Finder founder, crypto king Fred Schebesta’s extraordinary life of ‘two wives’, four kids, and a $30m castle

Most mornings, Fred Schebesta drives his kids to school. Two schools, sometimes three, about an hour all up by the time he’s back.

He could pay someone to do it. He has, by most reports, somewhere north of $200 million. He does it anyway.

“It’s the connection time,” he tells The Nightly.

“Otherwise it wouldn’t be there. You just wouldn’t have that, you know, sitting together, talking about things. Sharing the experience in the moment.”

This is not the Fred Schebesta most people think they know. That one calls himself the Crypto King of Australia, and an internet rockstar. That one lives in a concrete fortress on a Coogee clifftop in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, a house he bought for $16.85 million in 2021, renamed Crypto Castle, and now rents out for parties and film shoots when the family’s away.

Both are true. He’d probably tell you the contrast is the point.

A LITTLE EXPERIMENT

Twenty years ago this year, Schebesta and his business partner Frank Restuccia built a website that first compared credit cards after selling their digital marketing agency for $1.36 million.

He didn’t see any of its success coming.

“I thought it was just a little experiment,” he says. “I had a massive graveyard of failed experiments. Most of them failed, actually. I don’t profess to be able to see the future terribly well, and in fact, I think Frank would wish I would see the future a little bit better.”

What he has had, for two decades, is an unusually clear view of how Australians handle money.

Finder watches what people search for, compare and switch. And lately, he’s watched the country get squeezed.

“People are feeling inflation, and they’re scared of the prices rising,” he says. “The water is slowly creeping up. And there’s only so much people can take.”

Twenty years ago, he says, comparing was something you did when you got around to it.

“You kind of thought, oh, I might go and have a look at that. She’ll be right, I’ll just pay what it is. It’s not going to be that big a difference.

“But now the arithmetic is different, and people are doing it because they have to.”

The numbers back him up. Finder now pays people to switch — between $200 and $500 for moving health insurance, for instance — and Schebesta says the company has handed back around $2 million to customers in the past 12 months alone.

“It’s a lot of money,” he says.

“But it’s just helped so many people get from, you know, leaning out, to really leaning in and actively managing these things.”

He points to Britain, where he says around 90 per cent of car insurance is now sold through comparison sites.

“The reason for that is you need to save every single dollar. The water has risen that high in terms of cost pressure.”

That’s where he thinks Australia is heading, and quickly.

ENTER THE ROBOTS

What comes next for Finder, he says, is more of the same, plus robots. The company is building AI agents designed to do the switching for you, the kind of thing that used to be called robo-advice, back when it was mostly a good idea that didn’t work.

“I think most people have budgets in their head. I actually think the problem is they just don’t look at their bank account,” he says.

So the agents would look for you. You haven’t reviewed your energy plan in two years. You’re paying for four subscriptions you’ve forgotten about. Want me to sort it?

Which raises the obvious question: if the agents are doing the reviewing, the comparing, the switching, what’s left for the humans? At a moment when the Commonwealth Bank, Uber and Microsoft are all cutting customer service roles and handing the work to machines, it’s not an idle one.

Schebesta doesn’t see it that way.

“My position is that we need new ways to work alongside agents and AI, with them not being an adjunct or a replacement. It’s working together,” he says.

“If I were to give a very simple analogy, this is it. In Star Wars, there’s R2-D2, C-3PO, coming around with you. That’s how I see humans, robots, and AI all working together. They don’t turn them off. You have them on permanently, and you work together.”

There’s talk of a Finder debit card, too — customers already receive their cash back on one — and Schebesta seems to be enjoying the idea of turning it into something more permanent.

He is markedly less enthusiastic about the country he’s building it in.

LOSING THE CRYPTO RACE

Ask him about crypto, the thing that made his name and put “King” in front of it, and the answer is not what you’d expect from Australia’s loudest evangelist.

“The chances of us becoming the crypto hub of the world are slim to zero,” he says.

“That race has now run, unfortunately.”

He isn’t hedging. The companies have gone, he says. The entrepreneurs have gone. Dubai, Singapore, America. What Australia needed, in his view, was clear crypto law, or something like the digital safe harbours he says exist in South Korea and Singapore; a defined space where startups can build things the law hasn’t caught up with yet, employ people and pay tax while everyone works out the rules.

“But unfortunately, that is not the stance that our government has taken. It’s taken the complete opposite,” he said.

Schebesta would know. In 2022, ASIC took Finder to court over Finder Earn, a crypto-linked product, arguing it amounted to unlicensed financial services. The case was the first to test what a debenture means in Australian law when cryptocurrency is involved. The Federal Court dismissed it. Schebesta won.

Four years on, he says nothing much has changed.

“They put out a guide,” he says.

“But no, they’ve not written any laws. Nothing’s happened.”

The year after the case, he stepped back. Restuccia has run Finder since, while Schebesta moved to the venture capital side. He has said he replaced himself in roles with people better than him, and that Restuccia is the stronger day-to-day leader of a large organisation.

For a man who describes his own instinct as reinvention, the frustration is less about crypto than about inertia.

He wants smaller government with less spending, lower income tax, support for small business and a serious effort to attract the industries he thinks will define the future — AI, crypto, data centres. He worries loudly about young Australians being priced out of housing.

It’s a familiar set of arguments, and he makes them fluently. What’s more interesting is the hesitation afterwards. Having said it, he pauses.

“I don’t want to be like some revolutionary,” he says.

“I just have some views.”

Not the words you’d expect from a man who calls himself the Crypto King.

That reputation is earned. The business publication Capital Brief has noted that few private companies in Australia punch as far above their weight as Finder, and that the company has “honed a publicity engine that runs day and night”.

THE OTHER FRED

The private version is much quieter than the branding suggests.

The family goes skiing; not in the sun, but in the snow.

“We’re a bit more of a mountains and alpine family,” he says.

They’ve been to the same village in Austria, roughly 10 times: Lech, a place his father loved, in the part of the country his family came from.

They also pick a city each year and live in it for a stretch. Long enough to learn some of the language, and something about the culture.

“I’ve got four kids, so it’s pretty full on,” he says, and laughs. His children are aged two, five, 13 and 17.

“You take two wives, four kids and a nanny and, let me assure you, it’s certainly a fun experience.”

That’s his partner and his ex-wife, the mother of his two eldest. Same village, every year.

“Everyone gets along really well, which is amazing,” he says.

“Everyone likes each other, and they’ve found peace.”

Back home, Sundays run on a schedule that would exhaust most people. Jujitsu. Swimming lessons for the two little ones. Some sort of activity together if they can manage it. Home, cook something, eat as a family, a movie. Maybe some reading. Maybe some work.

Then, at 8pm, squash.

Schebesta plays at Mutch Park in Pagewood, a council-run centre in Sydney’s south-east, five or six times a week; competitively, in tournaments. He is, he reckons, the fittest he has ever been.

“Everyone’s got kids, so we put them to bed and then come down and train,” he says. “It’s a hobby. But I get a lot of fitness out of it as well.”

Then home, something to eat, sleep. Up at five or six. Kids to school.

It’s the school run he defends most warmly, and it’s the one thing in his day he seems to actively guard.

At the end of a long afternoon, I ask him the question everyone asks a man with two nicknames and a castle. Crypto King. Internet rockstar. Who’s the real Fred?

“I think he’s a disruptor,” he says, without much of a pause.

“Creative. Thinks outside the box. But constructively. I reinvent things which just aren’t working and make them better.”

He is careful to add that he didn’t invent the practice of comparing things. He just did it better than anyone else.

But ask about his house, and for the first time he searches for the words.

The castle sits on more than 40m of ocean frontage, all raw concrete, steel and glass, built in 1994 to look like a fortress floating above the Pacific, now estimated to be worth $25 to $30 million.

He has said he’ll probably never sell it. He struggles to explain why.

“It’s just got an energy to it,” he says. “I don’t know how to explain it. There are parts of the earth where they talk about the magnetism, the lava, all this stuff. It just feels different. I just think this place feels different to every other place I’ve ever been.”

And then, almost as an afterthought, he lands on something better.

“It’s marble, travertine, concrete, steel, glass. You’d think that is the roughest set of materials. And yet, inside, it has such warmth. And it’s that contrast, I think, which makes it really nice.”

He is talking about a house on a cliff in Coogee. And yet, equally, he could be talking about himself.