Ryan Murtagh

CEO, Neto

Melbourne

Ryan is an entrepreneur at heart, his business journey started when he took over a failing school tuck shop and turned it into a small business success story at the age of 14. Although his business interests have been varied, he has always had a passion for online retail. Ryan's first online store was available through his school's intranet, it sold the fly-fishing flies he tied while at boarding school in South Africa.

After completing a business degree at the Queensland University of Technology, Ryan continued on his entrepreneurial journey, building an online department store that imported and distributed a range of goods from China. It was at this time that Ryan hired Simon, a talented programmer who also studied at QUT. Simon was brought on board to assist in the maintenance and development of the online store that Ryan was operating. At the time, Ryan was struggling to scale the business efficiently with the software available to him.

Using the experience Ryan had gained as an online retailer, and the development skills of Simon, the two set out on the path of developing an end-to-end ecommerce platform designed to automate and streamline online trading for SMEs. They focussed on the pain points they were experiencing as a growing start up and set about solving these through software. Soon, they realised that they could share the solution with others, helping them to grow online. Today, thousands of businesses use the Neto platform to run their online stores and cumulatively they have turned over more than $1 billion through the service.