"In the end we just couldn't see the path to that, and now the important thing for me is that the amazing team around me get to move on and do amazing things."

Winding things back

The company was employing 22 people until it recently began to wind things back, and Mr Morle said it would move down to zero by the end of June.

Pollenizer still has a portfolio of start-ups under its wing and said it was cutting out its other operations in order to retain enough capital to be able to assist them to their next stages as previously planned. These start-ups are Lawpath, HiveXchange, Mezo, CohortIQ and Spot.

Having been the face of the business, and a high-profile advocate for the local sector, Mr Morle said the decision to admit defeat had been tough to take, but that it was the right thing to do.

Phil Morle and Pollenizer co-founder Mick Liubinskas have been high-profile figures in Australia's emerging start-up scene. Tamara Voninski

"We always say that a great entrepreneur is someone who has an unreasonable belief in something succeeding, because then they push through all the down times to get success," he said.

"When it comes to Pollenizer, I'm that guy. I have had an unreasonable belief that it is going to succeed year in year out, and that is very emotionally driven.


"I have passionately pursued success and loved every moment trying, and that makes it sad when the evidence tells you that you haven't nailed it."

Mr Morle said he was currently focused on winding up Pollenizer, but would then turn his focus to hunting for his "moonshot" project, where he could make a big impact on the world.

One of Pollenizer's most notable successes was when one of its portfolio companies, Spreets, was sold to Yahoo!7 for $40 million. Andrew Quilty

Pilot trials

It is possible that the start-up mentor could emerge as a tech founder himself , as he said he was hopeful that a software platform developed at Pollenizer could become a scalable business in its own right.

It will be backed from existing funds to July while pilot trials are completed.

"I would like to do something like that very much. The software itself is very interesting, because it is essentially like Pollenizer in a machine ... it would be history materialising its own destiny if it becomes what we hope it will become," he said.

He said that while Pollenizer had failed to make a start-up incubator model commercially viable, because of the length of time it takes for start-ups to materialise returns, he believed others could succeed in Australia.

He said Muru-D stood a great chance as it has a wealthy benefactor in Telstra, and hoped that other smaller players would figure out a way where he had been unable to.

"If you measure Pollenizer by impact then I am enormously proud, and it is an unequivocal success ... but in terms of finding a sustainable business model then we failed," Mr Morle said.

"Part of developing an entrepreneurial culture that systematically works requires that we can look at ourselves in the mirror and admit when something hasn't worked ... but boy did we learn a lot."