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Startup Australia

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Re: Startup Australia

#11

Post by kerno »

Coming back to Oz from London put into perspective how far behind we are. With HN London now attracting so many people they've had to start charging a fee to get in, and the community built around Silicon Roundabout, it is very sad to come back home and see the fragmented efforts to build a startup group in Australia.

With Silicon Beach on and off, Startup Grind, lots of small meetups, and Fishburners in Sydney, there are certainly groups to build this community around but I still think we are years behind the critical mass of something like HN London. And that's just to talk about forums for people to gather in - it says nothing about our skills shortage.

I agree with Matt's points regarding our reliance on the resources industry. So many people head off to the mines on a fly-in-fly-out basis, and make incredible coin - but it won't last long-term and then our skill base will be incompatible with value-adding services industries.

However, I think we need successes before a great weight of people will shift towards STEM disciplines, in the same way that the dot-com frenzy saw Web Development course demand explode.

Re: Startup Australia

#12

Post by stephen_g »

hoodoof wrote: post #3

Surely this guy doesn't think the answer is to vote in the liberals who will shut down the fibre to the home goal of the NBN? Is that really a good way to advance Australia's startups?

I really hope that sanity will prevail there when they get in (but by Abbot and Turnbul's comments, it may not be likely)... I mean, a big part of their plan is to not do anything in areas that have HFC currently, even though that cable is so over-subscribed that you don't get decent speeds in peak hour, and many apartment blocks just don't have access to it. So under the Coalition's plan, most people won't get even slightly better internet. How is that OK?

Then, rolling out an inferior tech (compared to fibre) that is only marginally better to current ADSL to the rest which is going to run over an aging copper network that will require billions of dollars of maintenance over the years? All while maintaining the current telco monopoly...

Really, their only selling point is the cost, but I haven't actually been able to find any evidence that the plan is actually costed - every reference to it being cheap is just based on rollouts in other countries with very different geography, population density and existing infrastructure. If they actually costed it, and then took running costs into account, I doubt it would actually be cheaper. And the current, superior NBN isn't even a cost to the taxpayer - it's an investment that will eventually pay itself back with a small profit.

I think the biggest thing though is that even if it were double the price and didn't pay itself back, the economic benefits of having fibre generally available to businesses and homes, as well as having a network which provides open access to suppliers (instead of having to go through the Telstra monopoly) would make it worthwhile.

Re: Startup Australia

#14

Post by angusscown »

dr1337 wrote: post #10
hoodoof wrote: post #3

Surely this guy doesn't think the answer is to vote in the liberals who will shut down the fibre to the home goal of the NBN? Is that really a good way to advance Australia's startups?

That's besides the point. FTTH is overkill and is absolutely not a requirement to build a technology industry. How is fibre going to a small town like Burnie in the middle of Tasmania going to encourage the creation of technology startups when its users are going to be technologically uneducated in the first place? What will most likely happen is all that bandwidth (paid by taxpayers) will most likely be used for Tor…

I'd rather more of my potential customers get NBN. Startups hubs tend to already have the broadband required. 'wealth' will be created by capturing a larger user base for new broadband/low latency applications.

Re: Startup Australia

#15

Post by kerno »

dr1337 wrote: post #10
hoodoof wrote: post #3

Surely this guy doesn't think the answer is to vote in the liberals who will shut down the fibre to the home goal of the NBN? Is that really a good way to advance Australia's startups?

That's besides the point. FTTH is overkill and is absolutely not a requirement to build a technology industry. How is fibre going to a small town like Burnie in the middle of Tasmania going to encourage the creation of technology startups when its users are going to be technologically uneducated in the first place? What will most likely happen is all that bandwidth (paid by taxpayers) will most likely be used for Tor…

I think that people in Burnie in the middle of Tasmania would probably receive the greatest benefits from having fast and reliable internet access. With online education and MOOCs opening up education to those who want it, giving isolated and rural communities access increases the opportunities available to them at a far greater rate than giving the innner city the same benefit.

Re: Startup Australia

#16

Post by Smerity »

To expand on one of the points in the article, let's expand venture capital raised per capita[1]... Israel: $170 per capita, USA: $75 per capita, Australia: $4.09 per capita.

Austrlaia literally spend more on a single day of gambling (Melbourne Cup: $7.27 per capita) than we do in our entire venture capital industry.

The government have also decided we're betraying the country by "abusing" a visa program to get more skilled programmers here. Of our 12,000 IT graduates, 8,000 of them are from overseas. 4,000 graduates doesn't go very far... Many of the 457 visas would also likely be programmers from international companies staying in Sydney: Atlassian and Google have numerous offices abroad and commonly allow programmers to travel around. The Australian government have no clue what's going on.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, founder of Atlassian, just tweeted "How can you say IT is the future of the country, then complain when we import skilled labour to help us?!"[2]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital

[2]: https://twitter.com/mcannonbrookes/status/312033343988449280

Re: Startup Australia

#17

Post by wluu »

Smerity wrote: post #16

To expand on one of the points in the article, let's expand venture capital raised per capita[1]... Israel: $170 per capita, USA: $75 per capita, Australia: $4.09 per capita. Austrlaia literally spend more on a single day of gambling (Melbourne Cup: $7.27 per capita) than we do in our entire venture capital industry. The government have also decided we're betraying the country by "abusing" a visa program to get more…

I heard Mike on radio yesterday, here's his interview with Radio National Drive - http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drive/it-indust...

Re: Startup Australia

#18

Post by ghiculescu »

hoodoof wrote: post #3

Surely this guy doesn't think the answer is to vote in the liberals who will shut down the fibre to the home goal of the NBN? Is that really a good way to advance Australia's startups?

Barrie is arguing that the Gillard government is increasingly going to restrict an Australian startup's ability to hire the people it needs to succeed.

When that happens, what good will faster internet in rural areas do?

Re: Startup Australia

#19

Post by matthewsinclair »

At least part of the problem is AUS is that we really don't have VCs. We have companies masquerading as VCs, but they're more like mezzanine financiers than VCs. They want an established market, established customers, protected IP, massive sweat and real-equity from founders, and they want a controlling interest for their investment.

They generally have no capacity for risk whatsoever, and unless you're digging stuff out of the ground and razing the environment, there's very little on offer from the Government, either.

So I can see why a lot of tech startups kick-off here and then go offshore because the economic environment is just not conducive to startups (at least in general).

Given how many people small business employs in this country (from memory, its the single largest employer, unlike mining, which only directly employes a low, single digit % of workers despite the mindshare it has) we should be doing everything we can to give people a leg up to start a business.

For example, something like Jon Stewart's proposal for a 'softer cushion for failure' would be a great start. We could do a lot worse here in Australia that institute something like this: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/jon-stewart-propose...

Re: Startup Australia

#20

Post by lubos »

stephen_g wrote: post #12
hoodoof wrote: post #3

Surely this guy doesn't think the answer is to vote in the liberals who will shut down the fibre to the home goal of the NBN? Is that really a good way to advance Australia's startups?

I really hope that sanity will prevail there when they get in (but by Abbot and Turnbul's comments, it may not be likely)... I mean, a big part of their plan is to not do anything in areas that have HFC currently, even though that cable is so over-subscribed that you don't get decent speeds in peak hour, and many apartment blocks just don't have access to it. So under the Coalition's plan, most people won't get even…

Could you please explain how NBN will pay for itself?

Not to mention, NBN Corp. will not be any different monopoly from Telstra Wholesale.

And regarding speeds, how is NBN going to solve that? Australia doesn't even have enough international throughput in the current network. NBN will make speeds even worst as the demand will only increase. The bottleneck here is not copper, it is international capacity. What's the point of replacing copper if the weakest link of the network remains.

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