A billionaire tech entrepreneur won’t send any of his five children to private school because he wants them to have the most solid childhood possible.
Sam Kroonenburg and his wife Claire, who live in Victoria, will enroll their children, aged between six and 13, in state schools.
After surveying the state’s top private schools, Mr. Kroonenburg said he was uncomfortable with what quickly seemed like a “race for status.”
He believed that for his children to thrive on their own, they needed to focus on themselves and their passions rather than having life imposed on them.
“I think if it’s too easy or everything is handed to you, then maybe you lose the passion for it,” Kroonenburg said. Australian financial magazine.
“I don’t know. I could be wrong. We’ll find out.”
Mr Kroonenburg pocketed $500 million after selling his online education company, A Cloud Guru, which he developed with his brother, Ryan, in Karratha, Western Australia.
Mr. Kroonenburg is among the richest people in the country, ranked 137th on the Financial Review’s rich list as of May 2024.
Sam Kroonenburg has hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank, but he’s still sending his five children to public schools, not private ones.
Mr Kroonenburg and his wife, Claire, inspected Victoria’s top private schools but ultimately decided that life should not be “handed over” to their children.
Mr. Kroonenburg turned to the company after being rejected from a job at Amazon and the product was initially designed to help others get high-paying jobs at the same company he had been rejected from.
The two built the program from Mr. Kroonenburg’s bedroom in three weeks. in 2015 and sold it six years later to US company Pluralsight for $2 billion.
Once Mr. Kroonenburg began developing the software in earnest, he quit his job as an IT consultant and moved into a new home with his wife and children.
‘I felt a little bit of the weight of wanting to give it up for her and for the kids,’ he said.
‘I was only able to devote all that time to the business because my wife was in charge at home and putting all her effort into the children and the family to sustain the part that I was defrauding.’
This struggle to build his own business, he said, is what made him oppose the easy path that private schools would provide for his children.
Mr Kroonenburg believes that the best people in life are those who have fought to prove themselves and added that such people usually end up in better positions.
Mr. Kroonenburg, on the other hand, admires those who endured the “journey” of building something from nothing.
She said her children wouldn’t be able to develop that kind of drive and determination in a private school.
Mr. Kroonenburg created an online education company called A Cloud Guru with his brother Ryan (left) and eventually sold it with guidance from Ms. Kroonenburg (right) for $2 billion in 2021
Before launching his own company in 2015, Mr. Kroonenburg was an IT consultant who failed to land a job at Amazon (pictured with his wife at the time)
Mr. Kroonenburg’s wife has been at the center of his business and the millionaire encouraged others to include family in their work.
A year after creating A Cloud Guru, Mr. Kroonenburg and Ryan were offered $8 million to sell, but Ms. Kroonenburg urged him not to.
At one point, while his wife was dealing with their children, Mr. Kroonenburg said his mother-in-law took him aside to tell him how difficult it was to watch her daughter suffer through difficult times, but that they persevered.
Since selling A Cloud Guru when he was 40, it has all been uphill for Mr. Kroonenburg, who has since… co-founded another company called Cuttable.
He hopes the challenges he faced in building his first company will help him make Cuttable, which is an advertising agency, even better.