Bangladeshi – worth $148 million – featured in Australia’s Young Rich list

The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), an Australian public broadcasting portal featured a Bangladeshi boy Ashik Ahmed who moved to Australia at 17-year-old and began flipping burgers at a fast-food chain in Melbourne.

"I was an hourly-paid worker so I saw all the challenges and got to see from the employer's side in managing the employees," Mr Ahmed told SBS News.

It was that exposure, along with his passion for mathematics and science, which saw him co-found workforce management system Deputy in 2008.

The software helps business owners roster and pay their employees and the company boasts a client list of more than 184,000, including Qantas and NASA.

The 38-year-old is now listed at number 25 on the Australian Financial Review Young Rich List, released this week, and worth $148 million.

Mr Ahmed says money is not what motivates him.  "I think money is never a goal, it's rather an outcome of things happening," he said. 

"I never did it for the money and I still wouldn't. It doesn't matter whether I'm in the rich list or not, it does not change why I get out of bed every morning.  

Mr Ahmed says he is driven by helping to solve a problem. "Validation in life comes from enriching other people's lives," he said. 

"I think especially migrant entrepreneurs, my advice to them is that Australia is such a great place is to seek out an opportunity and maximise it, and to follow your passion to enrich another person's life."

"We slogged it out, ate tinned spaghetti"

Also on the list is the co-founder of financial services comparison website Finder, Frank Restuccia, who at number 60 is worth $53million. 

The 39-year-old credits his mother and father's strong work ethic for his success.

"It hasn't always been easy for my parents, they've had to work hard in the trades and there were some tough times in the '90s with the recession," he said. 

"My father had a lot of properties and debt and it was really tough with interest rates rising, so I learnt through that period to be resilient and to be resourceful and I've taken that into the business world as well."

His conservative nature meant he was able to fund the growth of the business without a lot of debt.

Mr Restuccia studied commerce at university, while his longtime friend and business partner Fred Schebesta got an early start in the technology field.

"I started at college building websites for people and built an internet marketing company," Mr Schebesta, 38, said. 

"We slogged it out, ate tinned spaghetti, did whatever we could to save a dollar to get the business growing and put all the profits back into the business to grow the company."

That company now operates in 83 countries with 10 million online visitors each month.

It makes its money by receiving a fee when people click through its website to a third-party site and made its founders millionaires. 

Mr Schebesta is worth $193million and number 22 on the list. 

Gender imbalance

Technology players make up more than a third of this year's Young Rich List.

"With software or an online market place, you can instantly scale that up to the world relatively quickly, if you've got something that solves problems for people," author Michael Bailey said. 

"So compared with slogging it out in Australia and then gradually expanding in a traditional business, the path to wealth is much greater."

But of the 103 people on the list this year, only nine are female. 

"It's caused because technology is increasing on the list, and that is a sector that has struggled to get great female graduates and great female founders," Mr Bailey said. 

The total wealth of those on the list almost doubled this year to $41 billion, with CEO of Atlassian Mike Cannon-Brookes ranked in the top spot. He is worth more than $13 billion.