Episode #371: Surfing in the City with Andrew Ross

Andrew Ross is the founder of URBNSURF, Australia’s first surf park, which opened its doors to the public in January of 2020 to much fanfare.

Prior to opening URBNSURF, Andrew spent twenty five years in various legal, corporate finance and investment banking roles before merging his profession and his passion to ultimately find his purpose, as you’ll learn in this conversation.

As you might imagine, building a two-hectare large surf park, that generates 1,000 ocean-like waves per hour is a Herculean feat, and one that delivers lots of both business and life lessons, lessons we unpack, so strap yourself in for my hour-plus long conversation with the founder of URBNSURF, the one and only, Andrew Ross.

Topics Discussed:

- What is URBNSURF?

- Andrew’s origin story

- How investment banking prepared Andrew for entrepreneurship

- Where the inspiration for URBNSURF came from

- Challenges faced in turning the dream into reality

- Build it and they will come?

- The value of resilience

- Raising $30 million from investors

- How to overcome objections

- Risk management and redundancy

- How URBNSURF compares to ocean surfing