How Australian Tech Companies Can Think About Silicon Valley

This is a great post. I'd like to add:

> You can get even better value if you can build your team outside of Sydney/Melbourne.

So much this, but talent outside the big cities is rare. I lived in Queensland for a while and would have taken a massive pay cut for any tech work... but there just isn't any. I knew more people working in Sydney (fly-in-fly-out) than working in local companies.

You can pick up uni students cheaply. They're grateful for relevant work.

I knew a few founders living cheap but pretty much all knew that moving to the US was an inevitability.

> focused on building a good business first

This is a massive plus of starting in Australia. The business has to make sense. Local funding sources aren't as willing to build perceived value and flip the company -- it's important to have a genuine sustainable business with customers and cashflow.

> 43.5% of your development cost back through the R&D Tax Incentive

Probably half of my lifetime earnings have been paid for with the R&D Tax Incentive and other grants. It's such a good deal that every incorporated company with a tech component should be trying to claim it.

I'm not grumpy or anything, but in Queensland, claiming government grants for tech companies is probably more lucrative than working in a tech company. There's an abundance of funding and a shortage of people able to use it.

> don't limit yourself to selling or developing in only one location

I forget who gave the talk, but it was from Muru-D at Co Spaces in the Gold Coast, and guy said (paraphrasing):

"New Zealanders have an advantage over Australians because they know from day one that they will have to sell overseas to make their company a success. Australia is big enough that you can fool yourself for a while, but it won't take long before you reach saturation and need to move anyway. Better to get it done sooner."

One of the strange things about Australia's startup scene over the last decade or so is the sheer number of what I like to call "meta-entrepreneurs" - people who help other people become entrepreneurs, and present themselves as experts on technology, business, Silicon Valley etc, but have declined to actually do the hard work of setting up a business, let alone growing it to success.

So when Australians give advice about "how to start a tech company", the first question to ask is "How many have you personally started? And how did they go?".

One of the things that I've come to understand about Australia since leaving (I've live in Berlin now, before that I was in London) is that the average level of professional work is quite mediocre by global standards - this is not just in tech, but across all industries. Australians have had it very easy for about 2 decades now, getting rich through a property boom and a mining boom, but most have never had to really compete on a global level. An awful lot of people cruise in their jobs, doing something that's good enough for the Australian market, and they've had a comfortable career doing it. So why change?

The problem is, that if you do achieve PMF in an economy that operates primarily at this level, you're not going to have PMF in an economy that operates at a higher level of sophistication and competence. That's why I think the strategy of "start local, grow global" is a fool's errand, and risks turning into "start local, burn some cash trying to go global, stay local".

I also dispute that there is an advantage to keeping a tech team in Australia. The salaries are still quite high (particularly in Sydney) but the talent is again, not that good. This is both in tech and tech management, however there ARE exceptions[1], and the situation is improving - Atlassian have produced a lot of people who know what it takes to run a global, successful tech business, and now we are starting to see a second generation of top-notch people being developed in fast-growing Australian startups like Canva and SafetyCulture[2].

There are plenty of companies who have sold into the US market from day 1 from outside the US. HotJar from Malta. My current employer, ChartMogul. Travis CI, also from here in Berlin. There are hundreds more, but those are the ones that just jumped to mind.

If you want to be a global company, then think like a global company from day one. This is as true in Australia as anywhere else, but it's taken a long time to sink in there.

[1] Of course, the exceptional people generally know it, and command matching salaries. As an aside (to this aside), I'm currently reading Camille Fournier's excellent "The Manager's Path", which is like a museum of management practises that I've never seen in Australia.

[2] SafetyCulture is an exception to my "start global" thesis. They did start locally, then grow. I think this is because of two main things: In health and safety things, Australia does generally lead the world, or come close to it. I used to work in construction in Australia, and am continually shocked at the practises I see in the EU and the US when I visit. The other thing is that I've seen SafetyCulture hire a lot of very good people, which is never a bad thing for a business to do.

The liveability of places like Adelaide (and even Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth) is such an undersold secret. Personally I'm so torn between wanting to tell everyone how good we have it and wanting to keep it to ourselves.

Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth are all in the top 10 cities to live in the world.

Taking Adelaide for example (1.2 million people), we can live within 10-15 minutes of the CBD in a roomy townhouse for highly-affordable rent, get paid pretty well, be 20 minutes from the beach, 20-60 minutes from four different world-class wine regions, have a great festival culture, delicious local food and wine, and a highly safe and welcoming culture.

If you want a larger city you have Melbourne (3.9 million) with a fantastic bar and food culture and endless high-paying work.

As a company, and this is somewhat anecdotal, you have high availability of highly-educated workers who are used to working collaboratively and doing whatever's needed to get things done to cover the work of N other people (low population after all).

Too bad the Internet in large parts of those cities belong to the last century.

Just curious: what is some cool stuff happening in Brisbane these days? I grew up there but I moved away to find more interesting work a long time ago. It would be nice to hear about interesting things happen there nowadays.