Podcast Interview: History of the Australian Startup Ecosystem

My interview for the Welcome to Day One series on the history of the Aussie Startup Ecosystem got released recently and I’ve had some good feedback from others so I thought I would share it here.

I would also recommend listening to this interview with Peter Davison (one of the OG PayPal investors) and Jodie Fox (founder of Shoes Of Prey).

The undertone of my interview is that we need to see narrative change in Australia away from constantly putting ourselves down, “we’re crap and we don’t know what we’re doing“, to “we’re actually doing pretty well and this is why we’ll win.” – Australia needs to build its confidence to play on a global stage in tech. After all, just look at our confidence in mining and education for real life examples.

Ultimately, there is no such as a copy-paste in startup land and that applies to Australia’s strategy as well.

Some of the things we chat about it include:

• Why our startup ecosystem is much better then we give it credit for
• The problems we have in startup land are NOT unique to Australia
• Problem with Australia backing young people to do big things
• Our transformation from a services economy to a tech economy
• Why every founder and their company is unique
• Don’t over profile what a founder should look like as it leads to value-laden limitations
• What “startup infrastructure” means and why that is important
• Does ‘tall poppy’ cap our ambition?
• The levers Government can pull to make the tech sector bigger and better

They asked my for my ‘unpopular’ or ‘differentiated opinions’ (as I put it) on our sector and putting it here for posterity:

1. Government does have a role in AU to play in increases global competitiveness – it’s completely false that governments don’t help create markets (but it is true that too much privations of gains can also lead to bad market outcomes)
2. Increased state-to-state competition is a good thing for Australia (but federal tech policy should be consistent from election to election!)
3. Founders should understand what type of game you’re playing to improve their chances of success (i.e. understand what advice you should listen to!)

Thanks to Adam Spencer for putting this together.