Beginnings: Victoria Ransom

At 35, Victoria Ransom is on to her third start-up and now talks of creating and developing businesses with such affable ease you would think it was entirely natural Photo: Robyn Toomey

If you’re ever tramping in the North Island of New Zealand, you could do worse than visit Victoria Ransom’s home town of Scott’s Ferry. Two hours north of Wellington, it was from the tiny 30-student school here that Victoria Ransom took off to study at the United World College in Montezuma, New Mexico, a trip that opened her eyes to a world of possibilities.

Working with 200 students from all over the world, Ransom completed the international baccalaureate and went onto complete a degree in psychology at Macalester College in Minnesota in the US. It was upon graduating that she had a panic moment realising that she didn’t actually want to work as a psychologist, although it wasn’t until later that the seeds of entrepreneurialism were sown.

“I went into a graduate business analyst program with Morgan Stanley during the dot com boom and bust, so I got a lot of exposure to tech entrepreneurs,” Ransom says. “But I still thought that you needed to be from a family of entrepreneurs in order to become one.”

At 35, Victoria Ransom is on to her third start-up and now talks of creating and developing businesses with such affable ease you would think it was entirely natural. However, her first experience as an entrepreneur came when she left with fellow analyst and would-be entrepreneur Alain Chuard to found an adventure travel company, Access Travel.

“We started a businesses doing what we loved doing – snowboarding and ski travel,” Ransom says.

“The thought was that we’d do it for a year and see what happened.”

Still operational, Access Travel now runs adventure holidays to 16 different countries. Ransom, however, stepped away from the business in 2006 to study an MBA at Harvard Business School and as part of the program spent a summer with Highland Capital Partners and helped develop a booking system for smaller travel companies. This project was placed on the backburner when she chanced upon a better idea.

“For Access Travel we were looking for software which would make it easy to generate social networking marketing campaigns,” Ransom says. “There wasn’t anything on the market, so we found some developers, who turned out to be in Estonia, and got them to build the software.”

Graduating from Harvard Business School at the beginning of the financial crisis, she nonetheless managed to convince investors to sink $250,000 into product development and in August 2009 the web application software went live.

The few hundred customers who were already using a beta version of the software quickly swelled to several thousand and Wildfire went into expansion mode.

By the beginning of 2010, the company boasted seven employees and at last count those ranks have swelled to more than 120, to support 50,000 customers.

“Maybe there will be an exit in the next five years but right now I’m very much focused on growing the business,” Ransom says.

BRW

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