Rod Johnson

For Australian-born entrepreneur Rod Johnson, the path to becoming a multimillionaire has taken him from teaching at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music before to writing books on computer programming in London and founding a software company.

Eventually it led him to Silicon Valley, where in August he sold his business SpringSource to the fast-rising US software company VMware for US$420 million, cash and equity and unvested stock and options.

Johnson’s background includes studying music history, in which he has a PhD, pure mathematics and computer science. While teaching at the Conservatorium in the mid-1990s he was also writing small successful software applications on the side, and became involved in computer-based music. In 1996 he developed an interest in Sun Microsystems’ newly-emerging Java software language.

“I decided that I needed to do one thing as a hobby, and one thing as my career, and figured it was time to switch,” he says.

In 1997 he relocated to London, and began working as a freelance software consultant, servicing clients including FT.com and the London Clearing House, and in 2001 authored a book on the Spring Framework (a set of open source software tools for developing Java-based applications).

The community of Spring developers was growing at an explosive rate, and by 2004 he and the other core contributors realised something remarkable was happening. That led to the founding of SpringSource (then known as Interface21) as a company dedicated to making development of enterprise applications in Java easier.

Rapid acceptance of the Spring Framework led to the company seeking capital to expand, and in May 2007 it raised US$10 million from the Silicon Valley VC firm Benchmark Capital.

“Because Spring was so well known, and having such a big impact on the industry, we were fairly fortunate in being able to choose investors,” Johnson says. “That led to the decision of where the best place would be to have the headquarters, and I made the decision in 2007 that the best place would be California.”

The company subsequently changed its name to SpringSource, and in 2008 raised a second found of US$15 million from Benchmark and another Silicon Valley VC firm, Accel Partners.

Johnson says it was the move to Silicon Valley that led directly to the acquisition by VMware, as he was able to become acquainted with VMware’s chief executive officer, Paul Maritz, a former Microsoft executive who in the 1990s formed part of the company’s five-person executive management team. Being in close proximity meant the two were able to dine together on several occasions.

“The network in the Valley is very valuable – and in forming the relationship with VMware,” Johnson says. “It’s a very interesting benefit.”

“I was really excited about the vision that he [Maritz] has. One of the reasons that I had a conviction that this was the right deal was having formed a personal relationship with Paul.”

VMware has specialised in creating software technology called virtualisation that helps companies make better use of their computing investments using a technology. The acquisition of SpringSource takes it in a different direction, allowing VMware to work more closely with application developers.

Johnson has not disclosed how much he personally gained through the acquisition, but has stayed on to continue running SpringSource as a division of VMware.

He says another benefit of moving to the Valley has been that he is able to lead a more normal life. With the founders of SpringSource coming from the United Kingdom, Austria, Canada and the United States, staff tended to be employed where they lived rather than relocated, and the business was run virtually. But managing such a dispersed organisation from London presented problems.

“I used to travel so much from London,” Johnson says. “The time zone issue was just terrible – I could never put my kids to bed because I would always be on the phone as people on the West Coast were waking up. So it’s actually much easier to work some normal hours here.”

Today the company employs 160 people, with two offices in the San Francisco Bay Area employing 60 people and another in Southampton in the UK which employs 25. An additional team of six is based in Australia, with other smaller offices scattered around the world.

Apart from a brief period in 2001, Johnson has not lived in Australia full-time since the 1990s, but still visits once or twice a year. But in terms of building a business, he knows where he would rather be.

“There’s an awful lot of talent in Australia, but it is easier to raise capital here,” he says.

ENDS