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Australia’s Deep Tech Ambitions With Phil Morle, Startup Scene Pioneer and Partner at Main Sequence Ventures

Benjamin Joffe
SOSV
Published in
26 min readAug 10, 2020

This is the 13th episode of the podcast Deep Tech: From Lab to Market’ where Founders and Investors share how ‘deep tech’ innovation can go from lab to market. It is available on Apple Podcast and other platforms and hosted by Benjamin Joffe, Partner at SOSV, a global early stage fund focused on deep tech. SOSV runs multiple accelerator programs including HAX (intelligent hardware) and IndieBio (life sciences). To hear about new episodes, sign up to the newsletter or follow us on twitter at @LabToMarket.

Getting innovation from lab to market is not an easy feat, and few countries do it well. Australia’s research output, for instance, punches way above its commercial applications (e.g. #10 in the SJR ranking and Nature Index).

Are there ways to accelerate that transformation? Australia set up Main Sequence Ventures (@mseqvc) as a AU$240M (about US$170M) deep tech fund backed by the CSIRO and private investors, to target that opportunity notably in domains such as ag-tech, synthetic biology, quantum and space (the CSIRO is the Australia’s federal government agency responsible for scientific research).

In this episode, Phil Morle (@philmorle), partner and long-time pioneer of the country’s startup scene (wikipedia), explains the commonalities he found between entrepreneurs and scientists, how the fund extended its investment domains and helps compress development timelines.

He closes with thoughts on the tough year it has been with fires, drought and Covid, and how returns and impact now go hand in hand, from responding to new threats, feeding the planet, to delivering healthcare at scale.

For other episodes on foreign deep tech ecosystems, check out India and Japan.

Before Main Sequence Ventures, Phil had three lives:

  • He spent a decade as a theatre director, learning how to create things from scratch.
  • Another decade with startups including as CTO of Kazaa — the then-dominant P2P file-sharing service,
  • And another as the founder of Australia’s first Silicon Valley-style startup incubator, called Pollenizer, where he also advised numerous organizations including the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) on setting up their own incubators.
  • He was then tapped by the CSIRO to set up a fund to support the translation of Australian research into commercial applications, including the output of CSIRO’s 3,500 scientists.

Among the lessons learned:

  • How he got scientists to grow an entrepreneurial mindset.
  • How to look for early proof points for the whole company.
  • How spending too long in the science exclusively sends weak signals into the market.
  • How deal creation is more valuable than mere deal assessment and de-risking.
  • How they designed a plant-based meat company, assembled a team, and got a product to market in 9 months only.
  • How bridge-building between scientific domains, business expertise and geographies is crucial to startup success.
  • How Covid-19 has lit a fire in the innovation ecosystem.

(Scroll down for the full transcript)

Ben: [00:00:00] Phil, great to have you today!

Phil: [00:00:01] Hello, Benjamin. Great to be here!

Ben: [00:00:04] You were one of the pioneers of the incubation and acceleration for startups in Australia. We met when you used to run Pollenizer out of Sydney and Singapore, and you’ve come a long way since!

Phil: [00:00:16] Thanks, Benjamin. My startup experience really began when I was actually a theater director. it sounds like nothing to do with deep tech startups that I work with today, but theater is a terrific grounding for people making companies, because you effectively have nothing to start with: you need to gather resources around you to make sense something amazing that people value and you have to bring people along on the mission with you. So that grounding was fantastic.

But after that, as I decided I would like to make some money in my life, I made my way up through the ranks of various technology companies until I became the chief technology officer at Kazaa, one of the earlier file sharing companies and got my early taste of being in an early stage high growth company, and one of the few that had come out of Australia at the time.

Ten years later, I looked around for another startup and it was a bit of a desert of startup activity. In general, entrepreneurs would get on a plane and go to Silicon Valley to start their company rather than build them here. And so we created the first Silicon Valley-style accelerator program and it was called Pollenizer and it went through a range of different business models because it needed to pivot like crazy to find its value in a sort of epically underfunded environment here in Australia.

But we made about 35 different companies and helped many hundreds, as we co-designed accelerator programs for people across Southeast Asia and across Australia, including some of the biggest companies.

What was very interesting about that was having to be quite mindful of what we were doing. There was a point where we said: let’s help more people do what we do. And we realized that we’d just been going on instinct and we were doing some things that were quite valuable and useful, but we didn’t really know what those specific things were.

So the first job was actually extracting those things and having a mindset where we’re outside and looking at it critically, and optimizing it over time. And that’s what sort of gave us a very deliberate company-building ‘from scratch’ approach. Towards the end of that time, we created and designed and ran the first national accelerator program for the CSIRO, which is where I work now. It stands for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. It’s the massive science agency here in Australia.

The brief was to design an accelerator program for the nation’s research system. And so that the customers, if you like, were not only the CSIRO, but it was defense, it was all the universities, it was all the rural development corporations.

And the big challenge was how do we help scientists construct a company out of their inventions. And I remember my first briefing and I was warned ‘The scientists don’t think like you, Phil, you can’t just wait in there with your entrepreneur slogans on your t-shirt and make big declarations about changing the world. These people come from a different culture and you need to learn from that and change what you’re doing for those people.’

[Scientists] come from a different culture and you need to learn from that.

But in fact, I learned very quickly that those people had very much in common with entrepreneurs. And I’ve I summarized that with being this idea: why do you choose to be a scientist? Or why do you choose to be an entrepreneur? And I think there’s a couple of things:

  • One is you want to have impact on the planet. You want to know that something you did make everything a little bit better.
  • And also you’re insanely curious, if you choose either of those paths.

Those two ideas they were my rope that I pulled my way through the relationship with the scientists. And that’s led me to where I am today as a partner in the CSIRO venture capital fund, which is called Main Sequence Ventures. And that’s what we do.

We fund deep tech companies with strong connections with publicly funded research, that can have massive impact on the world.

Ben: [00:04:34] What did you see that needed tuning when you started working with scientists? there’s another program quite well known in the U S called iCorps that was designed by Steve Blank, one of the grandfathers of the Lean Startup movement. Did you adapt some of that?

Phil: [00:04:49] The work that we did here did begin with the Steve Blank mindset . That maps very well to the scientific mind. So this whole idea of having a hypothesis, running an experiment, testing for failure.

But the big change was how you tell the story and describe what it is that you’re trying to do. And I found this incredibly interesting, and I realized why I was struggling with it so much.

One day when I went to a classic scientific presentation session. It was a kind of liquid biopsy therapy that someone was talking about on the stage.

And as soon as the scientist opened, the audience put up their hands and people started objecting and challenging what the scientist was asserting in the research. And I realized that this world that we come from in entrepreneurship where we’re describing not our science, that’s proven with all the evidence, we’re often describing what we’re trying to build and what the world will look like when we’re successful.

We’re describing not our science [but] what we’re trying to build and what the world will look like when we’re successful.

That created a lot of discomfort in the communities that I was working with, about understanding that sort of switch when you’re describing your company that people are listening to differently than if you’re presenting the evidence if your science.

Another thing that happened to me was in one of the early cohorts of the accelerator, I showed everyone the Elon Musk Tesla Powerwall launch video. And this is a really interesting presentation of something deeply scientific with a mission behind it, being shared by somebody that isn’t an actor, you know. It’s kind of nice watching Elon Musk present some of these things cause he’s a bit of a nerd and he’s a bit clumsy.

And myI thinking when I showed this was ‘Here: he’s just a normal, scientific thinking person, like the rest of us in this room, and look at how he shows the world what he’s looking to build here.’

And I remember the beginning of that presentation, as he says: ‘Today, we’re going to talk about how energy flows across the Earth.’ And then he starts talking about the energy system, and what Tesla is going to do to improve it, over time. remember looking up at the group — there’s about 50 people in the room — saying: what do you think? They were just quiet and I said ‘what’s the matter? what are you guys thinking?’, and they said, ‘He’s lying! He can’t do what he says he’s trying to do. The job is too vague!’

And then they started throwing all these sort of kilowatt-hour sort of formulas at me. And I said that the thing that you’re missing here is he’s not describing his research. he’s describing the change in the world that he wants to play a very active part in doing, and he’s trying to build a movement behind himself so that more people participate in and we have a massive impact.

That really helped people understand that mindset difference between the scientific picture, if you like, where you’re describing your evidence, and the entrepreneurial pitch way you’re describing primarily the world that you’re going to create. it’s quite different. It requires the entrepreneurial scientists to make a shift in their mind between those two roles.

Ben: [00:08:09] Your example is great cause it really highlights that difference between the world of science, which is first doubt, and then looking for proof, versus the world of entrepreneurship, which is a lot about conviction.

Phil: [00:08:22] That’s right. One of the things I find myself doing a lot in my work and it creates breakthroughs thinking this way is helping scientists to determine what is the early proof point of a company, if that’s the direction that they want to go. And quite often, as you well know in your work, they, unlike a SaaS platform or a marketplace or a kind of ‘startup 1.0’ time company, we can’t make a quick MVP that has a thousand customers paying us $20 a month.

For a synthetic biology alternative to die, for example, for fashion. They too, need proof at a very early stage. And I find that proof of business, proof of transformation can occur.

That is one of the moments where initially scientists are quite often highly reluctant to make any commitment. And so there’ll be lots of conversations around, ‘could we do in six months?’ that shows people we can nail this or how long would it take us, or how quickly could we make a sample that five people can experience or something like that… so that we can show people what we can do and then resource the next stage of the company.

That’s how venture capital works, right? It’s:

  • Invest what you need to get to the next proof so that you get a step change in value.
  • Bring in more capital, more resources, more support.
  • And then repeat, as the business grows.

Have that conversation with scientists, so they understand it’s okay to say ‘I think, yeah, we could, we might not be able to, but I’ll have a crack at it’, rather than the conversation of ‘we would need to do some experiments in order to determine whether that’s possible’, which is infinite loop of not getting anywhere quite often.

Ben: [00:10:15] A challenge for many of the deep tech early stage startups is to identify those early milestones. I’d say the default thinking of researchers and scientists is generally more science and more research, and that’s not necessarily what the company needs at that point.

Phil: [00:10:29] Spending too long in the science exclusively sends weak signals into the market.

Spending too long in the science exclusively sends weak signals into the market.

It sends a signal which isn’t really describing what we’re doing in a way that people who aren’t scientists could understand it, and come and support you. It’s taken a long time quite often which, in the world of venture, can lead people sometimes to think ‘Gosh! What’s really happening with this company Is it really producing anything?’, whereas if we can get to that early milestone where other people who might talk about that company can experience what it’s doing. If that company has a brand story, if that company is hiring some of the most interesting people, and we’re building the company as well as the science at the same time, that’s incredibly powerful I’ve found for properly resourcing these companies over time.

Ben: [00:11:24] How has the deep tech ecosystem developed in Australia starting with maybe looking into the most active research areas?

Phil: [00:11:32] We have a fantastic research system here in Australia. We have 48 universities here, and an expanded research system around that. So we have groups called rural development corporations, which are funded from government money, but also from levies from sheep farmers, for example, or wheat farmers and they do agricultural research.

And then we have various defense and a whole bunch of healthcare, research organizations, We have some strengths here in Australia around, food for example.

A hundred years ago, the CSIRO was founded to actually solve the food problem. And scientists came together to become very good at the science of agriculture and food production in general. The DPI, the Department of Primary Industries, New South Wales, that alone has 600 scientists. So there’s a lot of food and agriculture research that happens here across Australia, that’s accrued over a hundred years and it’s deeply integrated with industry. That’s extending into modern ways of making foods such as synthetic biology. We’ve been very active in synthetic biology at least a decade especially in Brisbane where there is super cluster of synthetic biology, talent and facilities.

Quantum computing is also a big area And, as with many of these incredible scientific disciplines, that began with one academic joining ranks of the university of New South Wales here in Sydney, about 20 years ago when it was a sort of niche academic pursuit. And then if you wanted to study this as an academic, Australia was one of the places you came to. And now we have multiple universities in Australia that are world-class with quantum computing and companies like Microsoft come here to develop their quantum computers. We’re very excited about what is emerging as an industry here around quantum computing.

We have the Southern hemisphere and space infrastructure here in Australia that CSIRO. So all the telescopes, we have the square kilometer array, which is the biggest telescope in the world, that runs out of the desert of Western Australia. And when it’s fully operational, it’s going to literally create the Internet’s worth of data every minute coming in from these satellites. So we have an emerging, driven, powerful, space industry here in Australia, which is coming in behind the academic efforts of the last few decades.

Healthcare again is a big area. If there’s been a weakness, traditionally in Australia, it’s been that a lot of this work historically has been quite siloed and not necessarily been shared across the different research organizations. And certainly not with the broader industry that can actually help turn these things into companies.

So even though we’re one of the top research countries in the world, the top 1% in many areas, we are 70-something in the rankings of countries that actually turn this into commercial outcomes.

And that’s one of the reasons why our fund was founded to be a lot more deliberate about how things come out, and how industry in general works with things which are inside research to turn it into Australian companies operating on a global stage and we’ve got much better at that. Today, if you go to any university, any research organization, there is a very active interaction with the system around them. There is a common language. There is an enthusiasm around starting companies. And I think we’re just at the bottom of the foot hills, but it’s working and we’re well placed to make some great companies here in Australia.

Ben: [00:15:35] It’s great to see that the ecosystem is evolving. What you describe as the challenge of translating research into a commercial applications is something many countries struggle with. Actually doing that right is more the exception than the norm! Through our work on investments around the world, we’ve noticed that some ecosystems punch above their weight, like Israel, Canada with the University of Waterloo. Do you think that there are some remaining barriers around IP sharing, or carer risk for project owners?

Phil: [00:16:05] We haven’t nailed a shared mindset yet. I think, that’s definitely getting there, but the traditional model of IP is holding things back in Australia. we still have too many, research organizations who believe that the research has been proven, the paper has been published, the value creation is done, all you have to go and do now is sell it and everything will look perfect. But of course we know that there’s everything to be done from that point.

And we find that where it’s broken, there are issues in terms of IP ownership, which means that there’s no room on the cap table for founders to be motivated for the decade to come and for other shareholders to be able to come in and support the business. There’s simply no room. And so that is going away quickly as we have that very open conversation, but it’s still holding things back.

I think the other thing that’s missing is an appreciation of velocity. there tends to be processes that take too long before action can happen. there are some very good universities here in Australia now who are pioneering much more Silicon Valley / Stanford type of model, which is quick decisions, then don’t overreach, IP, run like the wind and go build your company. But we’ve got that inconsistent around Australia at the moment. Being a CEO and professor of genetics at Berkeley or something like that, in most places in Australia, you would get fired for doing that because it’s technically against the terms of your contract at the university to do that. And so there’s this thing holding people back where they can’t just dive headfirst into the flow of innovation. There’s not enough fluidity on that yet. I think we’re getting there, but that I really hope to see that happening cause I think it’s going to pay fantastic dividends when there’s more of a flow between the lab and the startups

Ben: [00:18:04] That’s a great point. Another question I wanted to ask was around the intellectual trade balance, and the role of Australia’s unique geography.

Phil: [00:18:13] one of the things I love about living in Australia is it is deeply intercultural it’s a melting pot of people from all over the world. So in that sense, it’s a net importer because over the last couple of generations, many of us have moved to Australia. I’m from the UK, but I’ve lived here for 30 years. I think from that, we have a very global perspective and we have a very strong access to networks who are all over the world.

And I think we’re also in general, mindful that our market isn’t as vast as China, or the US, or Europe. And so we must think globally in order to, grow our companies, certainly in terms of finding customers in terms of understanding the value propositions, but also in terms of talent acquisition. Many of our portfolio companies have hired people in other countries and brought them over to Australia. You really just have to do that. We can’t put an ad in the news type a for an expert in quantum error correction, there’s a hundred people who are the best in the world at that. And they’re scattered all over the world. Having said that we have some extraordinary, people in those industries that I spoke about before quantum computing, synthetic biology, agriculture, healthcare, and there are other people that are here because talented, inspiring people are a magnet for other people.

In our first wave of venture capital we’ve had a bias towards West coast US. Increasingly, we are building strong networks in Asia, including China, India, Southeast Asian countries.

And I hope we’re not entering a period of time where that is going to become difficult: one of our companies has just raised a very big round. One of the investors that was in the early stages of the round was very enthusiastic and was going to put in a significant contribution of money. On the day it went to the board for decision, a local newspaper here published some anti-Chinese, sentiment and the board of that company in China actually read it, and withdrew from the process. It would be a shame if incredibly rich friendships and innovation opportunities across this entire region freezes over due to geopolitics.

Ben: [00:20:39] We see the same happening in the US, occasionally also in Europe. There’s the politics and there’s also sometimes some form of technological protectionism, which is often misguided because affecting sectors that don’t really have a strategic importance, and definitely limiting the options of local companies in terms of funding in terms of exits. So that’s problematic.

Phil: [00:21:01] Especially when you get into these sort of strategic technologies, which is much more easy to stumble into, of course, if you’re a deep tech fund and a deep tech startup, because we’re making transformational powerful things with unique science at the core of them.

And so, for example, our quantum computing company, which is called Q Control. It’s wrapped up in this a little bit at the moment, where there’s this question of ‘Is it a dual use technology? Should quantum technology in general be export controlled?’ In fairness to our government, they are very proactive in trying to understand what startups need in order not be frozen over accidentally with some legislation, but at the same time developing legislation in response to global events, which are changing more rapidly than they have done perhaps historically. So it’s a difficult challenge.

Ben: [00:21:56] It’s a complex problem to solve, but we can hope for the best. To talk about also your practice of investing in deep tech. I’d be curious to hear about your approach to sourcing the projects, to due diligence. And in particular, because you mentioned a number of sectors considered quite difficult, like you mentioned, synthetic biology, quantum … if you could explain how you stepped into those areas?

Phil: [00:22:20] Technically we can invest in anything which has a strong, scientific core and some connection with publicly funded research.

  • About half of the companies we’ve invested in have spun out of publicly funded research organizations.
  • The other half we have connected them with something going on in a publicly funded research and increased the value of the company doing so.

So the connection could be preexisting or we’ve facilitated happening.

And then we have five themes currently:

  1. Humanity-scale Healthcare. How do we diagnose and treat illness cheaper and better?
  2. Feeding 10 Billion People, which is how do we feed 10 billion people with less planetary resources.
  3. Space and New Transport. A lot of that is building upon the amazing infrastructure that we have here in Australia.
  4. New Society theme, which is about how do we, as humans, respond to this massive surge in new technologies? How do we be ready for new threats? How do we learn new skills?
  5. Exponential Machines, which is about, how do we increase the power of what we’re doing to be able to do things like synthesize proteins and things like that with quantum computer.

And, so then to the next layer of your question, there’s two things here.

One is: how do we understand the science enough to know whether something’s snake oil. And that’s one of the terrific benefits of being a part of the CSIRO, because there’s 3,500 scientists here from every discipline that you like. And we have ready access to people who are experts in the field, or just come and work with us, and not only to help us to understand it from a scientific perspective, but to help us meet other people that can give us different perspectives on it and grow the scope of the opportunity.

So it’s not just saying whether something’s bad or whether there’s some risk, but it’s also saying ‘Why don’t you think about these other two things here? Because that would make it even more interesting.’ So this whole idea of deal creation, not just deal assessment and risk mitigation, is quite powerful.

Deal creation, not just deal assessment and risk mitigation.

And then the other thing, which is probably more important from a venture capital perspective is, as these sectors have very unique patterns of investment, specialist funds working in these different fields.

Healthcare is a classic, I mean the science of growing a health care company, what the exit looks like, how much money it needs, what the time scales are, who your peers in the investment community are, who are the companies? It’s a phenomenal amount of work to actually build that network, build those relationships, get that understanding of the industry as well as the science itself. And that’s the main reason why we have these emerging lines of inquiry across these themes, because it just takes time and effort to become knowledgeable and connected in that area. And that includes ways of designing in the systems which are going to make this company more likely to succeed than not.

Look at food, for example. I got very interested in food when we were doing the On accelerator program, because I noticed that the food teams coming through, whilst super exciting in what they were proposing — there was one which had a much more potent source of calcium, which could added to other foods rather than needing drink lots of milk — but they really struggled to figure out, you know, what’s the food? Is it a sweet, is it a shake or a drink? Is it a powder that food companies pay for, is it an ingredient? And is it a medicine? So they couldn’t figure that out.

There were supply chains, which were very specific, there were certain customer things needing a marketing mindset. So there were just so many dimensions to it that the science on its own just couldn’t deliver a scope philosophy.

In contrast to that, our recent company V2 Food, which is a plant based meat company. We knew that it was going to be really hard to make that business, we understood all too well that Impossible Foods, for example, isn’t just mashing soybeans in a bowl into the shape of the beef burger, and then saying, ‘there you go, mate’. There’s a lot of work and hundreds of millions of dollars that have delivered this fabulous new kind of food. So we went into that with our eyes wide open and the way we did that is we literally designed the company.

  • We put risk capital in before there was a company,
  • We brought together a fantastic entrepreneurial team who had launched products on the global stage for companies like Mars and PepsiCo.
  • We brought in the Australian, franchise of Burger King, which is called Hungry Jack, which has a massive supply chain right across Asia. It has meat processing and of course it has the restaurants.
  • And we brought together the CSIRO who had protein scientists, climate scientists, nutrition scientists. They had scientists that work with the meat industry to optimize the flavor of animal-produced meat.

And we brought them together to create a sort of super team to deliver the science. And we delivered a product that people going through a drive-through in a Hungry Jack’s, in a high vis vest in a four wheel drive, found indistinguishable from meat. And we got there in nine months and launched it nationally in Australia in nine months. But we could only do that because we designed all the elements together. We have the networks in the food industry and the entrepreneur world, to bring the right people in science. None of us could have started that company on our own, we had to bring it all together. And everything we do is a version of that. That’s an extreme version, but in my experience there’s no equivalent to the digital startup world where there’s a stream of fabulously honed, ready to invest in companies, just walking through the door. There’s just so much to do at a tech company, so many things potentially missing that there’s a lot of work for a deep tech venture fund to do to support those companies and provide some of those other elements.

Ben: [00:28:53] What you describe around compressing the timeline and participating in the company creation is a really impressive outcome. I remember when we were preparing this call, you also mentioned another company that we both have a in portfolio called Clara Foods. It struck me as also a very interesting example of connecting Australia’s ecosystem strength around synthetic biology to a later stage company.

Phil: [00:29:17] That’s a really good example how valuable bridge-building is in this work that we all do together. And to be able to learn from, and exchange opportunities between equally talented people in other markets ahead of us in some areas and needing help in other areas. And Clara is a really good example of how the qualifier in our fund — which is there needs to be this connection with Australian publicly funded research — is a powerful lever cause it might seem odd that that we invested in a Californian company with no connection with Australian publicly funded research.

But first of all, with Clara, we just thought they were a fantastic company doing important work, that was in line with our ‘Feeding 10 Billion People’ thesis. We discovered when we met them at the stage they were going through — this is about a year ago now — was scaling up that technology so that they could make much larger volumes of their various animal proteins without the animal.

As it turns out, that’s one of the areas that CSIRO has an incredible expertise and also has facilities like scale-up facilities for fermentation technology. There was a number of things that we could do to actually help the Clara team:

  • That included doing carbon assessments of their process independently,
  • Helping them with their scale up running some pilot trials in our various facilities,
  • And also working with our synthetic biology team who were up in Brisbane to optimize their product more.

That conversation become even more interesting because as we develop this industry, There are some significant infrastructure opportunities coming down. Brisbane city itself wants to be known as being a global epicenter of synthetic biology.

Brisbane city itself wants to be known as being a global epicenter of synthetic biology.

So there is a whole building going up now — a tower block, which is going to be all synthetic biology labs — there are scale-up facilities: bioreactors or fermenters, or whatever it is that the companies need are starting to be built.

And we have a massive sugar cane industry which means there is feedstock for fermentation right next door to where all their science is happening, where all these factories are happening. So Clara is in that mix as well. And maybe it can get to a point where it can create massive volumes of its proteins with the economics it needs to be globally competitive, because it’s built it in a place which is optimizing itself to be very good at it, and to do it at scale.

Ben: [00:31:56] definitely looking forward to that. we’ll try to be sending you more and more of our successful IndieBio graduates. So maybe to conclude, I’d like to ask you what do you see as next for Australia and it’s deep tech scene.

Phil: [00:32:11] Covid-19 has very strongly lit a fire in the innovation system here, and everyone from the government to the big companies, to the research organizations. There’s a lot of planning happening around how we’re going to burst out of this with new industries, not trying to patch up some of the old ones. The CSIRO created a roadmap for the quantum industry, for example, which has line of sight of a multibillion dollar industry.

Covid-19 has very strongly lit a fire in the innovation system here.

And now there is a coordinated effort for literally everyone involved in that industry to work together, to get there sooner. Quantum again is another one of those examples where you just can’t do it on your own. The full value proposition happens when multiple technologies come together to create a solution.

I’ve got a lot of hope of having companies directly solve problems that quantum computers need, to become a reality quickly. But also what’s super intense as all of these companies are working closely with industries who are, in time, going to become customers that buy or use quantum computers. And they’re learning together side by side. And I think that’s a very exciting thing that may be this country will have multiple industries that were there before anybody else working in quantum computing. So in our pharma businesses, in our banking sector, in our defense sector, we have some great opportunities there.

I’ve talked a lot about that in the food area, I think there is a great opportunity and a lot of planning going on to that becoming a, massive industry here in Australia. We in our fund are going to doing a lot more the whole kind of decarbonization strategy.

We’re a little bit torn at the moment. We don’t know whether it’s, say, it’s a theme or it’s a kind of meta-theme. It’s like everything we should be doing should be pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, or at least decreasing it massively. This whole question of impact investing or investing in capital returns is gone away now in our world. It’s all the same thing. The valuable companies are the companies that are going to have a massive impact on the planet in trouble. you’re looking for those.

This whole question of impact investing or investing in capital returns is gone away now in our world. It’s all the same thing.

And I think tragic as it’s been, in Australia, we’ve had bush fires, we’ve had droughts, now we’ve got COVID. It’s been the apocalypse here for the last year. And so no-one’s taking the old ways for granted anymore. Everyone’s looking to the future and knowing we have to do something differently. And that’s a potent time in history to do something extraordinary.

Ben: [00:34:40] Exciting times ahead. Personally, I’m also looking forward trying this Australian burger you mentioned.

Phil: [00:34:45] I can’t wait to share one with you.

Ben: [00:34:46] All right. Phil, thanks a lot. And, looking forward to future exchanges and potential co-investments!

Phil: [00:34:53] Thanks Benjamin.

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Benjamin Joffe
SOSV

Written by Benjamin Joffe

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Partner @ SOSV — Deep Tech VC w/ $1B AUM | Digital Naturalist | Keynote Speaker | Angel Investor | Mediocre chess player, worse at Jiu-jitsu

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