The Rokt star whose tech wealth hides humble beginnings
When Bruce Buchannan debuts on The Richest 250 list with over $600m to his name, it’s an accolade that won’t sit comfortably with the self-made millionaire who prefers the nitty gritty.
When The Australian’s annual list of the nation’s richest 250 people is published next month, Bruce Buchanan looks likely to make his debut.
He’s now worth more than $600m, courtesy of the recent capital raising which valued his Rokt digital marketing business at a cool $US3.5bn ($5.6bn).
Rokt, which has patented technology connecting advertisers through partners’ websites to new digital online and mobile consumers and is backed by Lachlan Murdoch, Square Peg Capital and Sydney buyout firm TDM Growth Partners, boosted revenues by more than 40 per cent over the past year to $US600m.
Rokt is now operating in 15 countries and firmly on track for a bumper sharemarket listing in the US this time next year.
But put the topic of his paper wealth and rich-lister status to the man himself, and Buchanan calls it “bizarre”.
“It feels uncomfortable, knowing the environment I came from,” he says, in reference to his working-class upbringing at The Entrance on the NSW Central Coast.
“The thought of getting to that sort of point is kind of weird.
“I don’t think wealth is a positive thing per se. I think one of life’s joys is actually defining your own path and I think what makes people really interesting and impactful is the struggle they have had.
“I think the people that have had to fight and have resilience, tenacity and drive are some of the most impactful people in society.”
A successful executive before establishing Rokt, the one-time Jetstar chief executive’s toughest battle happened 40 years ago when he was just 12 years old.
After his parents divorced, his mother, Linda, was diagnosed with cancer. He looked after his younger sister on his own for the next four years but his mother lost her battle to live just before her 40th birthday.
“Those four years were probably some of the hardest years of my life because they are the years where you are supposed to be growing up. Instead I had a single, very sick mum who was slowly deteriorating and a sister six years younger,” he says softly.
“It is a sort of feeling of isolation, but at the same time, a responsibility that I think forces you to grow up.”
Buchanan still believes he and his sister have never fully recovered from the trauma of those years. “Going through that turmoil, I think, is something that stays with you for a long period of time. We develop in lots of different ways, but that is something that shapes you and it is not something you will ever drop,” he says.
He believes the experiences of his youth – alone after his mother died, he also started a business to get him through the final two years of a high school from which only a small percentage of students went to university – have shaped his philosophy on wealth.
It is one shared by his wife of 13 years, Elizabeth, who started Rokt with her husband and is now the firm’s chief commercial officer.
When they crystallise some of their wealth at the planned Rokt float, after paying for their children’s education, they will give the rest away to charity.
The Buchanans have already established the Scamander philanthropic foundation, named after the small town on the northeast coast of Tasmania where Bruce’s father has had a farm since his son started at university.
Elizabeth is active in the US not-for-profit Vital Voices, a global organisation that supports 50,000 female leaders.
The Rokt Foundation has separate partnerships with the Melbourne-based charity Teach for Australia to support bright graduates to teach in disadvantaged schools, and with Red Bull’s Formula One Academy Program, an all-female racing series.
In 2022, Rokt joined the Pledge 1% movement, committing to donate 1 per cent of its product, profits and time to charitable causes.
In December 2024, the Buchanans attended the Nasdaq closing bell ceremony in New York to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the initiative alongside Scott Farquhar, co-founder of Atlassian, who is founder of Pledge 1%.
“I believe that our society is better off when there is equality of opportunity. I think inherited wealth is one of the scars on our society,” Buchanan says.
“That really is about the best in society, ultimately, not getting the opportunity to achieve their full potential, and that makes us all worse off,” Buchanan declares with a steely look. “But I think it makes the kids’ lives that actually get that inherited wealth worse off as well. I think you want your children to have to struggle. I always call it the paradox of parenting ... I don’t think there’s any real learning without an understanding of failure.
“Our hardest lessons in life are learned through the toughest experiences.”
Lessons from life’s challenges
Sophie Buchanan was one of the two children Elizabeth brought to her “Brady Bunch” marriage to her husband which was celebrated on the beach in Phuket in October 2011.
Bruce brought two girls of his own and together they now also have an 11-year-old son.
Sophie was born with an unusual condition known as Heterotaxy syndrome, whereby the heart and other organs were in the wrong place in the chest and abdomen, and has been through a string of marathon heart procedures over her 17 years. She also has a cleft lip and palate, and other medical conditions, including hearing loss and arthritis.
Her stepfather has previously spoken of the compassion his daughter has taught him through her medical struggles, putting any problem into perspective.
He calls her his guiding star towards a bigger purpose in life – living proof that everyone deserves a fair chance at making something great, and a “remarkable, resilient” person.
“It is hard to put yourself in anyone’s shoes with the struggles they go through, but she has had to face a lot of adversity at a very young age,” he says. “I think when she was younger, she didn’t really fully take it all in. I think as she has got older, it has become harder because there is a lot more of understanding that she is different.
“The great news for her is she has been really good over the last few years and we’ve had – touch wood – no unexpected challenges ... but you never know when there may be another major thing with her heart, her juvenile arthritis, or something else.”
Sophie is close with her older sisters Sarah, Hannah and Charlotte, and her brother Baxter.
In business, Buchanan has faced other challenges over the past year, both outside and inside Rokt.
Since 2016 he had been a director of Mexican fast-food business Guzman y Gomez, but ahead of its bumper listing on the ASX last year he decided to step down from the board. He still has a small shareholding in the firm worth tens of millions of dollars on paper.
He says his passion at GYG was helping its founder, former investment banker Stephen Marks, build the business.
“Some businesses get to a point where when they go public and they are on the other side of the world and you know that they just need a different style of leadership,” Buchanan says. “The other problem is tyranny of distance. I love Stephen and I love the journey we’ve been on. But I also thought the value I could add remotely was getting less and less in the powerful business he was in.”
Last year Buchanan had to manage the disappointment of former Wesfarmers executive-turned BHP, Coles and Transurban director Terry Bowen being unable to relocate to America to take up a full-time role with Rokt as chief operating officer.
Instead Bowen became a Rokt non-executive director, but he still makes four trips to New York each year and spends about 20 per cent of his time on Rokt business.
“When you are trying to do something that is hard, it involves taking some risks, it involves trying things and trying to find paths that are unconventional. Recruiting someone to move their family to New York was definitely unconventional,” Buchanan muses.
“The great news where we landed with Terry is we feel like we’ve got the best of Terry at the moment in the business. We just got him in a different flavour. But personal circumstances and all those sorts of things, ultimately they hang over all of us,”
Buchanan says the most important piece of advice Bowen has given him at Rokt is to ensure the back end of the business keeps up with the speed of its front end growth.
“Part of that is about focus and priorities, and part of it is about people. But part of it is also about just making sure we define for the team what is really important,” he says. “Terry is someone who is in the detail, in the weeds, and he’s very grounded. But he’s got the ability to translate that to broader pattern recognition in a way that is quite remarkable.”
Bowen’s words will be ringing in Buchanan’s ears over the coming months as his team integrates the largest acquisition in Rokt’s history – the recent $US300m purchase of the Michael Katz-led customer data platform, mParticle.
MParticle’s platform helps customers unify, manage and action customer data across websites, social media, email and connected devices.
This year Rokt plans to spend about $US150m on research and development across its legacy and mParticle operations. The latter will provide a new and exciting data layer for Rokt’s AI and machine learning customer relevance engine known as The Rokt Brain.
Brain power here to serve
The Brain uses deep machine learning and advanced AI to identify the best product or service for each customer in any given situation and dynamically generates creatives, formats, and layouts that align with a customer’s preferences.
In 2024 Rokt invested $US70m in R&D for the Rokt Brain, which delivered an impressive 28 per cent improvement in relevance for customers in the six months to the end of December.
The goal this year is to get up to 15 per cent improvement.
“I think it is massive for the business, but I think it is even bigger for the clients we work with,” Buchanan says.
“I think the concept of real-time relevance is so powerful, and not just for e-commerce. Think about the types of things that businesses want to use their data for, to activate things in real time.”
One of Buchanan’s business heroes has long been Apple founder Steve Jobs.
He reveres plenty of the tech legend’s famous quotes. But one stands out from the pack: “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your inner voice.”
It has been and will continue to be his quiet mantra at Rokt, that people who genuinely change the world have the audacity to dream big. Sometimes they fail and the “tall poppy syndrome” tears them down, as they once did Jobs.
Buchanan just wishes society was more prepared to celebrate their successes.
“It feels like in today’s day and age, which is very glossy and self conscious, that people are too preoccupied with how they are seen and perceived,” he says.
“I think the substance of what we do often is a lot of hard work and a lot of real nitty gritty.
“It requires a fortitude and an inner voice where you just say to yourself, ‘Look, I believe this can be done’. Then you actually make it happen.”
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