Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

Disclosure, I work for data61, a major recipient of the gov't new innovation strategy. I'm also Canadian and have worked in technology in SF, LA, NYC, Vancouver and Santiago Chile.

I have a very different perspective on this. Australia has had more than just one Atlassian. They've also got Campaign Monitor, BigCommerce, Canva, Where 2 (became Google Maps), Envato. Australia is also growing Freelancer (I don't believe it was initially built here), and I'm sure many others.

Now, let's look at the comment regarding the newly announced innovation strategy does provide lots (probably too much) money to incubators, but so has every country. The incubator thing is just not successful outside a the few outliers YC, TechStars and maybe 1 or 2 others.

However, one of the large components of the plan is tax incentives to early stage investors. There are also bankruptcy law reform. There is also a new Entrepreneur Visa.

Now, Silicon Valley will almost always have an advantage to the history and network there. But that doesn't mean that Australia is "a crappy place" for tech business.

I find Australia a refreshing change from North America. There is a realistic view on revenue models, less money is 'wasted' on poorly thought out businesses. Australians are bright resourceful people.

I think this is a great place to be in tech. It punches above it's weight on the world stage.

If you look at regions with major technology successes, what do you end up with? A bunch in the US, a few in China, a few in India, a few in Canada, a few in Germany, a few in the UK. Where would Australia end up on a list of population vs. influence? I think pretty high.

I really don't understand the NBN meme.

I've worked for small tech companies in Australia my entire (not so long) career, and access to high internet speeds has never ever really been a problem. When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really?

Yes, regional areas should be upgraded from dialup/slow sattelite to at least 10mbps. What kind of impact will that have wrt the OP?

As someone who sorely wishes that a tech scene would actually take off here, issues that I believe dwarf the NBN are: small companies can't actually afford to fund hacking/R&D, risk aversion, a culture that is generally dismissive of [the] tech [scene], lack of encouragement in school education, and tax system (also the Australian Consumer Law) that will punish you for trying.

I worked from a co-working "hacker space" for a couple of years and, uh, well, there was not a lot of hacking going on. I've recently gotten into this for myself, and while mildly successful, all our customers are overseas shrug.

Edit: all good points made below. Quality of life will improve for us, still skeptical as to the degree to which it will address fundamental problems with the tech economy here though.

There is always more the government can do but there are two major government assistance programs I was not aware of till I founded a startup here. https://www.austrade.gov.au/Australian/Export/Export-Grants/... will reimburse 50% of your sales and marketing costs. So you can go spend $100k on Google Adwords and get $50k back effectively meaning you can outbid all your competitors for the same keywords. https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/Research-and-development-tax... is more well known. What is less well known is that if you make a loss in the year you make the R&D claim they will credit the offset into your bank account vs carrying the offset forward to next year. I am not sure what the equivalent of these two grants is in the US but I know Singapore is even more generous with tax holidays and 500%? of R&D spend grants. Edit - forgot to add there are R&D consultants who will even advance you a percentage of your claim amount in advance to help with cashflow so you don't have to wait 12 months to get the money back.

  > Australia sucks at technology; rather than help make it suck less, you should
  > leave your home and ensure that the U.S.A continues not to suck at
  > technology.

Does it make me a cynic if I could only read this as a propaganda piece for The Valley?

The key point is that as an Australian programmer living relatively close to Sydney in an area less than a decade old, I can only get 5mbps (that's megabits) internet at the best of times, this means I am almost entirely unable to work remotely and getting access to the latest software and libraries requires hours of downloading. I can't host my own test servers because my upload speeds are in the tens of Kbps and all Australian hosting providers are prohibitively expensive. It makes it very difficult to get anything productive done away from the office, where even then I have 15-20mbps peak in the middle of North Sydney.