It’s a long way from 2nd Street in San Francisco, where Evan Thornley once ran Australia’s first tech unicorn, to the Melbourne suburb of Mount Waverley where he now runs a residential property company.

And much has changed in the tech industry since those heady San Francisco days, when the search engine company he co-founded, LookSmart, hit a market valuation of $US7 billion in the dizzy heights of the late-1990s dotcom boom, making Thornley and his then-wife, Tracey Ellery, on-paper billionaires at the time.