Myriad is the tipping point for Queensland tech
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Aspirational headlines used to say “Brisbane startup scene booming!”
But it wasn’t quite.
As recently as 2013 the key stakeholders of the Queensland startup ecosystem could fit around a small table. Or in the case of one actual session, a meeting room in a lawyer’s office at Brisbane’s Eagle Street Pier.
In that room the idea of a startup festival was raised and discussed and dashed. It wasn’t that the idea of a startup event was a bad one. It was just that there was a mix of factors that made it seem unlikely or uncomfortable in the way it was being presented.
From memory these factors included:
- concerns over there being enough resources allocated to execute it
- the natural fears of significant stakeholders that they might not be involved enough
- previous attempts in recent years weren’t created by the community first
- disagreement in appropriateness of the brand or stakeholders driving the project ahead
These are all very valid points. But for sake of brevity you can see where this is all going — you’ve read the headline after all. Each one of these worries is calmed by bringing in an impartial third party with not only significant financial support behind them, but experience delivering events at scale.
Myriad is the tipping point for Queensland tech.
Put very simply I think that Myriad is a significant cultural event for Queensland tech. A three day technology and startup conference that’s bringing in over $10B worth of technology VCs is certainly something to get some attention. But even more interesting is the individual narrative…
Global tech community as a personal experience
My bias in this view is probably worth a summary. In 2013 I was Red Hat’s first and only startup advocate in Australia, a role I created by maxing out my credit card and HR’s patience to explore Europe’s tech communities.
This included Slush in Helsinki, where Myriad co-organiser Martin Talvari worked and was in the email chain that landed me a media pass for some coverage amongst Australian startup media.
I attended again the following year, where I was delighted to watch Australian company CareMonkey winning the Slush 100 pitch competition. I’d started living in Helsinki too, moving over as my own company Corilla finished up season 7 of the NUMA startup accelerator in Paris.
The backstory is worth mentioning to declare some bias, sure, but to also show just one personal story revolving around the existence of Slush in Finland.
As the marketing team at Slush would say… why would anyone come to the dark north in winter for a technology conference? Why would an Australian fly that far on their own weeping credit card? Why would they come back and live there? Why would other Aussies come and conquer a pitch comp? Why?
Because any shared experience of significant mass creates a certain cultural gravity.
A quick lesson in gravity
One of the criticisms I’ve heard about Myriad is that the Queensland government has allocated millions of dollarydoos to secure the rights from 2017 to 2019 and that it’s… a lot of money. That the money could be spent on existing meetups. Or anything else you might imagine if you’re willing to play a round of the zero sum game.
To understand why this thinking is culturally self-limiting, picture all the meetups and clubs and co-working spaces and groups and agendas you can imagine in a startup ecosystem. Now toss them randomly across the freshly laid sheet of a king size bed.
I know. Cool story, bro.
Now let’s try this again. But now we take a bowling ball and place it gently in the middle of the bed. Watch as a few objects roll in towards the middle — effectively collecting a community of objects against the gravity of the bowling bowl.
Now let’s do this again and again. Not only adding more weight to the bowling ball, but actively pulling the other pieces closer time after time.
That’s Myriad — a force of gravity for the ecosystem that we can choose struggle against. Or something that we can roll towards, add weight to, and begin pulling in the creative collisions that are almost entirely the underlying magic of a global startup ecosystem.
An ecosystem that only a few years ago sat around a table and demanded support and resources and media attention.
Well, we’ve got it. It’s on March 29th to 31st. See you there.
Thanks for reading. I’ve set myself a personal challenge of writing and publishing daily for the month of March. Partly as an exercise in lean writing and partly to explore the impact of contributing these quick and raw narratives. This was day seven’s post — what did you think?
