Innovation, it turns out. In the summer of 2007 Rick Chen was a Chinese student marooned with few friends in Sydney and his family back in China. He answered an ad on Gumtree looking for fellow travellers to share petrol costs on a road trip to Noosa. A keen novice surfer, he signed up.

"Nobody knew each other, we're packed in a car for seven days. My flatmate said I was going to get murdered," Chen says.

Happily, instead, Chen got a future business partner, Alan Crabbe​, from Northern Ireland, with whom he went on to create a crowdfunding business called Pozible​, now the fourth largest of its kind in the world. Not bad for an accidental meeting and five years' work.

Chen runs a successful tech startup, a sector of the new economy that I assume involves young people in offices with trampolines and ironic astroturf play areas. It turns out this is about right, except with ping pong tables instead of trampolines. So I feel under some pressure to find a suitably hip venue for our lunch. Consultations with the Herald's tech and food editors come to naught when it turns out the hip new restaurants don't do lunch on Tuesdays. We wind up at Reuben Hills in Surry Hills, a cafe with bearded baristas, on-site coffee roasting and a huge roller door open on a gritty back lane: hip enough.

Pozible is a rewards-based crowdfunding website, where people can post projects and tout for contributions to make it happen. Supporters get a reward – from warm fuzzies to discounts or special access to the finished product. Pozible funds albums, exhibitions, cafes, art projects, indie films, smart watches, theatre costumes, obscure academic research, literature awards, ethical food projects, hot dinners. No weapons, no pyramid or investment schemes, nothing illegal or pornographic. Seeking a quintessential Pozible project, Chen tells me the story of a Melbourne musician who asked for $40 to have a chicken parma and a beer at his local pub. "His argument was that musicians really struggle these days... If you fund him for $1 he'll think about your name when he drinks his beer, all the way up to $40 then you could join him in the pub to have a parma and pint together. ...So it's not very profit or money driven at all. It's very indie and creative and a funny and interesting mix." The Pint and Parma Project raised $259 in April 2013.

This is not the get-rich-quick end of the startup market. But it's not charity, either: Pozible takes a 5 per cent cut of the funds raised by its users. Given Pozible projects have successfully raised almost $36 million in pledges since 2010, you can assume Chen and Crabbe are no longer in need of Gumtree to share petrol costs. They have offices in China, Singapore and the United States as well as Sydney and Melbourne, with a dozen employees. At time of writing 8932 projects had been launched, which represents a 57 per cent success rate.

People with unusual financial requirements have turned to Pozible, like Australian National University researchers investigating the connection between Tasmanian deforestation and the local sugar gliders' new appetite for the endangered orange-bellied parrot ($73,000 raised!); or Liverpool plains farmers in need of a fighting fund to take on coal mining and CSG interests ($58,000 raised!).

The crowdfunding field could be about to change dramatically with the federal government planning to legalise equity crowdfunding so startups could offer shares in the business to early investors. That would see Australia follow New Zealand and Britain in opening up a huge new pool of funds to potentially kickstart a bunch of innovative new small businesses.

Settling onto a wooden stool, dressed in a puffy vest, jeans and cool sneakers, Chen is friendly and chatty. We turn our attention to the Reuben Hills menu, which uses emphatic language – promising, for example, Really Fucking Good Fried Chicken – and has something mysterious called Pozole, which I initially misread as Pozible and feel obliged to order. Rick orders the Dirty Bird, which doesn't sound that great to me, but he's his own man. He volunteers the story of the life-changing Gumtree road trip, where he and Alan figured they might start a company.

Not that their first venture – WonderArt – went so well.

"It was a dumb idea," he says. "We spent a year on it, a really beautifully designed website for artists to sell their art. It's not online anymore. Who's going to buy a $2000 painting off the internet without actually seeing it?"

Almost no one, it turned out. But through that first failure they saw how much artists were struggling financially. Instead of noting that sad circumstance and moving on, they decided to do something about it.

"We wanted artists to be able to pre-sell products, to have the money up front," Chen says. "Crowdfunding had just started, so we looked around to see if anyone was doing anything similar here, and no one was in Australia. So we just set it up. It took three months, we worked our arses off."

Crabbe had a full-time job, and gave half his salary to Chen during the site-building phase. "He would join me after work from 5 o'clock and we would work til 11. Then we'd have quite a few 4 o'clock in the morning days before we started, it was quite difficult."

They launched in 2010 with just four projects, and grew rapidly. Apart from the tech side, they learned on the job – marketing, legal stuff, accounting. "The university of YouTube" was heavily consulted, he says.

Our food arrives. My Pozole is a tasty pork soup with crackling on top that you could break a tooth on. Chen is quite happy with his Dirty Bird, which turns out to be a hipsterfied chicken burger. We drink water and tea – no time for long lunches in the new economy. More's the pity.

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Born Gang Chen, he grew up in Bengbu, a "small town" of about threemillion people in Anhui province, about five hours' drive northwest of Shanghai. Chen's mother worked in a shop in a railway station, and his father worked for a telecommunications company. " His parents are retired now, and he says they are very proud of his achievements, "although they don't understand it completely."

Unusually for his generation in China, Chen has a sister – a twin, Jing, an online fashion retailer who is married and lives in Qingdao. "She married one of my childhood best friends – which gave me some doubt about my friendship with him for a while," Chen chuckles. Chen is single, and doesn't think he'll marry or have kids. "I feel my daily time isn't enough now even for myself, I don't see how a kid will fit in," he says. Also, he confesses, he's been put off by seeing his friends have babies. Oh, it's not that bad, I say, gamely. I would be more convincing if I'd slept the night before. Too much information before making a decision can be dangerous, we agree. If he'd known how much was involved in running a startup, he might not have done that either. "I didn't know what I was getting myself into," he says.

We have the paranoia of British authorities to thank for Chen's presence in Australia. His first choice of university was Edinburgh, but the 2005 London bombings saw Whitehall cancel foreign student visas. So he applied to do the same course at the University of Sydney and was accepted immediately.

He arrived in Sydney aged 22, his first time outside China.

"It was huge culture shock," he said. He'd been one of the good students in his English classes in China, but when he arrived, "I couldn't understand anything at all. My friend took me to a shopping centre in Macquarie to try to get a phone plan, and I didn't understand a thing. The English I'd learned wasn't the real thing. I thought it had been a waste of my time."

Having lived in Australia for almost a decade – most of his adult life – Chen is somewhere between cultures – not Australian, but no longer entirely Chinese.

"My mind has changed a lot since I came to Australia," he says. "I was talking to a Chinese friend recently about this – we're not completely Australian but we definitely can't go back to China anymore, we're not local Chinese. It's not a bad position to be, it's just unique – it gives us a different perspective."

He's hoping to buy a home here, but may move to startup mecca San Francisco for a while instead. Pozible consumes most of his waking life so in his rare downtime, Chen – a great fan of Chinese classical music – opts for a good book and "a date with the couch". "You and I are quite similar," he offers, generously. "You have two children, and I have a startup." That is true, in that they are rewarding and all-consuming, although so far my children have not made me millions.

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Pozible launched in China last year with offices in Shanghai and Shenzhen, but with very few chicken parma projects.

"No it's very different," he says. "[In China] people don't buy ideas, people don't buy on trust…" He laughs. "Goodwill does not go very far but we love discounts, and we love to find ways of getting special treatment."

He marvels at the pace of development in China, how the commonplace poverty of his childhood has been replaced so quickly by material wealth for so many millions. But he questions the "environmental sacrifice" that got China there, and feels disconnected from his peers. "Everything's about making money, everything's about profit," he says. "It's very boring actually. Very materialistic, what car they drive, girls' handbags, Gucci's, LVs, that sort of thing."

Chen is adamant that he would not have started something like Pozible if he had not come to Australia. "It was very friendly to a startup culture," he says. The timing was right, too, as government funding cuts squeezed the arts. "There was certain things we did right, but it was also luck," he says.

Pozible is well-positioned to launch into equity crowdfunding if and when it's legalised by the federal government, but Chen doesn't want to be working on Pozible when he's 50. "I want to do other startups, I enjoy it," he says.

I press him for his advice for aspiring entrepreneurs. "It requires a lot more than the desire for money to get [a startup] working. It needs hard work. You've got have a passion or to be honest, you won't stick at it for that long."

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LIFE AND TIMES

1983 Born in Bengbu, China

2006 Comes to Australia to study Digital Media Design at the University of Sydney

2007 Meets Pozible co-founder Alan Crabbe through a Gumtree ad for a shared road trip

2009 Spends a year developing WonderArt website

2010 Co-founds Pozible

2011 Moves to Melbourne to expand Pozible

2012 Pozible becomes world's third largest reward-based crowdfunding platform

2014 Pozible launches in China