There's a bit of a backgrounder in the AFR on migration, attracting those with skills and the like. Texan Dean Tuck isn't one, rather he came to do a PhD, was homeless, lucked into jobs, had a stint at BHP before landing CEO at DRE....
Paul Chapman, an accountant and serial company-starter, was looking for someone “young and dumb to do all the dirty work” on a new exploration business he was going to create out of a sharemarket shell, Tuck says.
The company had $300,000 in cash, no employees, no mining or exploration approvals, and no relationships with organisations that owned the land it wanted to explore. Tuck offered to become the chief executive – and pay his own wage. He invested $30,000, which covered three months of his salary.
It wasn’t easy, but four years and 12 hires later, Dreadnought Resources reported, on 28 December, that it had discovered neodymium and praseodymium, two rare earths used in electric cars and wind turbines. The ore body, at the Yin prospect near Exmouth, contains 14 million tonnes, of which 1 per cent is estimated to be rare earths. Drilling over the next six months should find more.
Dreadnought, without raising one dollar of revenue, is now worth $300 million.
Tuck says he borrowed his leadership style from Google. “They train people up so the business wants them, but they want to leave,” he says. “I look forward to the day they [the Dreadnought staff] go off on their own and start their own businesses.”