John De Margheriti holds an Global Executive MBA from Sydney University and co-manages a family-run conglomerate comprised of video games development, video games and visual effects schools, film and game coworking spaces, film financing and production, commercial and residential real estate investments, and a technology park.

A seasoned, highly successful businessman, De Margheriti co-founded Micro Forté in 1985, one of the oldest independent video games development studios in the world, and produced a number of globally successful games.   In 1995 John co-patented a system and method for creating highly scalable client-server technology and in 1999 he co-invented the massively multiplayer middle-ware online category through his BigWorld Technology company which was widely used in China, later exiting to Wargaming.net, the makers of “World of Tanks”, one of his most successful licensees.

Additionally, De Margheriti founded The Academy of Interactive Entertainment Ltd (AIE) in 1996, a non-profit college and arguably the world’s original game school with campuses in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide, Online, Seattle, and Lafayette (AIE.edu). He founded the Game Developers’ Association of Australia (GDAA) in 1999 and later co-founded Game Plus, a coworking space for over 50 game development companies.  Deciding that he had achieved all he wanted from the video games industry, he turned to innovating the independent Australian film industry. He recently co-founded The Film Distillery, which helps to develop, finance and produce smaller independent genre feature films and Film Plus collaborative production studios for independent film production and related companies.  He was appointed an Honorary Ambassador for Canberra in 2000 for his contribution to the video games industry and later awarded the 2014 CSIRO Benson Entrepreneur of the Year.