New Year honours 2026: How $50 from his parents set Xero founder Sir Rod Drury on the path to a knighthood
Wednesday, 31 December 2025
The $50 spent by Xero founder Rod Drury’s parents to buy him a part-share in an Apple II computer while he was at school might just be the best-invested $50 of all time.
Drury has been made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2026 New Year honours for his services to business, the technology industry and philanthropy.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, who chaired the cabinet committee that decided on this year’s honours, called him a titan of New Zealand business.
While Drury was at the helm of Xero, the company became New Zealand’s second largest tech exporter, generating thousands of jobs and supporting more than four million customers worldwide, Luxon said.
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In 2025, Xero, which was founded in 2006, booked just over $2 billion of revenue.
Drury said his interest in the power of computers went back to an inspirational teacher while he was at Napier Boy’s High School.
“We had an amazing high school teacher guy called Bob McCaw that was at the forefront of bringing computers into schools,” Drury said. “So we had a bunch of Apple II computers … and I learned to program in basic.”
“I remember they had a scheme, because we didn’t have a lot of money in Hawke’s Bay, where parents could put 50 bucks in to buy a share of a computer.”
His electrician dad and office manager mum scraped the cash together to encourage his interest.
“We were able to take them home. I learnt really early on that with computers you could use your brain to make machines that could basically earn overnight. And I remember really clearly from those early days in high school that these things were just so scalable, and so powerful. My whole career came from that,” he said.
Mr McCaw wasn’t the only inspirational teacher Drury cites as having had a profound impact on him.
“I also had a really good accounting and bookkeeping teacher called Fred Westrupp,” he said.
Inspired to learn more, he went on to study Commerce at Victoria University of Wellington, to become what he calls “the highest educated Drury of all time”.
His time in the capital cemented a lifelong love of the city. The entrepreneurial energy in the tech sector in Wellington in the 1990s and 2000s was intense, he said.
“It was just so much fun with all the software companies with Trade Me and a bunch of other cool companies starting all around that time,” he said.
Now Drury considers himself to be “funemployed”, only doing things he wants to, and he’s involved in “giving back” to the city through work on its mountain bike trails and renovating the band rotunda building in Oriental Bay.
He’s very active in Queenstown, where he now lives. He has been involved in developing it into a “fantasy” mountain biking destination, including establishing the Red Bull Natural Selection Tour event which is broadcast to a global audience.
“We’re doing that again this year. We’ve made Queenstown one of the most famous biking spots in the world with great infrastructure, and we’re so welcoming to all those top pros,” he said.
Drury’s funemployment also includes the Queenstown Gondola passion project to ease one of Queenstown’s biggest issues; traffic congestion. That project, which would cost about $400 million, would deliver a tourism asset linking Queenstown to Frankton.
But it also included lobbying for energy infrastructure development aimed at giving this country the lowest-cost renewable power in the world.
Drury is also involved in some technology projects, including one he hopes could put a lot of money back into tourism businesses’ pockets.
“One of the projects I’ve been working on is creating a data architecture for New Zealand tourism operators,” he said.
“I think there’s $1b of revenue leakage to the international online travel agents and that could be much worse with the rise of AI, where you just say, ‘Hey book me somewhere with snow’, and it builds your itinerary for you.”
Drury said he felt humbled by the honour, and it has made him reflect on the hard work and support of so many people involved with the companies and projects that have contributed to his success.
But he has one regret.
“I wish that mum and dad were around. They'd be blown away.”