“What’s up with the Australian startup scene lately?”
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The email had just that one sentence. And maybe a few emojis.
I laughed and tapped a quick reply out on my iPhone.
“Get on a ✈️ and find out m8 🇦🇺!”
What’s up down under?
A post about Australian unicorns today from Atlanta Daniel of Signal Ventures brought this ridiculous exchange to my mind again. Having spent the last few years abroad, I’m used to a full spectrum of reactions towards the tech community in my homeland. Lately the shrimp on a barbie jokes have given away to increasingly genuine curiosity.
No really, what is going on down there?
Unlike some cultures that melt into their immediate environments, Australians tend to maintain some form of cultural connection that is easily evidenced in our community groups — ranging from our infamous (and awesome) Aussie Mafia group, the emerging Aussie.eu or the various Advance and landing pad efforts.
And it’s while abroad that, like so many others, I realise that this is such an easy country to advocate for. And almost like sharing a secret we could just as easily keep to ourselves.
But it’s no secret anymore… Australia is quickly becoming a funnel for investment opportunities abroad. Look at former Fishburner’s Sydney-based Snappr heading up the number one spot in Mattermark’s analysis of the current graduating Y Combinator cohort earlier this week.
Take a minute to appreciate that. From a community-focused co-working space in Ultimo to the top spot in one of the top accelerators on the planet.
Swapping sunshine for snow?
A feat that’s reminiscent of Troy Westley from CareMonkey taking out the startup pitch competition at Slush in 2015. I’d been covering the event in Helsinki for a number of years, spending some time living in Finland to attempt to understand how the community grew from “a few mates at a pub” to a thriving 20,000-person event (the answer was obviously “saunas and Leipäjuusto).
Some seemed surprised to see Aussies amongst the entrants (which included Slush Downunder winner Sports Performance Tracking), but after watching each of Troy’s earlier rounds, I pre-wrote the copy proclaiming CareMonkey’s win and shipped it off to some editors I was running stringer for with the note “I kid you not I reckon old mate’s got this in the bag too easy aye mate”.
At least one US editor replied with what I took as a culturally appreciative “sigh… ozzies.” 🤠
Why doesn’t Australia tell it’s own story?
For those back in Australia, the national narrative seems too often to be a recipe of equal parts Hills Hoist and “we discovered wifi” nostalgia, with a side serving of Atlassian.
But there’s no shortage of amazing stories in the ecosystem. There’s just a shortage of documentarians to share them.
What I love most about the post by Lants is that is was preceded by an entertaining poke around the Twittersphere. “Crikey,” she might have but didn’t really say, “where’s our true blue unicorns, diggers?”
Or words to that effect.
The result was a quick barrage of at least twelve unicorns and a whole host of innovative businesses. The majority keeping their heads down and shipping product — including Envato, the “most profitable startup that you haven’t heard of”.
And something else that Lants pointed out was that Aussie investors are mixing it with their international counterparts.
Australian investors also do world-class deals. They’ve lead rounds with international syndicates (eg Square Peg Capital lead with Fiverr and went in on Uber, and Blackbird Ventures with Zoox). — Lants.
Certainly the recent coverage of how Jeremey Liew sourced the first investment in Snapchat for Lightspeed Venture Partners is remiss without an insistent nudge that he grew up in Perth (which is technically a part of Australia in the same way that Special Zone is part of Super Mario World).
Investors love a sunburned country
But the inverse also holds true: world-class foreign investment is coming to find the Australian companies.
We experienced this at our company Corilla as well, which I spun out from Red Hat’s Brisbane office with both angel and seed rounds led by Red Hat’s US-based cofounder and first CEO, Bob Young. That was a first for an Aussie company and a sign that even the household names in tech are turning their attention to the lucky country.
The same goes for accelerators, with familiar faces from 500 Startups and TechStars and YC doing their tours of duty around the nation, and two of the three opening regional programs.
Again something we’ve experienced first-hand, taking Corilla over to join the NUMA accelerator in Paris (something I’ll touch on during the “Going global from day one” panel at Myriad next week). In turn I’m excited to have lured at least one NUMA startup back to Australia, with the amazing Krak coming over as part of the Hot DesQ program.
And that’s just one boomerang
Just a quick note about those examples above. Consider this: those are just a handful or examples within the personal experience of a pretty typical first-time founder on an equally typical journey through a pretty awesome ecosystem.
So imagine this at scale? Across all of the nation? With founders that actually know what they’re doing?
Let alone the “boomerangs” who’ve gone abroad and will return with their own networks, leads, advice, experience and stories. Founders like Nikki Durkin. These are quite the stories. In a country with quite the opportunity for those willing to take it.
Remember that the next time you hear someone whinge “but Australia is just so faaaaaaaaaar”. Tell that to the generations of this multi-cultural country that arrived by boat to build big and important things. Or the amazing indigenous first peoples that walked here and learned this fierce nation’s secrets.
There’s things I would change about Australia — I’ve written recently and openly about our ability to cut out the tall poppy syndrome — but after working across 10+ countries in the last 12 months alone it’s safe to say that there is indeed something up with the Australian startup scene lately.
Which is why, like a lot of local founders that have gone abroad, I’m starting to think that maybe those damn Qantas kids put it best…
And you could too.
It looks like there’s something up with the startup scene here after all. See you at Myriad. 🇦🇺
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 twenty-three’s post — what did you think?
