Published: 5 October 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
The hitch?
It was someone else’s dream.
“It just felt that there was a better experience to be had, with a more purposeful career that made a greater contribution to society,” says McCurdie, leaning back in a chair in a meeting room in the Sydney Startup Hub, a high-rise building of meeting spaces and resources for entrepreneurs in the city’s CBD. “Otherwise, what the hell were we doing?”
Ross agrees - “Winning that game didn’t necessarily mean a good life” – before suddenly looking at his phone and furrowing his brow.
“Is everything all right?” says McCurdie, looking over at Ross, across the desk.
Before jumping up to leave the room momentarily, Ross explains that he’s just fielded an email from one of the duo’s many clients, who use their not-for-profit company, Humanitix, as their on-line ticketing platform.
A pioneering charity, Humanitix redistributes all the profits that a ticketing platform normally takes from organisations and ticket buyers to 30 partner charities. The causes it benefits are diverse, including domestic violence, Indigenous literacy, feeding the homeless and rural medical care.
Companies that have signed up to use Humanitix include Football Federation Australia and Westfield. Their venture has sold approximately $8 million worth of tickets via the platform. Each participating company chooses which partner charity they would like their ticket fees to go to.
“There’s so many subconscious values that I was brought up with around the value of community, around everybody looking out for each other,” says McCurdie.
“It’s all about alleviating inequality,” says McCurdie of the pair’s goal, adding that their focus is specifically on alleviating suffering, poverty, and education gaps.
This jumping up and down and out of chairs, the furrowed brows, the running from one place to another – soon the pair will duck out of the room, mid-interview, to race to a meeting across town – has been their life since they started Humanitix in 2015.
That, and, after quitting their jobs, moving back in with their parents, in their late 20s, at their respective homes in St Ives, in the leafy – but decidedly land-locked - north shore of Sydney.
What’s it like, living at home at 30, while your friends are buying their first properties? I ask Ross (McCurdie has since moved out of his family home.)
“Yeah, please don’t put that in the article,” Ross says, grimacing. “Two weeks, I’ll be out of home! It’s so embarrassing!” His eyes crinkle as he smiles.
But that comes with the territory when you’re a 30-year-old who is more concerned with helping the socially disadvantaged than entering the property market.
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It’s an outlook that the men, who first met at Sydney’s Masada College, say they learned from their families.
Community giving, says McCurdie, who is also 30, is woven into the fabric of his family. One of his grandfathers, after emigrating to Australia from South Africa, arranged a system for people to visit those in hospital. McCurdie’s mother, a barrister by training, sits on the Australian board of Magen David Adom, Israel’s medical emergency service, and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies.
“My parents have always been giving to Jewish causes and non-Jewish causes,” adds Ross. “Not in crazy ways, it’s more their attitude.”
After high school, both men volunteered in various capacities: Ross with Jewish Care, an organisation that supports vulnerable members of the community, McCurdie with the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. (As part of his master’s degree in agriculture, McCurdie undertook a research project in rural Africa on how to improve the region’s crops.)
“There’s so many subconscious values that I was brought up with around the value of community, around everybody looking out for each other,” says McCurdie.
Ross agrees. “What I really like about Judaism is the idea that you don’t just give back to the Jewish community, but you’re supposed to try and inspire the world.”
It's a philosophy, says Ross, that was pushed to the forefront of his mind in 2015, during a trip to Kashmir with his father, who suffered a fractured vertebra in his neck, and other injuries, during a mountain biking expedition. It sparked, says Ross, something of "an existential crisis".
Since then, Humanitix has garnered some high-profile supporters. In December last year, Australia’s $30 billion technology company, Atlassian, gave the duo $1.2 million to fund them for three years. Former Wallabies captain John Eales has mentored them – and ran a leadership workshop with them – as part of their being named, this year, in the top 20 of Westpac’s Businesses of Tomorrow.
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And, a week after our interview, Ross and McCurdie were named Social Entrepreneurs of the Year at the Third Sector Awards, which celebrate leadership and innovation in the not-for-profit sector.
But, says the duo, some of their greatest supporters have been members of the Jewish community.
“She looked at us like we weren’t crazy,” says McCurdie of Ronni Kahn, “a big inspiration” and the founder of OzHarvest (a Humanitix partner charity). Both Ross and McCurdie say that, in stark contrast, they received a lot of pushback from would-be donors in the early days, who urged them to make their company a for-profit endeavour.
Australian philanthropist David Gonski was also an early mentor, as was Ray Kellerman, owner of investment firm Quentin Ayers, who helped the duo with the expensive and onerous process of becoming a registered charity, and who sits on the Humanitix board.
Kellerman was originally going to be on the board for six months but stayed because of what he calls the charity’s innovative philanthropic model. Namely, that Humanitix is a “self-sustaining” business that won’t require ongoing fundraising in order to continue to funnel profits to charities.
Some of their greatest supporters have been members of the Jewish community. “Ronni Kahn looked at us like we weren’t crazy”.
Ross and McCurdie are still scoping other charity horizons. Humantix has paired with the Australian Network on Disability to help people with disabilities attend live events. The company prompts each event organiser they deal with to complete an online questionnaire to both urge companies to make their events more accessible, and provide disabled people with the information they need to attend an event. It’s also working with Vision Australia to make the Humantix website as friendly as possible to the vision impaired.
And, says McCurdie, the pair will begin to focus even more on education charities, as a means of achieving greater long term equality, not just in Australia, but globally.
“We’re young, with energy, and able-bodied,” he says. “If we can’t do this, then who the hell is going to do this? At what point do you do anything that’s just beyond the pursuit of making money?”
Main image: From left, Adam McCurdie and Joshua Ross (All photos: Giselle Haber)
