In 2007, Rod Drury took an accounting-software startup to the stock exchange. Xero was about a year old. Most businesses spend their infancy trying to find customers; this one also had to explain itself to shareholders. There is a certain comic bravery in asking the public to finance software for doing the books before the books contain very much to admire.
The choice helps explain Drury. He saw an opportunity larger than the local funding market could comfortably support, and went looking for another way to pay for it. New Zealand offered a place to build. The customers would have to come from elsewhere. A small home market made international expansion part of the opening calculation.
Nearly two decades later, the projects have changed shape. There is an urban cable-car proposal in Queenstown, support for lake restoration, and an argument for changing how electricity is supplied. The connecting idea is that something familiar and awkward might be made to work better. But the public story now includes serious questions about the founder’s own conduct and the systems around him.
Before the ledger, the inbox
Born in Wellington in 1966 and raised in Hawke’s Bay, Drury attended Napier Boys’ High School and studied at Victoria University of Wellington. His parents worked as a tradesman and an executive assistant. His route into technology ran through the practical business world, rather than a laboratory or a university research spinout.
At Arthur Young, he began in audit before moving into IT consulting. He learned how businesses could be represented as information systems, and worked on substantial implementations. In that setting, software had to survive contact with an organisation’s actual habits. A tidy demonstration was only the beginning; the customer still needed the thing to function on Monday morning.
He established Glazier Systems in 1995. The software development and consulting business was sold in 1999. He also co-founded Context Connect, working on directory technology for mobile devices, and later built AfterMail, an email-archiving company. His interests kept returning to information that businesses possessed but struggled to organise or put to work.
Quest Software acquired AfterMail in January 2006. The announced terms were approximately US$14.7 million in cash, with up to US$30 million more dependent on performance over three years. Those qualifications matter: a possible deal total is a different thing from cash paid at closing, and neither is a statement of a founder’s personal proceeds.
The development team was to remain in Wellington. Drury had helped make a product that a larger overseas company wanted to distribute. That experience left him with another possibility to explore: building a company that would keep expanding under its own name.
An accountant gets a seat at the table
Drury co-founded Xero with accountant Hamish Edwards in 2006. Its beginnings included a kitchen table in a Wellington apartment. The work brought together people who understood accounting and people who could build for the web. Both skills mattered. Moving a ledger online would be of little use if the numbers were wrong or nobody wanted to use it.
The appeal of cloud accounting was wonderfully prosaic. Business owners and their advisers could work with shared financial information through the internet. Software no longer had to arrive as a package installed separately on each customer’s machine. An accountant could become a continuing collaborator, with access to the same evolving picture of the business.
Drury’s earlier work had given him a view of financial software from the implementation side. Here was a chance to reconsider the arrangement from the beginning. Small firms had ordinary, recurring jobs to do: sending invoices, following payments, reconciling bank activity. An improvement repeated across those tasks could be useful without ever being glamorous.
The word “beautiful” became part of Xero’s accounting pitch. It was an unexpectedly sociable adjective for bookkeeping. The underlying commercial question was more serious: could software feel approachable enough that people would use it regularly, understand their position sooner, and speak more productively with the person advising them?
The unusual order of operations
The 2007 NZX listing raised NZ$15 million. Drury later explained the funding problem in the language of a staffing plan. Developers needed testers; a business also needed salespeople and support. Local venture rounds of a few million dollars would not buy much time for the organisation he wanted to assemble.
Listing early put the company’s ambitions in public view. Shareholders were being asked to fund a future business while the present one was still taking shape. That required capital, persuasion and patience. It also created obligations that a founder could not settle with an engaging product demonstration.
Xero’s expansion depended on other people taking responsibility far from Wellington. Edwards went to the United Kingdom to help establish that market. Gary Turner subsequently built the UK operation, while Chris Ridd became an important leader in Australia. The founder’s map acquired names, relationships and local judgement.
Distribution was another problem to solve. Drury talked about working with established businesses such as British Telecom and Telstra, whose existing relationships could introduce Xero to small-business customers. He also described Twitter becoming a public place for customer support. A complaint that once disappeared inside a company could now be watched by anyone considering its product.
Raised while Xero was still about a year old.
The cable that stayed on the drawing board
During the Xero years, Drury also co-founded Pacific Fibre. With backers including Sam Morgan and Sir Stephen Tindall, the venture sought another internet cable linking New Zealand, Australia and the United States. A business selling software across the internet had an obvious interest in the infrastructure carrying it.
In June 2012, shareholders put more money into keeping the project alive as financing deadlines approached. The proposed system stretched roughly 13,000 kilometres, with a price tag around US$400 million. Customer commitments and confidence were still insufficient to close the funding gap. The venture was abandoned later that year.
It is an awkward entry in a career often told through exits and share prices. It belongs there. A useful proposal can fail to become a financed project, and a founder’s previous success cannot make every new set of numbers agree. The ocean remained an expensive place to put an argument.
“The journey is our reward.”
Rod Drury · 2019 interview
A different job waiting in Queenstown
Steve Vamos became Xero’s chief executive on 1 April 2018. Drury remained a non-executive director. In explaining the change, he pointed to the experience needed to run a multinational technology business, while retaining his own interest in product, strategy and machine learning’s possible role in accounting.
His board service ended in August 2023, after twelve years as an executive director and five as a non-executive. Xero said at the time that he would continue as an adviser. The distinction is useful when reading his biography: co-founder and former CEO describe the history; they do not put him in the current chief executive’s chair.
Queenstown became the base for a different collection of work. A NZ$1 million contribution helped support restoration efforts at Lake Hayes, also known as Waiwhakaata, through Mana Tāhuna. That work sits within a wider community effort involving local groups, public funding and Ngāi Tahu’s relationship with the lake. A cheque joins an existing landscape of responsibilities.
Through Southern Infrastructure, Drury has backed a proposed electric cable-car network intended to address Queenstown’s transport congestion. Ross Copland leads the company. By December 2025 it had named preferred suppliers for a proposed NZ$400 million network, with separate roles for international cableway manufacturers. These were steps in developing a proposal, rather than an operating transport service.
The design had already grown more ambitious. In May 2025, the proposed capacity rose to 3,000 passengers an hour in each direction. Copland compared that with a fifty-seat bus leaving every minute. For residents accustomed to traffic, the useful measure would eventually be less picturesque: whether the journey becomes reliable.
Drury has also argued for electricity-market reform, questioning the combination of infrastructure and retail within power companies. Those interests make his later career recognisable. Accounting, connectivity, transport and energy all involve systems people rely on daily. The difficulty is persuading enough participants to change an arrangement they already know.
- 2006Co-founder & CEO
- 2018Non-executive director
- 2023Leaves the board
The obligations that success cannot settle
Recognition accumulated along the way. Drury entered the New Zealand Hi-Tech Hall of Fame in 2009. The 2026 New Year Honours appointed him a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to business, the technology industry and philanthropy. His public reputation had become part of the country’s account of its technology ambitions.
In 2026, former employees publicly alleged misconduct. Drury denied wrongdoing. Ally Naylor’s allegations concerned his conduct when she was a junior Xero employee; she had raised a whistleblower complaint in 2017. Other women also came forward. On 8 May, Drury returned the New Zealander of the Year award he had received in March, while rejecting the allegations.
On 20 October 2026, Xero announced that Maria Dew KC’s review of its handling of the 2017 complaint was complete. Chair David Thodey and chief executive Sukhinder Singh Cassidy apologised to Naylor and any former employee whose experience fell short of the standards the company now expects.
Xero committed to further changes, including access to an outside whistleblowing organisation and independent investigators for serious complaints involving senior executives or directors. The announcement addressed the company’s handling of complaints. It should be read with that scope, alongside Drury’s denial of wrongdoing.
These events are part of the story of a public founder. So are the colleagues who built the software, the investors who funded it and the communities involved in his later projects. The career shows what can happen when someone refuses to let geography set the size of a business. Its present chapter also asks how the institutions built around that ambition answer to the people within them.