can overlook what is just outside the door.

Those details rescue him from the business-card version of a life. There is a person here who learns an instrument for the pleasure of learning it and makes room for a weekly game. An ambition measured in millions can coexist with an afternoon measured in points. The ukulele, happily, does not require a board resolution.

At StartGiving, Tan describes giving time, money or talent as something anyone can do and as a source of joy in his own life. It is a useful place to finish a story about a founder’s next chapter. He has spent years building an organization; now several of his roles help other people build theirs. The doors he opens will have other names on them.