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Australia ranked 61/63 countries for entrepreneurship

ceda.com.au

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Re: Australia ranked 61/63 countries for entrepreneurship

#21

Post by joeldo »

orzig wrote: post #6

Australians: Do you think it’s cultural, economic, or policy?

Personally a big factor has been cost of living. Housing prices are out of control in Australia, especially eastern capital cities, and servicing mortgage/rent without a stable salary requires a lot of planning without a grant.

The result is that unless you are able to acquire funding, you result to trying to getting something built outside of your job, which is much more difficult to pull off successfully with the limited time available.

Re: Australia ranked 61/63 countries for entrepreneurship

#22

Post by yawnxyz »

orzig wrote: post #6

Australians: Do you think it’s cultural, economic, or policy?

Australia is very much what I imagine the US was like when there was a strong "middle class". Middle class living is fairly attainable here and it's REALLY comfortable.

The train/rail/bus system gets you to beaches and national parks. Even with fairly low grant-funded salaries we can afford to dine out, even though it's fairly expensive, bc we don't have car and other expenses we had in the US.

It's a lot like Canadian living — the comfort kind of lulls you into complacency. We were joking that while US startups optimize for product growth, Aussies optimize for work life balance.

Because of taxes, even if you have a really high salary, you don't end up pocketing THAT much more money, so there's a negative incentive to work really hard. You kind of get punished for it.

And yes, housing is really expensive — my partner and I live in a 1br apartment in the Inner West for AUD$2k/mo, but the costs are comparable to American cities. Everywhere is walkable/bikable though.

Re: Australia ranked 61/63 countries for entrepreneurship

#23

Post by threeseed »

plugger wrote: post #8

lol, investment in communications ranked 4th. our internet speeds are garbage, what is this metric even meant to represent?

As someone who worked at the NBN it's really under appreciated how much they've managed to achieve given the situation they were left by the Liberal government. HFC was a mess but they've managed to slowly fix it. FTTN was a short sighted strategy but is slowly being transitioned to FTTP. FTTC will do the same. Obviously FTTB is out of their control.

And so across all technologies they will soon reach a baseline 1Gbps and with so much direct fibre will have the capability to go higher. Australia is a very large, very geographically diverse country and so the investment has been significant and we are slowly starting to see the fruits of it.

Re: Australia ranked 61/63 countries for entrepreneurship

#24

Post by dragonsky67 »

HappyTypist wrote: post #15
dragonsky67 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think as an Australian, it's a bit of each. There is not a great tradition amongst most Australians of trying to "Make it Big.". The Australian dream has been the house on the 1/4 acre block, not making millions in a Silicon Valley style buyout. Add to that the poor regard for those who are seen to be exploiting others for their personal gain and a strong dose of "Tall Poppy Syndrome" where the populous tries to te…

How can you even buy a 1/4 acre house without making millions? Those go for $2-5 million in Sydney.

You are so correct, property ownership is now just a dream, however I stand by the cultural inertia of home ownership rather than "making it big" as being an underlying driver in peoples minds. Why else would people take up mortgages at very low interest rates that will be impossible for them to make payments when the interest rates start to rise as they have started to do.

My kids (low 20's) still seem to dream that owning a home (well at least having a mortgage) is something that they can aspire to on a normal wage. The one who has given up on this idea is now tending towards "not playing" as being a logical decision with regards to economic participation, and to be honest who could argue with them.

Re: Australia ranked 61/63 countries for entrepreneurship

#25

Post by yawnxyz »

bob778 wrote: post #16
yawnxyz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised by how terrible NBN is, and how expensive/rare fiber internet is in Sydney. People commonly complain how bad internet access is in the US, but at least the major cities have access to fiber...

Almost 95% of Sydney has fiber thanks to the NBN? (FTTN or better)

For some reason we had trouble getting that where we live. Looking into it again

Re: Australia ranked 61/63 countries for entrepreneurship

#26

Post by mickael-kerjean »

orzig wrote: post #6

Australians: Do you think it’s cultural, economic, or policy?

As a french who live in Australia, it was amazing for me to see you could decide to start a company a Friday at lunch time and make your first invoice 2 hours later in the same day.

The barrier to entry is quite low in Australia, if you earn x you pay y in tax, your accountant will just help you lower y. In France, a simple payslip can't be understood easily, it's like the government is asking you to understand their mess before you can do anything. As a result, all the people I know of in France who start a company complain on the system whereas that's not the case in Australia.

Re: Australia ranked 61/63 countries for entrepreneurship

#27

Post by peblos »

bob778 wrote: post #16
yawnxyz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised by how terrible NBN is, and how expensive/rare fiber internet is in Sydney. People commonly complain how bad internet access is in the US, but at least the major cities have access to fiber...

Almost 95% of Sydney has fiber thanks to the NBN? (FTTN or better)

I wouldn’t describe FTTN (or FTTC) as providing fibre services to customers

FTTP services are increasing but still limited

Re: Australia ranked 61/63 countries for entrepreneurship

#28

Post by cjbgkagh »

yawnxyz wrote: post #22
orzig wrote: post #6

Australians: Do you think it’s cultural, economic, or policy?

Australia is very much what I imagine the US was like when there was a strong "middle class". Middle class living is fairly attainable here and it's REALLY comfortable. The train/rail/bus system gets you to beaches and national parks. Even with fairly low grant-funded salaries we can afford to dine out, even though it's fairly expensive, bc we don't have car and other expenses we had in the US. It's a lot like Canadi…

> Middle class living is fairly attainable here and it's REALLY comfortable.

That is not going to last very long. High interest rates will pop the Japanese style property bubble.

Re: Australia ranked 61/63 countries for entrepreneurship

#29

Post by cgio »

HappyTypist wrote: post #15
dragonsky67 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think as an Australian, it's a bit of each. There is not a great tradition amongst most Australians of trying to "Make it Big.". The Australian dream has been the house on the 1/4 acre block, not making millions in a Silicon Valley style buyout. Add to that the poor regard for those who are seen to be exploiting others for their personal gain and a strong dose of "Tall Poppy Syndrome" where the populous tries to te…

How can you even buy a 1/4 acre house without making millions? Those go for $2-5 million in Sydney.

As an immigrant to Australia, the dream is now being able to rent it. Cannot say that I feel that there is tall poppy at work, things can be quite creative and competitive. Schools do give that feeling of subdued expectations. I’d say education is the key factor for subpar performance, with very limited focus on academic achievement and inter generational education segregation partially built into the system. Australia beats significantly below its weight education wise. Weather, language, affluence would have you expect at least a couple globally leading universities. They are good, but nowhere near where they could be, as they focused on the easy money of attracting Chinese students just on the basis of proximity and language. With this source drying up, I see many academics I knew leaving the country (5 out of 5 is anecdotal and explicitly correlated, but hard to not take it seriously).

Re: Australia ranked 61/63 countries for entrepreneurship

#30

Post by xyzzy123 »

bob778 wrote: post #20

It’s worth noting many of these metrics are measuring the quality 4-5 years ago, and I think its improving relatively quickly. That said, the quality of internet is such a silly metric. Almost all places, including rural Australia, have better than 25/15 with metro areas having fiber due to the NBN rollout. That really is not our limiting factor - our culture and generally small funding amounts is.

What's interesting to me is that Australian tech investment is a wasteland BUT there's a strong "take a punt" culture in resource exploration / prospecting. There are definitely people out there with money and a healthy risk appetite so it doesn't seem impossible to connect those dots.

From my perspective an equal problem to lack of investment is very high property values and living costs.

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