Sydney Tech Meetup is Dead. Long Live the Sydney Tech Meetup.
After more than 10 years as the longest running tech meetup in Australia, the Sydney Tech Meetup as we know it is now finished.
In its place I’m going to trial a NEW Sydney Tech Meetup that I’ve been wanting to create for some time but just haven’t gotten around to doing… until now.
The new Sydney Tech Meetup will now be once monthly (instead of fortnightly) and will move from being an early morning event to an evening event.
The first of the new meetup events is (0r was, if you’re reading this in the future…) Wednesday 21st June at 6pm at Fishburners.
THE MAIN SPEAKERS — EARLIER STAGE THAN USUAL
At each meetup we will feature founders from 2 interesting companies that are at the start of their journey challenging incumbents in a large industry (the theme will change every meetup — so check out the event page for this month’s theme and speakers)
We’ve decided to focus on companies that are at the start of their journey because, by far, the majority of inbound questions I have received through this meetup and my day job at 25Fifteen are from people who have “a disruptive idea” but are unsure how to get started.
I think there’s lots of value in hearing from talented people who are working on changing things in industries where you can’t just throw up a landing page or set up a Big Commerce store (shout out to an awesome Sydney-born startup!) and who recently moved beyond idea stage.
For clarity, I think there’s aspirational and strategic value in hearing from successful (however that is defined) founders and there are lots of other great events that give you access to this type of information. My feeling is that there’s also complimentary “peer” value in hearing from people who are only a few steps ahead of you and understanding how they did what is often the hardest thing…got started.
WANT TO DEMO AN AWESOME AND ENGAGING TECHNICAL PRODUCT?
We will also be featuring 2 sydney-based teams that will do a live demo of technically interesting and innovative (i.e. plain cool) products — again with some connection to the month’s theme.
There’s so much focus on demo’ing to pitch these days that we want to go old school and focus some of our time on demo’ing for the sake of showcasing cool stuff.
For the demo products we’re indifferent as to whether or not you have a business model or what your monetisation strategy is (though there’s no problem is you have one or both of these). This is 100% about showing off cool stuff built in Sydney.
If you think you’d like to do a 5 min demo of your product (related to this month’s theme) with a quick Q&A afterwards just fill in this form and we’ll get back to you.
AND LASTLY…
The last thing we want to experiment with is how we can empower this group of 6000+ people to help each other, and the Sydney tech community, succeed.
I have a few ideas for how we can do this but am open to suggestion (i.e. feel free to reach out to me through the meetup site or directly if you have my details.)
Hope to see you at a Sydney Tech Meetup soon
