Gem of an idea is just one way to make it big
NOT everyone would consider owning the world’s largest collection of sapphires as a problem. But then, Richard Farleigh is most definitely not everyone. Now based in London and Monte Carlo, the Australian-born investor is perhaps best known for his former role on BBC TV’s Dragon’s Den.
His international success has followed an upbringing that couldn’t have been tougher.
The son of an alcoholic sheep shearer with a family of 11 children, he was sent to a foster home aged just three, where one of his teachers described him as “backward.”
Despite these early setbacks he went on to excel at mathematics and chess – he is an internationally-ranked player – and later won an economics scholarship to the University of New South Wales.
He then joined Bankers Trust Australia in Sydney aged 23 as a trader and stayed there for 10 years.
He was hired to run a hedge fund in Bermuda and moved there with his first wife and baby son. Three years later, he had earned enough to retire, aged 34, and moved to Monte Carlo.
After working with David Norwood to fund a number of commercial ventures in the UK, he made millions backing British technology companies.
In 2006, he was ranked at 876 in the Sunday Times Rich List, with an estimated net worth of £66m.
Richard likes to think of himself as a business angel rather than a venture capitalist, avoiding confrontation in favour of a more moderate approach to investing.
And as for those sapphires? “I got sloppy,” he ruefully admits. “I had shares in a listed company which came to me with a side deal to buy sapphires from Sri Lanka.
“Normally, they’d be sold to Thailand, where stones are heated to give them their colour, but the US company thought it had the technology to do it. I put up $1m, the company went broke – and I ended up with the stones.”
