Steve Maarbani and the trouble with standing still

Steve Maarbani has a complaint about escalators. People step onto them, stop walking and accept the speed the machinery has chosen. He would rather keep moving. In a public reflection on impatience, he proposed a sign asking riders: “Why have you stopped?” It is an unusually revealing question for a corporate lawyer turned founder. He sees a device designed to accelerate progress being used as an excuse to surrender it.

Apply that irritation to private investment and you have the beginnings of VentureCrowd. Maarbani spent years helping other people structure funds, negotiate investments and turn legal advice into commercial decisions. He came to believe that the machinery connecting founders with money could move faster, accommodate more people and be much easier to use. Then he helped build a business around that belief. The escalator had acquired a capital-raising function.

His story now carries a harder turn. VentureCrowd’s parent entered administration in April 2026 and subsequently liquidation in July. That development belongs beside the ambition. Maarbani’s career offers a close view of a particular entrepreneurial wager: that opening access to a market and improving its machinery can support a business durable enough to keep doing both.

The lawyer at the edge of the deal

Based in Sydney, Maarbani trained as a corporate lawyer and became a partner at PwC, running its venture capital practice. His work put him near the point where a promising company becomes an investable proposition. He helped establish venture firms, worked on legal due diligence and negotiated transactions. He also served on the management committee of Sydney Angels. He learned the established routes through private capital from the inside.

His professional biography lists a Master of Laws from the University of Sydney. It also records work for clients including NAB Ventures, Australia Post Ventures, Artesian Venture Partners, Tank Stream Ventures and the Sydney Angels Sidecar Fund. This was a career built around the less photogenic parts of entrepreneurship: fund structures, acquisition terms and the arrangements that let money move. A founder’s pitch might start the conversation; someone still has to make the agreement work.

At PwC, he led an annual national briefing called The Future of Venture Capital. The assignment involved looking beyond the next transaction, examining overseas developments and asking what Australian fund managers should consider next. His consulting work later included advice on early-stage venture capital limited partnerships, with a plain-English introduction published in 2016. The combination is characteristic: understand the structure, then explain it so somebody can use it.

The clients who taught him to listen

One early client he remembers is Michelle Deaker of OneVentures. Recalling the period before that firm launched its first fund, Maarbani described himself, with deliberate exaggeration, as a “baby lawyer”. He had been trying to convince PwC’s partners that venture capital deserved their attention. Deaker was among the people whose work gave that argument substance.

What stayed with him was her manner. He remembered her being softly spoken, making time for constructive feedback and helping him adapt his work to what the client actually needed. His recollection dwelt on the absence of ego. For someone now associated with arguments about changing investment markets, it is a useful detail: an early professional lesson arrived through careful correction, delivered kindly. Expertise mattered. The way it travelled between people mattered too.

The advisory role eventually felt too confined. Maarbani enjoyed PwC and valued the people who trained him, but he wanted to remain involved after the advice had been handed over. He wanted to help execute the strategy. His account of that frustration contains the recognisable itch of a future operator: the point at which another person takes responsibility for the outcome begins to feel like the point at which your own interesting work has been interrupted.

A platform beside the fund

Artesian Venture Partners was a client. Maarbani proposed putting a digital platform alongside its investment business, and they developed VentureCrowd together. The platform launched in 2013. His consulting portfolio describes his contribution as lead adviser on strategy, structure, the regulatory framework and establishment. The founding idea drew directly on the work he already knew: organise investment participation through a different channel.

He later described an awkward mismatch from his PwC days. Lawyers could assess companies and work through due diligence, yet lack the financial qualifications or investment sums needed to join the opportunities they understood. Knowledge, available savings and formal access did not necessarily line up. That example helps explain why the access argument has stayed central to his work. Some potential participants were close enough to analyse the deal and still outside the transaction.

The same thinking extended into property. Maarbani advised on the strategy and establishment of VentureCrowd Property and gave briefings on technology’s effect on real-estate investment. His 2017 white paper, Real Estate Technology: Threat or Opportunity?, examined changes in the built environment. He was following an idea across asset classes: digital processes could alter how an established industry organised itself, including how projects obtained finance.

Freddie Mercury enters the investment committee

Maarbani’s public writing makes room for an unlikely investment companion: Queen. In 2019 he used Bohemian Rhapsody to argue that audiences can recognise appeal which professional intermediaries miss. He returned to the analogy in a 2021 essay addressed to Freddie Mercury fans and VentureCrowd investors. He likes the song; he also likes what the story allows him to say about who gets to decide.

The underlying argument is about customers. Investment committees attempt to anticipate what people will want, buy and use. Crowdfunding lets some of those people participate in financing the companies themselves. In Maarbani’s telling, customer enthusiasm can become ownership as well as sales. The analogy brings a little stage lighting into a conversation usually conducted beneath fluorescent tubes. It also makes his preference plain: give more people a chance to express a view through participation.

“Equality of access, and power to the people. Simple.”

Steve Maarbani, 2019

His other writing displays the same taste for puncturing financial ceremony. A 2019 column announced the decline of investment managers’ golf days and long lunches. Younger investors, he argued, wanted usable digital services, transparent information and efficient transactions. The hospitality budget was receiving a poor review. His point concerned how customers expected to transact, and why investment firms would have to adapt their service to those expectations.

That year he also argued that businesses should state their values and act on them. Consumers, employees and investors could form stronger relationships with companies whose purpose they shared. It was a commercial argument as well as a moral preference. In his account, a company’s stated mission created something people could choose to support. Crowdfunding offered a mechanism through which that support could include an investment.

Learning to run the room

Building a company required a different set of decisions from advising one. Maarbani has described himself as more introverted than extroverted and admitted finding difficult staffing conversations uncomfortable. Earlier in his leadership career, underperformance could send him back to his own conduct: had he coached enough, explained enough, invested enough time? His later lesson was to act sooner when senior people and the business were moving in different directions.

There is a revealing tension here. His legal training encouraged analysis, clear language and careful consideration of facts. Running a company also required him to trust his judgment and make decisions without universal agreement. He has credited his earlier colleagues with teaching him the value of doing good work beyond the rewards of salary or promotion. The founder who jokes about slow escalators has also had to learn when further discussion becomes another form of standing still.

The promise meets the balance sheet

In March 2023, Maarbani set out plans for a Southeast Asian expansion and a technology programme involving blockchain and secondary-market trading. VentureCrowd was seeking up to A$14.5 million through convertible notes. He saw Singapore as a base for connecting Australian opportunities with regional investors, and regional companies with Australian capital. These were plans for extending the business geographically and changing how private investments might be held and traded.

By 2025, his interviews were still centred on private-market access. A July conversation on Funded Futures covered the origins of VentureCrowd, artificial intelligence in due diligence, team-building mistakes and the practical barriers to raising capital. His pitch had acquired more operating experience behind it. The questions remained familiar: who gets access, how much work a transaction requires and whether technology can make the process more efficient.

April 2026 brought a different kind of capital problem. VentureCrowd Holdings entered administration on 9 April. An initial creditors’ meeting heard claims totalling A$7.3 million. Maarbani characterised the process as a restructuring of corporate debt and said operating subsidiaries and managed funds were unaffected at that time. That was his stated position during the administration, a dated assurance about a particular stage of events.

On 16 July, the Federal Court refused an urgent application connected with a proposed restructuring. The court found the evidence insufficient to establish adequate protection for a secured creditor’s interests. VentureCrowd Holdings entered liquidation on 24 July. In August, further winding-up applications involving other companies in the group followed. The sequence gave the company’s history a sharp distinction between the reach of its original proposition and the financial condition of the organisation built to deliver it.

Maarbani’s earlier work remains a record of someone who understood the machinery well enough to become dissatisfied with it. He moved from legal structures to operating a platform, from advising fund managers to arguing that their potential audience was wider than they assumed. He brought humour, technical familiarity and a persistent dislike of unnecessary delay to that project. The later corporate events belong to the same account. Walking faster can change the journey. The machinery still has to hold.