one of Lume\u2019s founding investors<\/a>.<\/p>\nAt the time of the 2023 transaction, Letterboxd had 16 staff, with Auckland-based Gemma Gracewood as editor-in-chief, who signed off after more than a decade in March last year.<\/p>\n
According to LinkedIn Premium Insights, the company has 124 employees today, including 34 in the US, 21 in India and 19 in New Zealand.<\/p>\n
In a 2023 interview, Buchanan told the Herald that he and von Randow had financed Letterboxd themselves since founding the service in 2011.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was no outside capital,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe took the slow road, bootstrapping by using time from Cactuslab [their web design and development company] to build out the platform.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we only hired staff once we broke even. The first fulltime person funded by revenue was in March 2020.\u201d<\/p>\n
Third big score<\/p>\n
Letterboxd is the pair\u2019s third commercial hit.<\/p>\n
Buchanan and von Randow founded Cactus Lab in 2001 as their first venture. Both graduated from the University of Auckland in the mid-1990s with computer science degrees; von Randow joined web design firm WebMedia as his first job while Buchanan became art director of computer magazine Bytes & Bytes and later NetGuide.<\/p>\n
Cactuslab was a pioneer in its field. It\u2019s still 100% owned by its founders and numbers Barfoot & Thompson, Ockham Residential, Honda New Zealand, the Jane Goodall Institute, the AA and Westpac among its clients.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t realise at the time but, by starting and growing Cactuslab, we were building the engine that would eventually allow us to build Letterboxd,\u201d Buchanan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you don\u2019t take funding at the start of a big tech project, one of the few other viable options is to supplement it with other paid work. It\u2019s a much slower path, but it allowed us to be much more deliberate in how we designed the features and grew a resilient community.\u201d<\/p>\n
Buchanan and von Randow founded their second start-up, Verifi Identity Services, in 2011 with fintech players Tyler McNamee and Vincent McCartney (each of the four had a 25% share).<\/p>\n
They created Cloudcheck \u2013 an identity verification platform inspired by the user-hostile nature of the Crown-backed RealMe \u2013 and gained Sharesies, Milford Asset Management and other high-profile firms as early adopters.<\/p>\n
In February last year, UK-listed GBG Group bought Verifi for $20m upfront, plus $8m in earnouts (split between payments this year and next).<\/p>\n
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald\u2019s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Its celebrity users include Martin Scorsese and Charli XCX, and its social media is studded with Hollywood and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":526364,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[260334,3225,5195,3167,2082,78,2454,55071,1132,1094,111,43,6042,139,69,194901,260336,3048,301,61,260335,113012],"class_list":["post-526363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-423m","tag-according","tag-be","tag-buy","tag-for","tag-in","tag-industry","tag-letterboxd","tag-million","tag-netflix","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newsletter","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-nzfounded","tag-puck","tag-said","tag-talks","tag-to","tag-us250","tag-zealandfounded"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526363\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/526364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}