“While at the helm of Xero, it became New Zealand’s second-largest tech exporter, generating thousands of jobs and supporting more than four million customers worldwide.

“The company was a pioneer in mental health and diversity.”

Luxon added: “He has spearheaded public good infrastructure and philanthropic projects. His entrepreneurial career has seen New Zealand benefit in the fields of education, the environment, and renewable energy.”

A believer in what he calls “NZ Inc” – or the private and public sectors collaborating for smoother services and better opportunities – Drury helped drive digitisation initiatives such as online GST and the New Zealand Business Number (NZBN) and pushed for digital payments reform.

Drury credits Napier Boys’ High School teacher Bob McCaw for sparking his interest in technology in the early 1980s.

“He was a pioneer in his field. He got everyone in my year interested in computers and was a real inspiration for me.”

McCaw introduced a scheme whereby parents could pay $50 each for student access to an Apple IIe.

“I got to take it home on the weekend and play with it, which was pretty cool,” Drury remembers.

“That set me off, right from fifth form, to be fully into computers,” Drury says.

“I just loved the scale of it; the magic of programming – that you could use your brain to build a machine, and code that made money while you slept was really exciting.

“You could be a doctor or a lawyer or a plumber, but it seemed like you could only get paid a certain amount, because you could only work a limited number of hours. I remember really early on thinking, it would be nice to be unconstrained.”

Later, at Victoria University, studying toward a BCA in Accounting and Information Systems, “I had an amazing professor, Dr Kaye McAulay”, Drury says.

“She was one of the gurus of information engineering and went on to run Standards NZ. I remember thinking that you could actually model how businesses work using diagrams. And that really lit me up. It led me to work at Arthur Young [later EY].”

After eight years at Arthur Young, Drury started his own consultancy, Glazier Systems in 1995, specialising in the Microsoft software that corporate New Zealand was just starting to embrace.

It had 60 staff by the time it was sold to Advantage Group in 1999 for around $7.5m.

After a brief stint at Advantage, Drury founded AfterMail, an email management and archiving system for large companies. Just three years later, in January 2006, Drury sold it to US firm Quest Software in a deal that involved around $21.5m cash up front.

In July the same year, Drury founded Xero – one of the pioneers in “SaaS” – software as a service or software that runs over the internet.

The early years were hard yards, going up against multinational incumbents, but Xero would gain millions of customers worldwide, making Drury a billionaire.

Drury’s father was an electrician, his mother a secretary.

Drury says his father, who died at age 80 in 2019, developed a keen interest in tracing his roots and discovered Ngāi Tahu ancestry from the 1840s.

“My father spent a lot of time travelling, going back through his roots.”

Through the process, Drury learned about his whakapapa.

“The values really resonated with me; taking a long-term, intergenerational view of being a custodian.”

Drury’s three children have always been on the Ngāi Tahu register.

The entrepreneur has advised the iwi’s commercial wing, set up scholarships for Ngāi Tahu students and artists, and backed two of the iwi’s major initiatives: Mana Tāhuna, a Kaupapa Māori Charitable Trust in the Queenstown-Lakes district focused on improving the social, cultural, and environmental wellbeing of the local Māori whānau and Project Tohu, a Coronet Peak reforestation project that is replacing around 200ha of Douglas Fir with native trees.

Drury says as well as addressing the menace of wilding pines, Project Tohu includes around 50km of new mountain bike and horse riding trails, helping to diversify Queenstown away from its reliance on skiing.

Now based in Queenstown, Drury stepped down as Xero CEO in 2018 and left the company’s board in 2023.

His “post-work” life, as he calls it, involves frenetic amounts of work.

Drury is one of two investors in Southern Infrastructure (the other is the company’s CEO, former Infrastructure Commission head Ross Copland), which has a clutch of projects on the go to boost Queenstown and the surrounding areas.

They include a $400 million gondola public transport system for Queenstown, which recently received conditional endorsement from the Infrastructure Commission.

Other areas of interest are electrification and possible public-private health models – all with a focus on getting things done in years rather than decades.

“Queenstown is a bit of a test lab for getting some projects off the ground,” Drury says. If they work, he has national ambitions.

Drury is also a backer of Lodestone Energy (with his frequent collaborator Sam Morgan and others), which has raised hundreds of millions to install 360,000 solar panels on 350ha of land over five sites and counting.

Through his venture capital firm Radar Ventures (established in 2021), Drury is also one of the investors in a more speculative power play – Wellington’s OpenStar Technologies, which is working on a nuclear fusion reactor that could one day supply cheap, clean and near-limitless energy.

In the here and now, Drury is lobbying the Government to make energy cheaper, with more of a focus on investing in renewables and additional capacity.

He says this could involve breaking up the big “gentailers”, just as Telecom was split into wholesale (Chorus) and retail (Spark) arms.

Through Radar and his own pocket, Drury has backed dozens of start-ups, from Atomic (in-app messaging) to Electric Wave (a public charging network for e-boats, beginning in Queenstown).

And then there’s his own latest venture, Corro – a “sovereign messaging platform”.

Drury says since he sold Aftermail 20 years ago, “email hasn’t really evolved”.

In fact, communication is often a scattered mess of messages on different platforms. Corro, promised for 2026, will clean things up, Drury says.

At a time when some in NZ are stuck in a “vibecession”, Drury retains his glass-half-full approach. Our problems, like expensive power, can be solved in ways that boost growth, he says.

“New Zealand could have the lowest-cost renewable energy in the world – and the ability to overbuild to fuel AI data centres and be a key part of the global communications network. There are some really big opportunities still to play for.”

He adds: “The great thing about New Zealand is we’re smaller than Melbourne, by population. We should be nimble at doing these things. So I’m incredibly optimistic about all the opportunities that we have in front of us.”

Drury has received numerous entrepreneurial and national business awards including the 2025 AMS Global Marketer of the Year, 2017 Wellingtonian of the Year, 2014 New Zealand Entrepreneur of the Year, 2013 New Zealand Herald Business Leader of the Year, 2012 New Zealand Hi-Tech Hall of Fame, 2009 World Class New Zealander and being inducted into the New Zealand Business Hall of Fame in April this year.

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.