David Keane knows we’re all connected. As the Chief Executive Officer of sales enablement software company Bigtincan, he has witnessed firsthand the serendipity that life has to offer in his travels across the globe.
The business he started above a coffee shop in Sydney is now based in Boston, which has a new owner after Vector Capital bought his company in December for AUS $183 million. Despite a change of hemispheres and owners for his business over all these years, Keane has stayed put as CEO. He continues to head a business that has served thousands of sales and marketing organizations of megabrands like Nike, AT&T, Prudential, Merck, Starwood Hotels, Winnebago, Red Bull, and Clorox.
An avid reader of the Australian critic and journalist Clive James, per a 2022 interview, Keane is fascinated with James’s “irreverent look at life in all its strangeness,” he said. “It’s a way of centering oneself on what is really important as we journey through what can only be called a rapidly changing world.”
That’s fitting because speed is Keane’s thing. He has a “passion” for hypergrowth firms, having notably started Australian company Veritel, which became a major player in the country in less than five years. In 2008, he moved into the mobile applications industry, and three years later, Bigtincan was born. Now, his company’s Genie AI, a content-creation and emulation-based platform, is helping to set the pace in the exploding industry.
“The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned,” wrote James. When you learn by dealing with the world’s biggest companies after starting your business in a nondescript office, you’re going to have plenty to impart.
