Top Australian buys into Unfiltered advice platform

Young New Zealand entrepreneur Jake Millar has secured the equivalent of a half-million dollar investment from a leading Australian businessman for Millar’s growth software platform Unfiltered. 

Just six months after launching Unfiltered as a business education platform – featuring interviews with the likes of Virgin Group Founder, Sir Richard Branson and many others – Millar and co-founder Yuuki Ogino have attracted the attention of investment and growth specialist Richard Bell.
 
Bell, the former General Manager of The Entourage, has forged a stellar career in business after becoming involved in his first venture aged 20.
 
Now 27, Bell has stakes in six companies, and an impressive ASX share and property portfolio. Bell’s business success has come despite dropping out of school at age 16.
 
While still at school Millar famously turned-down a $40,000 scholarship to study law at the University of Otago and went on to sell his first start-up business OOMPHER, a motivational careers website, to government entity Careers NZ when he was 19. That was only 10 months after Millar launched OOMPHER.
 
Millar then turned to Unfiltered as his second start-up.
 
Bell has become Chairman and a key shareholder of Unfiltered at a critical time, with the business being launched into Australia and the United States. Over the next three years Bell will commit his time and expertise to the value of A$500,000 in return for a 21 percent stake in the company, as part of the just-signed deal.
 
An accomplished business advisor and speaker, Bell has consulted to thousands of companies across 125 different sectors. Bell is a seed investor and was until February 2016 General Manager of The Entourage – a high profile business movement providing education and a sense of community to hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs in Australia and around the world.
 
The Entourage, founded by Young Rich-Lister Jack Delosa, is Australasia’s largest business education company with over 300,000 entrepreneurs in its worldwide network. Among other achievements Bell grew staff numbers from 12 to 90 in two years, and in 2015 was voted Australia’s number three emerging business leader by influential media companies Start Up Daily and Fairfax Media.
“Rich and I connected this year after I interviewed him for Unfiltered. I was blown away by his extensive business knowledge and amazing track-record leading a team of 90 as a 26-year-old, and pretty quickly realised that his skillset, not his money, was what we needed to grow into a global company,” Millar says.

“Unfiltered is uniquely positioned. Although we now have seven staff and we’re hiring aggressively, we do not need cash to grow as yet. Our business is totally bootstrapped. We made a conscious decision to bring on board an incredibly unique skill set in return for sweat equity, as opposed to cash for equity. Most start-ups do not have this luxury.” Both Millar and Bell have the capital to invest if the company needs it, however they are in discussion with several leading investors from around the globe.
 
Bell says having resigned from The Entourage he was looking for a big business play.
“Unfiltered ticks this box on so many levels. Not only is Jake and Yuuki’s progress from launch to million-dollar business in eight months phenomenal and almost unprecedented in start-up world, but I passionately believe that together we can build a truly global business, transforming the face of business education around the world.” 
 
“Jake has achieved incredible things in a very short time. I’m hugely impressed with his determination, hustle and risk-appetite. The connections he’s made are phenomenal, from the Prime Minister, to Hollywood director James Cameron, to celebrity fashion designers, to media moguls and countless business masterminds around the world. There’s no question, he’s definitely the most connected young person in New Zealand.”
 
With Millar having moved to New York city last month, the growth strategy for Unfiltered is very much global. He says it is very much his intention to build a $100 million company.
Other interviewees that have shared their business ideas on Unfiltered include Y Combinator President Sam Altman, Tesla Motors co-founder Ian Wright, Rendeavour founder Stephen Jennings, Cullen Investments Executive Chairman, Eric Watson and beer baron Sir Douglas Myers.

Photo: Jake Millar (left) with Richard Bell.