Founder Focus Ep 19 with Stuart Clout: Post-it Notes at 3am to a $236M Exit. The Journey of Thedocyard To Ansarada.

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Tribe Global Ventures

Business:investing, Investing, Entrepreneurship, Business

5.0 • 1 Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2026

⏱️ 99 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Stuart Clout founded Thedocyard at 3am on the floor of a Sydney law firm boardroom, listed it on the ASX the week before COVID locked down Australia, merged with Ansarada, and rode the combined business through to a $236m acquisition by Datasite. He joins Don and Aaron to unpack twelve years of B2B SaaS lessons, the deal mechanics, and what he wishes he had known sooner. Intro and origin story The 3am post-it note moment and the birth of Closing Rooms Top three lessons: founder problem fit, demos vs sales, the Mom Test The Gail Goodman talk that kept Stuart in the game $500 of coffees: the lead-gen tactic that beat everything else Anti-sales is the new sales Apathy, durability and becoming a verb The 2020 ASX listing one week before COVID The Ansarada merger: how the deal got done The Datasite acquisition: $236m, $2.50 per share, nine months of process The ACCC and policy frustrations Where Australian B2B SaaS should focus Founder mindset, fitness, family and "you can have everything, just not at the same time" Find Stuart hello@tribeglobal.vc

Transcript

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0:00.0	I was doing all this random stuff.
0:12.0	And actually what kept happening in the dockyard kept getting like people querying my website
0:18.0	and people calling me and going, can I actually have this thing please? And I'm like, I'm not that excited about that.
0:22.6	I'm just like, I hate to be a lawyer.
0:24.6	And what I actually realized was that I was tripping over product market fit very early on
0:29.6	because I was getting drawn towards it.
0:31.6	And that's another thing.
0:32.6	Like, if people are grabbing you by the hair and ask you, can you please charge me for this thing then you
0:39.5	probably should follow that rabbit down the rabbit hole I reckon anti-sales is new the
0:48.0	new sales which is which is challenge people to say well why do you need my? Because if you can't talk someone out of buying,
0:56.4	then you know you're in the shoe for product market fit. Instead of trying to talk people
1:02.0	into buying, almost challenge them to say, well, do you really need this though? Like, it sounds like
1:06.8	using an Excel spreadsheet's fine. And that this would just be slightly better than an Excel
1:11.2	spreadsheet. And if I was founding a business today and I was the founder, I would be having
1:17.1	those conversations off from day zero because you'll find out super quick that maybe you shouldn't
1:21.9	waste your time. It was an opportunity for me as an executive to be no longer required and I stepped away from the business.
1:30.4	So yeah, that was how it happened.
1:32.7	It was so I've told that full story.
1:35.2	And even just sort of telling it out loud, it's like, oh God, it was actually more traumatic than I'm... It's.
1:57.1	Stuart, so good to have you join us.
2:05.6	I found this line online that says, I founded the dockyard in 2016, listed it on the ASX in 2020,
2:13.0	and then acquired Ansirata via a merger also in 2020 to bring together the two best deal tech companies on the earth.
	...

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