Macquarie Technology Group founders built success by staying out of each other’s way

David and Aidan Tudehope have been running Macquarie Technology Group formore than three decades.

Such chief executive tenure is rare for any listed company, especially one that has survived deregulation, multiple tech cycles and the constant threat of irrelevance.

But the secret of the company’s success isn’t found in its loyal corporate and government clients, the technology innovations – or even its evolution from a plucky challenger telco named Macquarie Telecom into a hi-tech digital infrastructure business spanning cloud, cyber security and data centres.

It lies in something far more human and harder to engineer: the rhythm of a sibling partnership which has endured when so many others have fractured.

They’re two brothers who think alike where it counts, think differently when itmatters, and somehow manage to never get in each other’s way.

“Ultimately, there’s always been enough space for both of us to play our own roles and be ourselves,” David Tudehope says.

“It is a bit like a restaurant: one of us is waiting tables, the other is in the kitchen. We hand off at the bench, but we are not climbing over each other.”

That balance, a rare mix of complementarity and independence, has shaped Macquarie Technology Group from humble beginnings in a tiny Sydney office with ahandful of staff into one of Australia’s most enduring technology companies.

One brother thrives on detail, structure and understanding people; the other leans into customer engagement, advocacy and government policy. Yet both share a love of technology and a fascination with innovation.

It is a dynamic which defies the usual stereotypes of sibling businesses.

“The thing that often surprises people is how little conflict there has been between Aidan and I. We’ve always got on well; we are genuinely good friends,” Tudehope says.

“I think the real key is that we’ve always had enough space to play our own game. The business has always been complex enough that we were never tripping over each other.”

When the working day ends, the boundaries hold. Outside of work, they rarely talk business.

“You have to draw a line. If you don’t, life becomes endless work. You need time where you can just be brothers, not business partners,” he says.

For decades, David Tudehope carried around a quote from former US president Calvin Coolidge scribbled on a piece of paper in his wallet. It read: “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost aproverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts.”

“That is hugely important. There are so many challenges in the journey of an entrepreneur. Things will not go to plan. You need resilience. You need belief in ultimate success,” he says.

“Then even in a tech company, talent is the single biggest challenge. Attracting and retaining talent is the most important role of the entrepreneur as you scale.”

He believes founders must adapt as their businesses grow – a transition many either resist or fail to make.

“My brother and I have changed enormously. We’ve evolved from entrepreneurs into what we call ‘business builders’. But many founders don’t want to do that. That is fine. But then you should sell the business and go start another one,” he says.

“The important thing is knowing when it’s no longer fun and being honest about whether you want to keep evolving. In our case, we continue to enjoy it.”

The Founder’s Mentality.

David Tudehope grew up in Sydney, and studied law and commerce at the University of New South Wales – a combination that shaped his disciplined, regulatory-savvy approach to business.

In 1992, when he left a safe banking job to established Macquarie Telecom with Aidan in the wake of telecommunications deregulation – they also have a sister named Danielle – the brothers regularly travelled overnight by bus from Sydney to Melbourne.

They would change into suits en route before visiting potential clients.

Neither asked their parents or grandparents what they thought about them going into business together. But the family influence ran deep. Their paternal grandmother lived to 100.

“From my grandparents I inherited two things: a strong entrepreneurial instinct and asteady diet of Great Depression stories. That’s a powerful combination,” Tudehopesays.

“They taught me not to take anything for granted. Success isn’t guaranteed, stability isn’t guaranteed. Everything can vanish unless you work hard and use common sense.

“Our generation hasn’t been through a real depression. But their generation did andhearing their stories gave me perspective and drive. It was that family influence, especially on Mum’s side, that instilled discipline and a deep motivation to build something. Those values have guided me through the entire journey of the company.”

His father, Brian, died in August 2013. His mother, famed Sydney philanthropist Maureen Tudehope, had died a decade earlier.

“There was a period where it felt like everyone in my family was dying. A generational run, perhaps? But I remember thinking it wasn’t a good sign when the cemetery, the stonemason and the funeral parlour were all on speed dial,” he quips.

Fifteen years ago, Tudehope was interviewed by American Jimmy Allen, co-authorof The Founder’s Mentality, a book which later influenced how Macquarie restructured itself.

The book argues that long-term corporate success isn’t primarily about strategy butabout maintaining the mindset founders bring at the start: a clear insurgent mission, an owner’s mindset, and obsession with customers and frontline execution.

As companies grow, complexity and bureaucracy creep in, often eroding that edge.

“We certainly had that challenge. We made a change 11 years ago that’s been hugely important for our business,” Tudehope says.

“We had lost some of the founder’s mentality. We rediscovered it and learned an enormous amount from Jimmy Allen. The main thing was the challenge of centralising key functions, how important it is to enable the businesses to besuccessful and not have central functions dominate.”

What followed was a deliberate decentralisation with a framework and boundaries. The central HR function was minimised to the essentials: payroll, basic policies and staff engagement.

“We devolved finance as much as possible to the businesses so the people leading the businesses could run it like their own. That ethos of freedoms and boundaries hasbeen hugely transformational,” he says.

“Each of the executive team took over a business of their own. We kept the centralfunction as small as possible. We often talk now about big state governments and the smallest possible central government.”

The changes were uncomfortable, especially for those working in central functions, but the pay-off was profound.

“What we rediscovered was our entrepreneurial spirit – that founder’s mentality – not just in Aidan and I, but more importantly in the executive team,” he says.

Risk, he says, has always been treated as the flip side of strategy.

That philosophy has taken on fresh relevance amid renewed scrutiny of founder-led companies in recent years.

In Asia there are many dedicated investment funds for founder-led businesses, recognising that founders create extraordinary wealth, especially when there is high shareholder alignment.

But the model in Australia has been challenged in recent years by the controversies surrounding firms such as WiseTech Global, Mineral Resources and Crown Resorts.

“I think founders will have bad years, and will have problems and challenges of allsorts and so will non-founder businesses. The common element is not ‘founders’, the common element is simply they are human beings running a business,” Tudehope says.

“Every business had a founder once, they created something very special. That builds a culture and plans that succeed. As a country you want people to found successful businesses, because they create jobs and investment.”

The Noah’s ark formula.

Innovation at Macquarie Technology Group is not accidental. One of the more distinctive tools of the firm’s strategy is what Tudehope calls the “Noah’s ark” formula, assembling a small group of experts from across the business in a forumthat goes deep on a single trend.

They usually do it twice a year, travelling to different locations around the world forup to a fortnight.
The most recent expedition, in the second half of 2025, focused on artificial intelligence. But not in the way most headlines suggest.

“There is one thing we are very active on which is incredibly important for our future… helping our corporate and government customers leverage the data sets they have internally,” Tudehope says.

The challenge, he says, is trust. “If you load company data into AI, you basicallyexpose it to the web … So how do you do that while protecting your company data?”

Security, governance and clean data become the competitive edge, a space Macquarie believes plays directly to its strengths from 20 years of doing cybersecurity for about 40 per cent of federal government departments.

The insights in the latest Noah’s ark on this topic didn’t come from a single executive, but from putting different minds – from product, sales and marketing and engineering – in the same room during a field trip to various technology companiesin the United Kingdom.

“You all look at your notepad afterwards and your take aways are completely different,” Tudehope says.
“We used to always go to the US … But more recently we’ve found the UK and western Europe really interesting.”

Macquarie Technology Group shares are up about 25 per cent over the past five years and more than 300 per cent over their history.

But over the past 12 months the stock has fallen more than 20 per cent, as markets have cooled on near-term growth and the company’s margins have been weighed down by heavy investment, especially in data centres.

Macquarie bought its first centre 25 years ago. It now has five and is building a sixth, which Tudehope says is on time and on budget.

“They are a big part of our business. That one-stop shop is very powerful,” he says.

On the questions about energy consumption and environmental concerns surrounding data centres, Tudehope is blunt.

Firstly, he believes they are significantly more power-efficient than corporates running their own servers.

Secondly, he claims concerns about surging power and water demand are being fuelled by unvetted, often speculative applications lodged at no cost by property developers, creating inflated forecasts and the risk of costly infrastructure being builton artificial demand rather than genuine projects.

“The solution is simple: charge a fee and get someone to assess whether the application is real,” he says.

Today the Tudehopes regularly appear on Rich Lists, although David always dismisses the numbers. They hold a 41 per cent stake in Macquarie Technology Group, which currently has a market value of about $1.6bn. “I don’t read them, Idon’t comment on them, and I wish people wouldn’t do them,” he says.

Philanthropy has an important place in his family life. He and wife Elizabeth Dibbs, the deputy chancellor of Western Sydney University, support a range of institutions including the National Portrait Gallery and the John Monash Foundation.

But on the subject of wealth and success, Tudehope stresses “you’ve got to be careful not to take yourself too seriously”.

“You need perspective. You can say, ‘Look how much we’ve grown over the decade, ’but markets then say: ‘Great, now tell us about next half, next year, and the year after’. The combination of the tech sector and that relentless focus on futureperformance is very levelling,” he says.

“We are marked to a share price every day and that becomes the measure of wealth. But honestly, wealth hasn’t changed me. The nature of the business and the pressure of future expectations keep it very grounding. It is a very levelling world.”