Marta Higuera was sailing in the Mediterranean when an Australian property problem began following her around. Her friend and former colleague Zoe Pointon had an idea about choosing real estate agents. They started exchanging emails. Higuera later remembered a particularly urgent part of the exercise: finding a name, with Pointon in Australia and Higuera off the coast of Turkey. The brainstorm lasted 48 hours. Even a boat, apparently, offers limited protection from a naming meeting.
OpenAgent was the result. The name carried an intention: make an opaque experience easier to understand. For the seller of a home, the difficulty began before the auction, the photographs or the negotiations. Someone had to choose the agent. A familiar face on a signboard offered one kind of reassurance. Evidence of how that person actually performed would offer another.
The colleague with a head start
Higuera came to that question with a working knowledge of how young companies learn. Her career had begun at McKinsey. She earned an MBA at Stanford, where classmates who went on to start companies helped make entrepreneurship feel possible. The attraction was partly the pace: she liked working in places where an idea could become a decision and a decision could become a release.
Before OpenAgent, she had worked in Silicon Valley and with a car-insurance lead-generation business in Spain. Pointon specifically credited that experience with helping them test assumptions, improve successive versions and release changes quickly. Their partnership had complementary starting points. Pointon brought the property experiences that prompted the idea; Higuera brought experience of making an uncertain proposition earn its next step.
The distinction matters. A frustrating experience can identify a problem. It cannot, by itself, tell you which service someone will use, which questions they need answered or which part they might pay for. Those answers require encounters with customers, including the inconvenient ones whose preferences fail to flatter the original plan.
A whiteboard before the boardroom
The early OpenAgent operation left little room for hiding behind scale. The founders wrote copy, worked out online advertising and called their first roughly 20 customers themselves. Their customer-management system was a whiteboard with sticky notes. Pointon remembered working from outdoor furniture in her home. The office-supply bill had yet to acquire a venture-capital vocabulary.
OpenAgent took shape in 2012 and launched publicly in February 2013. Pointon’s first test site used WordPress and Wufoo forms and cost about A$100. Subsequent versions improved the presentation, but the more consequential work involved discovering which assumptions survived contact with people trying to sell a house.
Did sellers want the cheapest agent, or the one most suited to the job? Did they want a telephone conversation to help them understand their options? How should the business work with agents? These were early questions the founders tested. Each answer affected what they built. A comparison service could easily organise the wrong comparison if it confused a visible number with the customer’s actual priority.
An editorial rendering of the founders’ early experiments, customer calls and successive website versions.
Higuera and Pointon funded the first ten months themselves, then combined consulting work with building the business. That arrangement required two jobs to support one young company. It also gave their fundraising argument something concrete to rest on: people using a service, rather than a service imagined in a presentation.
The money came with people attached
Outside investors followed. An initial A$400,000 round in 2013 preceded a A$1 million round in 2014 that included Trulia co-founder Pete Flint. By then, the founders could explain the business through what they had tried. Their experiments helped them answer questions with operating experience behind the answers.
In 2015, Hollard Investments put in A$6 million. Richard Enthoven, Hollard Australia’s managing director, had already been mentoring both founders. The relationship illustrates a recurring feature of the company’s financing: useful conversations could precede a financial commitment. Capital arrived through people who had had time to observe the work.
A A$12 million round led by Reinventure followed in 2016, with Qualgro and Breakthrough Labs also participating. At the time, OpenAgent reported 60 employees and more than 10,000 users. Higuera emphasised the calibre of the investors joining the business and the contribution they could make. The money would support expansion and further products for people considering a sale.
Led by Reinventure, with Qualgro and Breakthrough Labs participating.
It is tempting to make a funding announcement the climax of a founding story. For a service company, the following morning still contains customers waiting for a call. A larger bank balance changes the resources available to meet that obligation. It also increases the number of people expecting the obligation to be met.
A shortlist is a human problem
OpenAgent’s service joined information about agents with conversations about sellers. Past sales could help establish an agent’s experience. A customer’s property, preferences and circumstances could help establish whether that experience suited the assignment. A recommendation had to bridge both.
Higuera paid attention to the less glamorous mechanics. In 2016, she described setting call-back targets because someone making an enquiry expected a prompt response. A technically competent matching system would have limited value if the interested customer had already moved on. Timing belonged inside the product.
The founders also faced questions from agents about their place in the transaction. They explained that OpenAgent helped homeowners understand the selling process and introduced them to a small number of suitable agents. The agent paid a referral fee following a successful sale. Explaining that arrangement was part of explaining the service.
Asked about fee disclosure, the company described monitoring calls and requiring staff to explain the fee structure. Asked about agents changing agencies, it described retaining their sales histories. These operational details made the larger promise testable. Transparency had to survive the telephone script and the database record as well as the company name.
Sharing the job, trusting the team
For years, Higuera and Pointon shared the chief executive role. Higuera’s public comments about leadership placed weight on what other people could do without her. In 2017, she described trusting colleagues to make decisions and seeing value in giving them room to step up. Her account of the business depended on a team pulling in the same direction.
She was similarly direct about who belonged on that team. She challenged the idea that an organisation could assemble its strongest pool of inventive people by drawing exclusively from white men. Her argument connected diversity with the quality of the work, and asked people to examine the biases that shaped their decisions.
There is a smaller, more personal account of her influence. In a separate career interview, Tom Roets named Higuera as a friend who had taught him positive reinforcement. A colleague remembered the way she encouraged people. That recollection offers a useful companion to the growth figures: an effect measured in someone else’s working habits.
“Work for a start-up before you do your own start-up.”
Marta Higuera · 2017
Her advice to prospective founders was practical and consistent with her own route. Learn inside a startup first. She believed the experience she had accumulated before OpenAgent was essential to its survival. The recommendation gives preparation its due without pretending that preparation eliminates uncertainty.
Sharing leadership also gives the early experiments a different significance. Two people have to agree on what a result means before deciding what to try next. A customer who wants something unexpected can change that conversation. The discipline is partly about listening outside the company and partly about listening within it. Read alongside her comments about delegation, Higuera’s advice suggests a founder conscious of how much a business has to learn through other people. That is a useful perspective for someone whose eventual role would involve overseeing the company from its board.
A longer route home
Higuera’s subsequent career took her into corporate venture building. She became a managing director and partner at BCG Digital Ventures, working in Singapore. A Wild Digital speaker biography described a career lived across Europe, North and South America, Australia and Singapore, and noted that she spoke four languages. Her work had acquired a broad geographical range.
In November 2021, she co-authored a BCG publication on green venturing in Southeast Asia. It examined opportunities for businesses to build new ventures around the transition to a lower-carbon economy. The setting differed from Australian property matching, while the work again concerned turning an identified need into an investable business.
In 2023, she announced that she had moved from Singapore back to Santander, Spain, and wanted to reconnect with her Spanish and European network. Her message thanked BCG Digital Ventures for the preceding three years and expressed affection for Singapore and Sydney. A return home came with several other places still in the picture.
OpenAgent now identifies Higuera as its board chair. The company’s continuing leadership includes Pointon as co-CEO. Higuera’s later public work has also included a place on an April 2026 business AI event programme, discussing executive perspectives, startup lessons and organisational change.
The first whiteboard belongs to an earlier chapter. Its usefulness in this story remains quite current: each note stood for someone whose problem the founders had agreed to help solve. Higuera’s career has moved through different countries, organisations and titles. OpenAgent began by making that person easier to see. A growing company could do worse than keep the picture in focus.