Jonny Hendriksen

Founder & CEO Shuttlerock

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Jonny Hendriksen is the founder and chief executive of Shuttlerock, a company that turns a single piece of brand creative into hundreds of correctly sized, correctly localised video ads and delivers them at the tempo modern advertising platforms demand. He calls the model “Creative-as-a-Service”, and it sits deliberately between the two things it replaces: the traditional agency, which produces a small number of expensive assets slowly, and pure automation, which produces a large number of cheap assets badly. Shuttlerock runs a follow-the-sun production network with studios across four continents and staff who between them speak more than forty languages, so work moves around the clock. What makes Hendriksen’s career distinctive is that this is his second time building an advertising business from an unlikely base — he founded ValueClick Japan in 1998, grew it into the largest web and mobile advertising network in Japan, and in 2000 became, by EY’s account, the first foreigner to take a company public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. He now runs a global business from Nelson, at the top of New Zealand’s South Island, by choice.

Career Highlights

• Founded ValueClick Japan in 1998 and led it as chief executive to a Tokyo Stock Exchange listing in 2000.
• First foreigner to take a company public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, per EY’s award citation.
• Built ValueClick Japan into Japan’s largest web and mobile advertising network, peaking at around 40 million monthly unique users.
• Founded Shuttlerock in 2011, starting in his kitchen in Nelson.
• Scaled Shuttlerock to 300-plus staff across fourteen offices in Oceania, Europe, North America and Asia, with a wholly in-house creative team.
• Named EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2024 New Zealand in the Master category, the programme’s 25th winner, and went on to represent New Zealand at EY World Entrepreneur of the Year 2025.
• Returned to the programme as a judge for EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2026.

Professional Journey

Hendriksen’s first act was in Japan, and it was an improbable one. In 1998 he launched ValueClick Japan and took the chief executive’s seat, building a performance advertising network in a market that was both early to mobile internet and notoriously difficult for outsiders to operate in. The business scaled fast enough to list within two years: ValueClick Japan went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2000, at the peak of the first internet listing wave, and EY’s citation credits Hendriksen as the first foreigner to take a company public there. Under his leadership it became the country’s largest web and mobile advertising network, reaching roughly 40 million unique users a month at its high point — a substantial share of the Japanese online population at the time, and a business built on mobile advertising years before that was the default assumption anywhere else.

He then went home. Returning to New Zealand, he settled not in Auckland but in Nelson, a small city of around fifty thousand people at the top of the South Island, and it was there in 2011 that Shuttlerock began — literally at his kitchen table. The founding insight came from watching the same gap he had exploited in Japan reopen in a new form: enterprise marketers were being asked to feed an exploding number of social and digital placements, each with its own format, aspect ratio and language requirements, while their agencies were still structured to deliver a handful of hero assets per campaign. The mismatch was not creative but industrial. The company’s name came from an unrelated piece of timing — that same year Hendriksen spent time with the crew of the final NASA Space Shuttle flight, and named the business after the programme in tribute to its innovation and the dependability of its crews.

The answer he built was neither an agency nor a software product but a hybrid, and the insistence on that hybrid is the strategic spine of the company. Shuttlerock pairs a wholly in-house creative team — not a freelancer marketplace — with proprietary production technology and a globally distributed studio network arranged so that work hands off between time zones and production runs twenty-four hours a day. Staff across the network speak more than forty languages between them, which is what makes genuine localisation rather than mechanical subtitling possible at volume. The company holds badged partner status with nine major digital platforms, which matters commercially because it means its output is pre-validated against the specifications those platforms enforce.

That model carried Shuttlerock from a kitchen to more than 300 people operating out of fourteen offices: Nelson, Christchurch, Sydney and Auckland in Oceania; London, Berlin and Paris in Europe; New York, Los Angeles, Austin and Mexico City in North America; and Japan, Singapore and Vietnam in Asia. Hendriksen kept the head office in Nelson throughout, and has been explicit that this was a personal decision rather than a cost one — he works remotely from Nelson in order to be present for his family and to hold a workable balance, while running a business whose customers and studios are mostly twelve time zones away. In 2021 he took the company into the Pledge 1% movement, committing a portion of company resources to philanthropic causes.

Recognition arrived in November 2024, when EY named him New Zealand Entrepreneur of the Year in the Master category — the twenty-fifth winner in the programme’s history. The judges’ commentary is telling about how he operates: they noted that he remains “modest in how he speaks about his achievements” and stays “grounded in his New Zealand roots while excelling on a global stage”. The award carried him forward to represent New Zealand at the EY World Entrepreneur of the Year competition in 2025, and he has since returned to the programme from the other side of the table, joining the judging panel for the 2026 New Zealand awards while continuing as Shuttlerock’s founder and chief executive.

Education

No education record was found for Jonny Hendriksen in any source reviewed, including EY’s own award and judging profiles, Shuttlerock’s company materials, and New Zealand press coverage of his 2024 award. The field is left empty rather than estimated.