The Oxford byzantium scholar who became a Canberra startup tsar
Campus Plus Chief Operating Officer, Zoe Fieldhouse
If you have spent any time in the Canberra innovation ecosystem, you would have met Nick McNaughton, cofounder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Campus Plus. But have you met his co-founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO), Zoe Fieldhouse? Chances are you haven’t: they are yin and yang, with Fieldhouse preferring to quietly get on with making things happen than go to networking events.
Originally from the UK, Fieldhouse lives in a renovated home outside Yass with her three horses. Hers is a tale of a trailing spouse who followed her former partner around the globe. She pivoted and reinvented herself many times, throwing herself into new areas before they became the next it-thing trend. She’s Oxford-educated, an early tech adopter, a Telstra Business Awards finalist and a reno queen. And after reading this article, you will know exactly who she is if you see her at the Canberra Innovation Network or Campus Plus.
Tenth-Century Byzantium history
Fieldhouse studied modern history at Oxford University. Usually, modern history means contemporary (as in the last century or so). But she specialised in tenth-century Byzantium. You might think that studying the history of a civilisation based before the advent of computers might not have equipped her with the skills to be a successful entrepreneur and innovator, but it proved a useful discipline.
“The quantity of information that you had to get through week in, week out, assimilate, structure an argument around and then present to a potentially academic leading expert on that particular topic provided an incredible foundation and training for so many potential careers.”
‘The quantity of information that you had to get through week in, week out, assimilate, structure an argument around and then present to a potentially academic leading expert on that particular topic provided an incredible foundation and training for so many potential careers,’ Fieldhouse said. ‘A lot of my colleagues went into law, management consultancy or venture capitalism – anywhere where you need to be able to take in a lot of information, assimilate it clearly, see the issues and present a solution.’
Fieldhouse has used that discipline throughout her career, and it’s proved invaluable for tasks such as reviewing complex legal documents. She once had to deal with a badly written contract, and her research and analytical skills helped her interpret the document and use it to find a resolution. ‘To be able to actually get in there and break down the logic of what he had written was actually different to the argument that he was having,’ she said. ‘We ended up pointing out that the solution we were proposing was the only possible solution, as that was what everyone had signed in the contract.’
From cabbage fields to whiskey on the interweb
“Who wants to live next to cabbage fields for the rest of their lives?”
Fieldhouse grew up in Lincolnshire to school teacher parents. After graduation, she opted not to return. ‘There was no way I was going back home after graduating, because who wants to live next to cabbage fields for the rest of their lives?’
She met her ex-husband at Oxford and then followed him around the world for decades,‘like a lost little puppy dog’ as he moved for work assignments. Their journey started in Scotland, where they lived for around five years, and where she made money working for web development companies. That might seem like a typical path today, but this was in the 1990s when the ‘interweb’ was new and shiny, with few companies having an online presence.
‘Nobody really knew what [the internet] was and what it did or why anyone should have a website,’ she said. ‘We were getting knocked back from companies like real estate agents and banks who questioned why they even needed a website.’
As the industry was so embryonic, a large part of her work was educating business communities about why they should embrace this new technology. But there was a big upside: many of her clients were Scottish whisky companies, who understood early the importance of audience building in a niche sector. ‘We had the best drinks cabinet at work,’ she said, noting a partiality to 18-year-old Highland Park whiskey.
She then moved to Glasgow and set up her own consultancy business working for the Glasgow Development Agency. There she worked with local businesses to develop an eCommerce web development strategy.
Then the .com bubble burst. That, and the pace of work, all took a toll on Fieldhouse. ‘I got burnt out pretty quickly and was struggling with massive imposter syndrome at the time,’ she said. ‘I was only in my early twenties and I’d be sitting in boardrooms yapping on about eCommerce strategy and I wondered why people were listening to what I had to say,’ she said.
Reno queen
Then they relocated to Yorkshire, and she pivoted to something new: home renos.
‘I’d always fancied the idea of renovating an old property,’ she said. ‘My Dad had always been a bit of a handyman.’ They purchased a run-down terrace - a beautiful Yorkshire stone house. They purchased it as a deceased estate that hadn’t been updated in 50 years: it didn’t even have central heating. She gutted the property and started again from scratch, working with the help of the Reader’s Digest DIY Guide to Everything. She was even able to do her own plumbing and electrical work: she only needed to get an external party in to connect the gas boiler.
‘The first thing I did, and I’d never done anything like this before – I’d never even used a drill – was to put up a wine rack,’ she said. ‘Then I spent two weeks with my Reader’s Digest guide with my head stuck under floorboards trying to work out how to thread central heating plumbing under hundred-year-old wooden floors.’
This was the early 2000s, and home renos were not yet a television staple. And there were very few women doing hands-on renovation work. ‘If you were going into the equivalent of Bunnings at 7 am on a weekday morning, it was full of tradies – and me,’ she said.
Fieldhouse renovated a further three properties, with the next one being a run-down property that she bought at auction and doubled her money on.
Travelling the world
The next step was travel, with Fieldhouse and her former partner taking six months off to see the world. They went to South Africa, Australia, Borneo, through Thailand and then back home. ‘And then we came back home to the UK, and went “why on earth are we still back in the UK? This is ridiculous”.
‘I decided that I didn’t really want to stay in the UK. I was also thinking of starting a family as I’d just turned 30,’ she said. Having watched her seven-year-old niece struggle with the weight of homework, she wanted to raise her children in a different educational system.
They decided to sell the properties, have young children, and then sail the world for 12 to 18 months before settling in a new country where they would start a business that would afford a better lifestyle, such as running a youth hostel or a dive resort. So, Fieldhouse finished the final property whilst heavily pregnant, sold up, gave birth and moved temporarily to Spain with an 8-week-old.
From there, plans changed, and her ex-husband got a job with a biotech company in Orange, Australia.
Horses and eCommerce
Fieldhouse arrived in Orange in January 2007 with a young child, right before the crunch of the Global Financial Crisis. They got cold feet about working for a startup in the midst of economic turmoil, so her ex-partner took a new job at the University of Tasmania.
“ I absolutely feel head over heels in love with the whole having horses”
‘Tasmania is an absolutely amazing place, a beautiful place to live,’ she said. ‘It was a great place to raise a young lad.’ Life as a mum coordinating school drop-offs and pickups was busy, but in between, she discovered a love of horses.
‘I absolutely feel head over heels in love with the whole having horses,’ she said. She went from a novice rider to show jumping 90 centimetres within a year. And she trained to become an equine podio therapist – essentially, she learnt to look after horses’ feet.
She also founded two eCommerce companies and was a finalist in the Telstra Business Awards. The first company was a nutritional supplement for horses. ‘If you think of all the different nutrients we take as human athletes, an equine athlete has the same needs,’ she said. Her product helped with things like joint support, calming nervous behaviour in horses, and improving gut health and skin conditions. Her second company, Nature’s Pets, focused on companion animals such as dogs and cats.
Canberra and Campus Plus
In 2017, Fieldhouse moved to Canberra when her ex-partner was offered a job at ANU. There, she also started a new part-time job in research management. Later that year, she met Nick McNaughton, who brought her on as COO at ANU Connect Ventures, a venture capital fund that grew from an initial seed investment of $20 million to $47 million.
‘I knew nothing about venture capitalism,’ she said of the decision to work at ANU Connect Ventures. ‘I was thrown into the deep end with the first investor committee meeting held three weeks after I started.’
It proved to be a good working relationship – so much so McNaughton and Fieldhouse founded a business together. ‘Nick (McNaughton) and I have very complementary skillsets,’ she said. ‘Neither of us can really do what the other does. I don’t think either of us could have done it alone, either.’
Campus Plus was founded by chance. In late 2019, McNaughton and Fieldhouse had a coffee chat with someone who had just started a new job in research and innovation at the University of Canberra. She had a problem: they had a small team and needed someone to help with the commercialisation of research.
McNaughton and Fieldhouse decided to lean into the opportunity. ‘We saw some ideas about how we could do some industry engagement with their research strengths, basically do a bit of matchmaking,’ she said. ‘We had the coffee chat on Friday morning, and basically, within a week, we had the contract negotiated, signed, invoiced and paid.’
“We had the coffee chat on Friday morning, and basically, within a week, we had the contract negotiated, signed, invoiced and paid.”
COVID growth
They started working part-time on Campus Plus in February 2020. And then COVID happened. ‘Which was the best thing ever for us,’ said Fieldhouse. ‘We had to pivot quickly because we had been going down the traditional seminar-type model. We pivoted to Zoom, like the rest of the world. But then it meant we could find industry experts from any corner of Australia that could spend a spare 20 minutes to half an hour in a curated webinar with a really interested cohort of researchers.’
“We pivoted to Zoom, like the rest of the world. But then it meant we could find industry experts from any corner of Australia that could spend a spare 20 minutes to half an hour in a curated webinar with a really interested cohort of researchers.”
They did An early online seminar with Glen Keys AO, co-founder and Executive Co-Chairman of Canberra-based Aspen Medical. It was a seminar on allied health and was right in the middle of when COVID started to get really nasty and when the Ruby Princess onboard COVID breakout was in the news. Keys, who was then a regular commentator in the media, graciously found time to provide a presentation about the future of allied health in Australia.
At the same time, universities started culling staff due to the lack of revenue coming in from international students. For Campus Plus it meant a golden opportunity to provide capability on demand, as universities no longer had the in-house staff to keep many things running – yet the work still needed to be done. ‘We picked up a number of interesting bespoke projects doing things like developing strategic plans, business case development, IP portfolio reviews etc,’ she said.
Their flagship program is PD+, which aims to raise the level of awareness of how to commercialise research. In 2022, Campus Plus offered 30 webinars with 14 client universities on a range of related topics. They also work with the client institutions to provide data on which staff were most engaged, which helps identify innovation interests and talent.
Back to the UK
The next stop is to take Campus Plus to the UK. McNaughton is currently in the UK, and Fieldhouse plans to go across at the end of June. It will be her first return to the UK in 16 years. Is she nervous? Just a bit. But this time, she’s going there to promote her business on her own terms.
