Family offices in Australia have traditionally been run by men but as wealth shifts to the next generation and tech fortunes change the game, more women are taking the reins.
When Victoria Denholm went to her first networking event for people working in family offices, she was the only woman in the room. She was also the only one under 40 (or more likely 50, she says).
This was just a few years ago, but already the daughter of Tesla chair Robyn Denholm and CEO of their family office Wollemi Capital Group has noticed more women coming into the industry.
“There is an incredible cohort of female operators coming into the family office network. We just hired a head of legal from one of the venture funds and there’s more of that happening,” she tells AFR Weekend.
“There’s also a lot more family offices coming online in Australia. For a long time, it was agriculture, mining and property family offices, and now there’s so many more tech family offices and what we care about is slightly different.”
The numbers of women in the sector are growing, as a fresh wave of family offices are set up by successful start-up founders and multi-generational family wealth is passed on to a new generation.
But Denholm is still an anomaly. Only 22 per cent of family office employees in Australia are women, according to a KPMG report analysing 2022 data, and 92 per cent of family office CEOs are male.
Judy Anderson-Firth is among those also bucking the trend.
On paper, she is not the kind of person you’d expect to be running a family office. The former chief executive of Startup Victoria (now The Startup Network) doesn’t have a financial services background, nor has she worked in a venture capital fund or built her own business.
Indeed, the extent of her investing experience before taking on the CEO role at Euphemia, the family office for fintech founder Dom Pym, was limited. She had made a handful of personal angel investments, and had only basic knowledge of term sheets, funding types and the different venture capital funds.
That did not stop Dom Pym from deciding she was the perfect person to lead the investment of his $70 million-odd family fortune.
“So many people when they discovered I was in this role were like ‘but why?’,” Anderson-Firth tells AFR Weekend.
“‘You don’t look like an investment banker, you don’t look like a venture capitalist, you’ve been running a not-for-profit start-up community, what do you know?’ I had the same concerns as well.
“When talking to Dom about what we could do together, I’d raise the same flags. I did not have the CV to do the role. What I had to learn, and now appreciate, is… that when it comes to deal making, so much is based on relationships and that’s what I had in spades.”
‘High-risk appetite’
Born in the NSW Blue Mountains to a school teacher and railway engineer, Anderson-Firth, 35, studied entrepreneurship at RMIT before starting her career at Deloitte as part of an internal innovation team. In late 2013 she joined boutique consultancy Inventium, which was using neuroscience, psychology and management science principles to help incumbents innovate. It was a three-person team when Anderson-Firth joined, but it was already working with companies like Google, Disney and Lego.
Working there Anderson-Firth says she “really quashed her imposter syndrome”, while her role as Startup Victoria CEO allowed her to develop the network that’s been crucial to her success at Euphemia. Some 80 per cent of its assets are in start-ups and venture capital.
Rocketing wealth
“We have an unfair advantage in this asset class compared to other family offices because of our network and our knowledge of what a great tech company looks like,” she says. “We do have other asset classes, I’m not entirely crazy … but we have a high-risk appetite.”
Like Anderson-Firth, Denholm didn’t have much investment experience when she and her mother, Robyn Denholm, agreed she would run the family office alongside her brother Matt in 2021.
Her early career was spent working with Austrade in San Francisco, helping Australian founders get set up in the Bay Area. After returning to Australia, she took up a role at NSW Treasury in trade and investment, doing similar work.
Denholm didn’t enjoy the bureaucracy side of the public service and joined KPMG’s High Growth Ventures team in 2021.
Before 2020-21, the family had never considered starting a family office. While their wealth had accumulated over time, it suddenly rocketed on the back of Tesla’s soaring share price in 2020 and 2021.
“When I took the KPMG role I was thinking about pivoting into venture and I went on this journey where I met a bunch of venture firms and interviewed with them and I would get to second, third round interviews and [miss the role] because all my experience had been in government,” she says.
“I went the KPMG route, and it was such a blessing … because it set me up for success in the family office, understanding the operations side and investing side.”
For a year, Denholm spent one day a week in the family office and four days working for KPMG. There was no pressure from her mother, she says, to run the family office, but the opportunity was too good to pass up.
The family devised three core investment pillars – climate and the environment, diversity (including gender equity and First Nations investments), and community (which includes sport).
Last year Wollemi Capital acquired a 49 per cent stake in the Women’s National Basketball League. It has also previously invested in basketball enterprise and owner of the Sydney Kings and Sydney Flames, Hoops Capital.
While the family office is impact-driven, Denholm is clear the investments it makes are not charity – they expect strong returns.
“We are not shy about the fact we are doing this for commercial reasons,” Denholm says.
“We are investing in diverse founders and communities and in climate because we really care about these things … but it is not philanthropy. It’s driven by our conviction that this is a good investment.”
Wealth shift
Impact investing is a hallmark of many of the newer family offices, including Tripple, founded by the children of Sussan Group owner Naomi Milgrom.
As more women enter the industry, this type of investing is expected to increase.
“The traditional family office that is multi-generational has this undertone of their job being to be a custodian of the wealth,” Anderson-Firth says. “This new generation, born out of tech wealth or entrepreneurship in another field, you get more creative entrepreneurial thinking, and they’re happy to take more risk.”
Partners Wealth Group’s Rob Hand says his firm works mainly with new money and is increasingly doing more ESG and impact investing, as well as private market deals.
“They’re taking a more active role in controlling their wealth and knowing where they’re investing rather than putting it in pooled funds,” says Hand, who is the group’s director of wealth.
Chenelle Tanglao joined the Schwartz family office Trawalla Group as director of female-led ventures in 2023. Her background was as a data analyst, and she had built up a network among start-ups, becoming a fellow at angel investment fund Flying Fox Ventures. She had also taken Startmate’s First Believers course for angel investors.
Through Flying Fox she met Trawalla’s Carol Schwartz, who had been thinking about a focus on investment in female founders. Tanglao says it was a quick decision to take on the new job at Trawalla.
Like Denholm and Anderson-Firth, she doesn’t have a traditional investing background, but says it’s not crucial.
“Being able to read a model is important, but in early stage, that’s not the focus of the assessment, there aren’t any numbers to look at,” she says.
“[What you need is] curiosity, not being afraid to ask questions … and then there is a people element too. Being a good investor, especially at an early stage, is about being able to get a good read on a founder and get a sense of their character.”
Over the next decade, women will control an increasing share of the wealth. A JBWere report released last year predicted that 65 per cent of the nearly $5 trillion set to flow from Baby Boomers to the next generation will go to daughters.
At the same time, there is a growing number of self-made female millionaires who have built their own companies. Women are also living longer than men, and they are more likely to gain assets through divorces than in previous generations. On the 2025 Rich Women List, of the 75 women, 33 are self-made millionaires (or billionaires) and are worth a collective $26.9 billion.
Sarah Worboys, who is venture strategy director at Saniel Ventures – the family office of Aconex co-founder Leigh Jasper – says this shift has the potential to drive societal change, and also open up new areas of investment.
“We see the world differently. We care deeply about communities in ways that are different to men – it doesn’t make us better, it just makes us different,” she says.
“Having significant pools of capital in the hands of people that have an interest and ability to make a difference in unique and new ways is going to open up a bunch of new markets.”
