The simplest description of BVS is the one we give our accountant. Blue Venture Studios is a small Australian company owned and run by three people. It does two things. It takes on a short list of client engagements — product, creative and technology, usually the part of the problem nobody else wants to own. And it builds companies — some for clients, some for itself. The first pays for the second. That is the entire machine. No outside capital. No fund. No limited partners.
The client half is the older half, and it is the one with the recognisable names attached. Between us we have shipped for Virgin Cruises, LVMH’s 24 Sèvres, Santander, YouTube, Xapo and Jaguar Land Rover. We do not take much on: a handful of engagements at a time, with all three of us close enough to the work to be accountable for it. There are no handoffs between disciplines here because there are only three of us and we are the disciplines. That work now lives at agency.bvs.agency. This page is the company that owns it.
The other half is company-building, and it runs both ways. Sometimes a client arrives with a business that does not exist yet and we build it for them, from proposition through launch, and hand over the keys. Sometimes we find the gap ourselves, fund it out of what the client work earned, and keep what comes out. Bitcompare was the first of the second kind, in 2019, and Movingto, funds.movingto, Robozaps and Golden Visa Lawyers followed. The list at the bottom of this page says which is which. None of the ones we kept has taken a dollar from outside, and we do not plan to start.
The client work is not a stepping stone to the ventures, and the ventures are not a hobby beside the client work. Each one is the reason the other is possible.
That arrangement is not an accident, and it is worth explaining because most studios pick one side of it. An agency on its own sells hours, and the good months never quite compound into something you own. A venture on its own needs either outside money or a long stretch of unpaid runway, and both of those change what you are allowed to build. Doing both means we have never had to raise, and we have never had to quietly pretend a client project was really a product. When a venture needs eighteen months of patience, the client work buys the patience. When the client work gets dull, the ventures are what we go and do instead.
It also keeps us honest in a direction most agencies are not. We ship our own software, carry our own support load, and live with our own architectural shortcuts for years afterwards. It is difficult to hand a client a confident opinion about what happens after launch when you have never had to sit through the after-launch yourself. We have, repeatedly, and on our own money.
The three of us are Dean Fankhauser on product, Ana Ibanez Lario on creative, and Dan Sutherland on technology. Sydney, Melbourne and London is where we live or have lived, and where most of the experience behind this page was actually accumulated; it is not a claim about offices. We worked together before we owned anything together, which is the part that makes a three-person company survivable. We agree often enough that it functions and disagree often enough that the work is better for it.
We would rather own a small thing outright than a slice of a large one we cannot steer.
We are aware of the version of this where we pick the most promising venture, declare it the main event, raise against it, and let the rest go quiet. We think about it occasionally. We have not done it. The argument against is not financial — the financial argument for doing it is reasonably strong. It is that a working week spent on three or four things we own outright, with people we chose, is the working week we actually want. We are not certain that will still be true in five years. It has been true so far.
If you are here to hire us, the agency site is at agency.bvs.agency and it will tell you far more than this page will. If you are here to buy one of the companies, we are usually willing to have the conversation. If you are here because someone sent you this as evidence that three people owning their own work is a reasonable way to spend a career: yes, it is. That is the whole argument.
That is what we are. The rest of this page is just the list.