Alexandra Keating emerges from a group of about a dozen casually dressed young men tapping away on computers at their office in trendy southern Manhattan. Pointing to the software engineers seated on the open-plan floor, who Keating has hired from Apple, Google, Square and Twitter, she muses, "these guys wouldn't let me touch anything".

Keating, the youngest daughter of Australia's 24th prime minister, Paul Keating, is self-admittedly not a technology whiz. "I know enough to interview someone," she tells AFR Weekend in an interview at the firm's headquarters in Tribeca.