I’ve been interested in startups for the past ten or fifteen years. I worked through the dotcom boom and bust, watched the train wreck that followed and then observed as new, stronger companies grew up over the last few years. The environment for startups has changed so much over the past decade it is almost unbelievable. Services like Amazon’s EC2 and S3 make it so much easier and cheaper to get your company off the ground and on the development side, advances in techniques like the use of Agile and in frameworks like Rails have made building software much faster. It has been an amazing thing to watch and I’m excited to think that most intelligent commentators still believe that we’re at the beginning phase of the internet revolution.
A few months back I decided that I wanted to participate a bit more in the “startup community” here in Sydney and in Australia more broadly. Like most things, life conspired against me and I haven’t really done much beyond register a few domain names and give the idea some thought. Then something happened – Atlassian raised money from Accel and that sparked my interest in startups again.
More importantly than that though, Renai LeMay wrote an interesting opinion piece about the longer term impacts this might have on Australian IT. I instantly fired back on my blog with a rebuttal that took what I believe is a more focused but longer-term view of building a really good startup community in Australia.
To say the comments went off the chart on Delimiter would be understating the obvious. Renai got hammered for his point of view. What it did generate though was a whole bunch of passion from some people who are in the space or people who want to understand it. It also highlighted to me that there is the genesis of really strong community made up of existing and potential entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, there is also a complete lack of underlying infrastructure to support their ambitions and their businesses.
So I say, let’s work on changing that. In many respects, Renai makes a fair point – why should a company have to go offshore to raise $50m or $60m of funding when we Australians have invested over $1 TRILLION dollars in our superannuation? If a company like Atlassian has such a great future (and I totally believe they will be a massive success), how come our retirement funds aren’t going to get a piece of that action? Why can companies like Rio and BHP sustain dual listings in Australia and overseas, but tech companies are massively undervalued one the ASX and ignored by investors?
These things are all fixable – I ardently believe that capital flows to areas where there is the most growth and potential. Equally and unavoidably, the best ideas and the best entrepreneurs gravitate towards places where they can get the most value for their assets. The key is to foster a community of entrepreneurs who have access to good local talent, world class advisors and affordable and available capital from investors who understand what these entrepreneurs are aiming to do.
I think it is so important to learn from this experience with Atlassian, like Renai says, analyse what happened here, but rather than lament the opportunity lost, celebrate the fact that our startup community has had a win on the global stage and work out how we can foster more wins, bigger wins and develop a better ecosystem here to make sure that there are more Atlassians in the pipeline.
The main question is, how do we make change and make a difference? Well, I have a number of ideas of what I’d like to do with this site:
- Regular posts, updates, videos and profiles of startup companies in various stages of their lifecycle to help all of us keep across who’s out there and what people are working on;
- A startup Newsletter highlighting what’s going on in the community with companies, happenings and events;
- Scheduled events with speakers who can offer help, advice and guidance to entrepreneurs – this could be lawyers, accountants and other entrepreneurs, just offering insights into some area they know something about;
- A Job Board to help startups finds suitable candidates without breaking the bank on recruitment fees;
- Allow open submissions to the blog so if you think you have something to add, feel free to write a post, send it to me and if it makes some sense, then I’ll post it and attribute it accordingly;
- Compile a list of “REAL” technology Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists in Australia along with a list of startups - kind of like our own Australian version of Crunchbase;
- Look into the idea of creating a Venture Hacks’ style “Angel List” for Angels and VCs to opt into and for entrepreneurs to submit their ideas to; and,
- Within 12 months, all things being equal, I’d like to put together something like a “Techcrunch 50″ style event in Australia bringing together launching companies with the investor community.
There’s quite a few ideas there and that’s just what I’ve come up with. I’m happy to drive this in my spare time as a hobby, but please remember I have a real job. I’m also going to be reaching out to those of you who were very vocal on the topic and seemed to have experience to share – I will hold you to it. Any help you want to provide to this initiative is something I’m most certainly open to. I’ll be building out the site a bit over the coming weeks.
One thing I’ve listed above that I’ve been very keen to see is an event like the Techcrunch 50 or something akin to what Jason Calacanis is describing as his “Launch Conference” but operating here in Australia. What I’d like to do is spend the next bunch of months fleshing out who the players (Angels and VCs) are in the tech investment community here in Australia and trying to get them involved. Likewise, if there are any overseas investors who want to come here and play, they’re more than welcome. I’d like to see an event that allows a bunch of companies to launch on stage in front of real investors and their peers and have another group of companies in the various startup stages with an area to showcase what they are doing. Then whatever profit an event like this draws, roll it up into some kind of early-stage seed fund and invest it right back into the startup community here in Australia.
I firmly believe that the best way to build a vibrant startup community in Australia is to get people involved, make it economically viable, challenge government to make sensible policy and celebrate our victories.
If that’s something you want to be a part of or help to build, feel free to let me know via comments or by email at: sean@startupsdownunder.com
