Alan Noble is the founder of AusOcean, a not-for-profit organisation with the mission of helping the world’s oceans through technology. Alan also worked for 11 years as the Engineering Director of Google Australia, during which time he oversaw the hiring of hundreds of engineers to Google Australia’s team and got to know many of the people working within Australia’s startup ecosystem. In his conversation with Adam, Alan discusses the contrast between Silicon Valley and Australia in the early 2000’s, and how the failure of Google’s service, Google Wave, played an important role in the growth of Australia’s startup ecosystem.
Alan’s Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Noble_(entrepreneur)AusOcean: https://www.ausocean.org/Alan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/scruzin
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Adam Spencer: Let me tell you about our partner, Teamified. If you need to build a top-notch team quickly, Teamified is your go-to solution. They not only provide fractional CTOs, they can also do contractors and even remote team members tailored exactly to your needs. And whether you're looking for expertise in the Philippines, India, or Sri Lanka, Teamified has you covered. What's amazing is that Teamified uses a blend of AI and human expertise to cut hiring times by 50%, cent. The platform handles everything from automated onboarding to day-to-day management and even performance tracking. You can also handle rewards and recognition, buy equipment, and order training all through their platform. Simplify your hiring process and get the best talent fast with Teamified. Check them out now and transform your team. Go to dayone.fm/teamified. That's dayone.fm/teamified. T-E-A-M-I-F-I-E-D, and get started today. Hi, I'm Adam Spencer, founder of the Day One Network, which is bringing the history of the Australian startup ecosystem to you. I believe in founders. It's why I do everything I do at Day One and our media company, W2D1 Media. And that's why the Day One Network exists, to create helpful content for founders. We've got some great shows in development. But a large part of what we do couldn't be done without support from our partners and sponsors. And I couldn't be happier than to be working with NTP, who get community better than any other technology recruitment company out there. A Newcastle company like mine, NTP are invested in seeing the growth of the local tech community in Newcastle, Sydney, and more broadly Australia. So thank you NTP for helping us bring helpful content to founders and the startup community in Australia. Back to the interview. Hi, I'm Adam Spencer, founder of the Day One Network, which is bringing the history of the Australian startup ecosystem to you. I believe in founders. It's why I do everything I do at Day One and our media company, W2D1 Media. And that's why the Day One Network exists, to create helpful content for founders. We've got some great shows in development. But a large part of what we do couldn't be done without support from our partners and sponsors. And I couldn't be happier than to be working with NTP, who get community better than any other technology recruitment company out there. A Newcastle company like mine, NTP are invested in seeing the growth of the local tech community in Newcastle, Sydney, and more broadly Australia. So thank you NTP for helping us bring helpful content to founders and the startup community in Australia. Back to the interview.
Alan Noble: Hi, I'm Adam Spencer and welcome to Day One, the podcast that spotlights Australian startups, founders, and the organizations that empower Australian entrepreneurship. We go back to the beginning to tell a story of Australia's most inspiring founders and how they built their companies. You're listening to a special interview series as part of a documentary W2D1 is producing about the history of the Australian startup ecosystem. On the episode today, we have—
Speaker C: Hi, my name's Allan Noble. I'm the founder of OzOcean. OzOcean is a not-for-profit environmental organisation with a difference. We're more like a tech startup in that we look at ways that we can apply or develop technology to solve ocean problems with a particular focus on technology, uh, for ocean monitoring. Uh, there's a huge lack of information about our ocean ecosystems, and technology is a fantastic way we can achieve a lot more scale and get more information for less. So that's really what OzOcean is all about. We partner with other environmental nonprofits and try to help them solve their problems through leveraging technology. I'm also the former engineering director of Google Australia.
Alan Noble: When would you say you first got involved in the Australian startup ecosystem?
Speaker C: Yeah, I first got involved in February 2002. A few months earlier, I decided to return to Australia after spending 16 years living in Northern California and working in Silicon Valley that whole time. I came back to Australia on a scouting trip in February, And it just so happened that the World Congress on Information Technology was being hosted in my home city, Adelaide. I thought, well, that's a great opportunity to kind of scout out what's happening in terms of tech startups. And I have to say, I was really, really disappointed. There were so few tech startups on the ground. And I thought, well, it's probably just Adelaide. There probably aren't many tech startups around. Turns out it wasn't just Adelaide. It was all of Australia. But—
Alan Noble: Sorry, what year was that?
Adam Spencer: 2002.
Alan Noble: 2002, right, yep.
Speaker C: So this is the same year that Atlassian found, a little bit later on that year. There were very, very few, there were very few tech startups kind of in that kind of early, what I, you know, kind of interesting growth phase. There were a few, I guess, scale-ups from the previous, I guess, you know, era that were, you know, companies like Seek. But I was really interested in joining an early-stage startup. And I found a couple in Adelaide and the one I settled on was a company called Four Sticks.
Alan Noble: Can you comment on, you know, coming from Silicon Valley in 2002 into the Australian ecosystem which wasn't really, I suppose it didn't really exist at all. Yeah, can you just kind of give us a bit of a comparison between like the differences between the two ecosystems at that point in time?
Speaker C: Sure, if you kind of go back to 2002, I'll start with Silicon Valley. So Silicon Valley had just gone through the dot-com boom and bust. But Silicon Valley is remarkably resilient. Even though it was, it was still in that kind of bust phase, it was clear there were companies that were doing well. And Google being one of them, which actually started during the downturn in Silicon Valley. In contrast, Australia, there was very little startup activity. And I struggled even to find, you know, a handful of interesting companies that I was, I wanted to get involved in. I'd been in startups for, up until then, my first startup that I actually co-founded was back in '96. Before then, I'd done some work for some other startups, a company called Pure Software. Coincidentally, that was founded by Reed Hastings, who went on to create Netflix a few years later. Back in Australia, it wasn't just there was a lack of startups, The whole ecosystem was lacking. There weren't many venture capitalists on the ground. And the venture capitalists that were on the ground, and this is gonna sound a little bit harsh, they weren't very sophisticated by Silicon Valley standards. I mean, I'd been through several fundraising rounds in Silicon Valley. I kinda knew how it worked in Silicon Valley. And I came back to Australia and I had to, I was shocked at how kind of hard it was to fundraise in Australia. Yeah. And a lot of the terms are also honestly back then quite onerous. A lot of the VCs back in 2002, they kind of functioned a bit more like vulture capitalists than venture capitalists. They were, the terms they would kind of put before you were quite hideous. In fact, there was something that back in the heyday of Silicon Valley, probably back in the '90s, was referred to as, the capital cram, where VCs would kind of try to cram as much capital into a startup as possible, with the goal of actually gaining control. And they were still doing that back in 2002, and probably even well into the 2010s in Australia, but that practice was long gone. 'Cause it's a very, very entrepreneur unfriendly policy to kind of attempt to take control of a company. So basically, yeah, the whole ecosystem was, in a nutshell, embryonic. Dare I say, you know, lacked maturity.
Alan Noble: Mm-hmm.
Speaker C: It was really only with the evolution of startups like Blackbird VC, like decades later, that we started to see entrepreneur-friendly VCs. But it wasn't just the VCs, it was the whole ecosystem. Trying to get people, not just trying to find the technical talents that you needed. You could typically find engineers, you could hire software engineers and comp sci graduates. You couldn't hire a UX designer to save yourself. You'd really struggle to hire a product manager. So a lot of the other functions that we now take for granted that are essential to building a tech startup were really lacking. Even finding people to kind of provide guidance and sit on your boards, people that had real contributions they could make, was quite challenging. So it was a very immature ecosystem only, you know, 19 years ago. Yeah.
Alan Noble: I want to ask you in a second there, like what changed between, in your opinion, changed between 2002 and 2011, 2012, you know, that decade there, what changed to really kick things into gear? But the 2002, when you were just, you were talking about the, I love the vulture capitalists phrase, why was that flying? Like why was that the kind of practice at that time?
Speaker C: Yeah, I think the charitable explanation would be that the VCs at the time didn't yet appreciate that their purpose was to enable the entrepreneurs to be successful. It was first and foremost, it wasn't about controlling companies. And I think it took, it really literally took a new breed of venture capitalists to kind of say, hey, we're gonna get much better outcomes if we're there kind of backing the entrepreneurs. It might mean we're taking a slightly smaller cut up front, but guess what? We're going to make that pie big. So even though we have a smaller slice, there's this, you know, the thing is entrepreneurs have to have skin in the game. And, you know, if they end up with, you know, so little equity that they're, you know, their stake in the business becomes, you know, unexciting to them, well, you know, they'll do other things. So, so I guess there was probably just a gradual awareness that practices need to change, and it took a few years for that to soak in. I think there probably were more people returning from overseas that were kind of starting to bring in some of that overseas experience through osmosis. There's a few structural things that might have happened along the way. I like to talk about, so after that foray into Four Sticks, which lasted a couple of years, unfortunately they didn't survive, but that was a classic, For me, it was a learning experience. I kind of did a bit of a postmortem and I realized why. And part of it was that the support that entrepreneurs needed was lacking. It wasn't entirely the fault of the company, although there were business decisions that were, in retrospect, poor. So, Four Sticks did make some poor business decisions, but the big takeaway message for me was less about the individual choices the companies founders and board made, but what was missing in the Australian tech startup ecosystem at the time. A few years later when I joined Google, I had the opportunity to convene a roundtable of 50 or so stakeholders in the startup ecosystem, mostly entrepreneurs, but also some policymakers as well and some service providers. And we asked ourselves the question, What do we think was the most pressing need for startups in Australia? And we reached the conclusion that it was really a lack of awareness first and foremost. And that led to the decision to found a nonprofit called Startup Aus.
Alan Noble: Startup Aus, yeah, can you tell me more about that? Because I know that recently it has kind of morphed, is that the right term, into—
Speaker C: Yeah.
Alan Noble: The Tech Council of Australia. But Startup Aus has done a lot in the advocacy space. Like, what was the main mission of that and kind of what did it look like in the beginning of getting that up and running?
Speaker C: Yes, for Startup Aus, we realized that there were a few key or pressing issues that we needed to tackle fairly urgently. First, we needed to dramatically improve policymakers' awareness of tech startups and the value that tech startups could bring to the Australian economy. If you spoke with bureaucrats back then, they really had precious few ideas about what a tech startup was. So we needed to change that and make sure that Treasury and other departments were on board and supporting tech startups with good policies. We also needed to make sure that we had— we got the settings right. For talent and making sure, and that also related to policy, of course, too. So initially we focused on working with policymakers to firstly get the settings right to make it easy for startups to attract talent and bring entrepreneurial talent into Australia. And also get the settings right for incentive stock options or compensation, which at the time was quite onerous.
Alan Noble: Mm-hmm.
Speaker C: So that was the initial focus, but really the backdrop was essentially making sure that folks in Canberra and elsewhere understood the value that tech startups could bring to the Australian economy. And obviously we've seen a real groundswell in awareness in the decades since, but going back to the formation of Startup Aus, that was very, very nascent. Back then.
Alan Noble: You mentioned, you know, talent and how important that was for the ecosystem at the time. Can we rewind the clock a little bit and go back to 2010? Because I'd love to get your view and, you know, share the story here around Google Wave because, you know, we've brought that up in an email exchange. You told me about—
Adam Spencer: Sure.
Alan Noble: —your years at Google Wave and how it didn't work out, but that unleashed, you know, all this talent into the ecosystem.
Speaker C: Yeah, that's a great question. So, well, I'll go back to 2007, which is when I joined Google. So I was hired by Google to grow, well, grow their R&D presence in Australia, to run their R&D center in Sydney. And I got to know a lot of the players in the Aussie startup ecosystem back then. Obviously Mike and Scott over at Atlassian, and Mel and Camber over at Canva, and many of the VCs such as Bill Bartee. But also, my main role, of course, was essentially engineering recruitment. I was given the task of essentially growing the engineering center from 20 engineers to 150 engineers in 3 years. Well, I didn't stop there. I kept hiring and growing the center. We ended up, by the time I finally moved on from Google in 2018, there were over 650 engineers working for Google in Australia. Now along the way, a few interesting things happened. Shortly after I joined in 2007, Lars and Jens Rasmussen set about to build Google Wave. And that became a huge focus for the engineering center, Google's engineering center in Sydney. In fact, about 50% of the engineers that Google employed in Sydney worked on Google Wave, reaching about 55% at its peak. So Google Wave was released in May 2009 at Google I/O that year amid a flurry of excitement and activity. Unfortunately, although the product was incredibly innovative, and probably for your listeners I should explain what Google Wave is actually. So essentially Google Wave was a really, really bold attempt to reimagine workplace collaboration and communication. You can kind of think of it as email meets instant messaging meets Google Docs, all kind of integrated together. That's probably not doing it justice. And it had a very innovative UI to kind of pull that off. Unfortunately, it didn't really achieve the traction with consumers that Google had hoped for. My personal view was that Google Wave would have been an excellent enterprise product because it really was a great way for workplaces to collaborate. But the Wave team weren't focused on the enterprise at the time. They were focused on consumers, which was a big part of Google's focus. So again, no criticism. It was just, well, do we go after consumers or do we go after the enterprise? Obviously you want both. It was a bit of a disappointment, unfortunately, and Google canceled the product, you know, barely a year later. It was August 20— 2010. 2010. Now that was a very hard decision for Google, but it turned out it had very great unintended consequences for the Aussie tech startup ecosystem because it unleashed a flood of tech talent onto the local ecosystem. Because the, the kinds of engineers that had been attracted to work on Google Wave tended to be the engineers that that were perhaps a bit less risk-averse, a bit more inclined to work on something a bit radically different. And so many of those engineers, when they found themselves no longer working on Wave, they started chomping at the bit. They thought, well, you know, maybe, maybe I should be looking at startups instead. It didn't happen overnight, but it certainly has happened. And in the intervening years, we've seen dozens, if not possibly now in the low hundreds, of former Google Australian engineers essentially go out into dozens of Aussie startups. Perhaps the most famous example would be Canva's Cameron Adams.
Alan Noble: I'm so happy you mentioned that 'cause I interviewed Cameron a few weeks ago and he told part of this story that you're telling now.
Adam Spencer: Mm-hmm.
Alan Noble: And that's really interesting to see those two worlds overlap.
Speaker C: Yes, and of course Cameron was the lead UI designer for Google Wave. So he was really the, I guess, the UI architect for that product. So the experience I think he acquired at Google was very, very important when he, you know, moved over to Canva. But there were many, many, many other senior engineers including their CTO David Herndon was on Google Wave, Adam Shook was on Google Wave, David Wang, and to name a few. It's hard for me to keep track, but there probably are a couple of dozen Google engineers and product folks over at Canva alone. Of course, and there are others who have gone to other companies. There's many at Atlassian and smaller startups as well. So Google Wave may well go down in history as like Australia's mini Fairchild Semiconductor in that that company, Fairchild Semi, is often considered to be kind of the— The the grandfather company of Silicon Valley because it was the first semiconductor company in the valley. And Fairchild then essentially, the engineers of Fairchild went on to create companies such as Intel and AMD and of course the dozens of other tech companies that followed. So perhaps Google and Wave, you know, in the fullness of time, you know, historians might say, yep, that was a really instrumental event in Australia's ecosystem. Time will tell. Yeah. It's certainly been quite apparent that the talent has benefited Australia's startups immensely. Although it was, you know, bad for Google in a sense, but it was good for Australia.
Alan Noble: This part of the story is definitely going into the documentary.
Adam Spencer: Haha.
Alan Noble: That's amazing. So what happened, in your opinion, you know, between those 2010 years and now to kind of, What were some of the big, big movements that have really pushed the ecosystem forward in the last decade?
Speaker C: Well, I would, without a hint of modesty, I would point to March 2013, which is when we convened that first StartupAus roundtable. So 2013 was at the start of that decade. Honestly, I just thought, let's see what we can do if we can get a bunch of smart people in the room. You know, a bunch of entrepreneurs, a few policy wonks, a few investors, and just see what needs to be done to kind of kickstart the startup ecosystem. So, but StartupAus was really about influencing government attitudes, as I mentioned, and in particular working with Treasury and Immigration. So I would definitely, I definitely think the work that StartupAus did on the policy side did, help facilitate, kind of got, help get the settings right for startups. Made it easy for startups to essentially reward their employees with incentive stock options. Because think about a startup. Startups, you know, in the early days, they're really competing for talent. They can't compete with salary, so they really need other ways of incentivizing their early employees. And that's why incentive stock options and restricted stock units and such are so, so important for startups. Yeah. And so getting those tax settings right was super important. I'm very proud of the work we did with immigration too and the new entrepreneurship visas, which made it a lot easier for startups to bring in the talent they needed. In the early days, even though there was no shortage of engineers in Australia, it seems like Australia has always produced strong engineers ever since engineers existed, or even before we called engineers engineers.
Alan Noble: Mm-hmm.
Speaker C: So there was no shortage of smart software engineers, computer science graduates. What we lacked were those other vital roles, you know, the user experience and the user interface designers, the product managers. Those were job descriptions that weren't even considered real job descriptions back in 2013, so we worked hard to make sure that those jobs were known to immigration and were then Fast Track because startups were crying out for that, for those kinds of, for that kind of talent. As indeed was Google. It's interesting, I was working for Google at the time, but I often found that I thought that we had, in terms of the, our needs, I thought we often had more in common with tech startups than we did with other multinationals in Australia. And the reason was, you know, Google was doing R&D in Australia. We weren't just some, branch office doing sales and marketing like the vast majority of multinationals. We were actually trying to build products in Australia. So we needed those product managers, we needed those UX and UI designers. So I think the influx of talent was something that started to kick off in that decade that made a big difference. And I think there was probably just, the other thing that I wasn't directly involved in, but you could see more universities thinking hard about entrepreneurship and starting to produce graduates that were thinking, hmm, maybe instead of taking a job, I should be, you know, making a job. So that was happening about then too.
Alan Noble: Jumping forward to today for a minute, what, you know, a lot of great work had been done, you know, by Startup Aus from 2013. What still needs to be done in your opinion? Like, what are some of the gaps that that are still in the ecosystem that we need to fill?
Speaker C: Yeah, I think what's missing now, perhaps arguably the biggest issue is, it's not a single thing, it's a sense of urgency as a country that we need a vibrant tech ecosystem. Not just tech startup, but tech ecosystem. Of course, the fuel of a tech ecosystem are tech startups and the fuel that fuels tech startups is innovation. So I think we still have this, a bit of this attitude in Australia, ah, she'll be right, you know. We've got incredible resources, both renewable and non-renewable. And we kind of have this tendency to kind of be a bit laid back about these matters. But I think we need to do much, much more to kind of instill that sense of urgency that, you know, actually building this tech ecosystem is super important for Australia's future. And it's really about creating not just the jobs of the future, but the opportunities of the future. So we've made great progress for sure, but we are by no means done. And that's, I think, that explains why the Tech Council of Australia is so important too. Startup Oz essentially wound, I mean, wound itself down and has been replaced earlier this year by the Tech Council, which I'm excited about and will hopefully drive that mission forward. forward.
Alan Noble: Just out of curiosity, like, what's the difference in objective or mandate or makeup between StartupAus and the Tech Council?
Speaker C: Yeah, it's actually quite a big difference actually. So StartupAus was, it's almost like a startup itself in that it was very agile. We felt this overwhelming sense of urgency. We needed to get something up and running quickly. So we literally went around tapping people on the shoulders, people that we thought could bring something and kind of bootstrap the whole organization very, very quickly. We didn't go out saying we represent the tech startup ecosystem per se. We weren't a membership-based organization. So that's a major point of difference. The Tech Council has structured itself as a membership-based organization, so tech companies are members and those members will have representation on the board. Startup Oz was much more agile, much looser in a sense. We just basically roped in people that we thought could bring value and bring value quickly because we wanted to move quickly. I always had the vision that Startup Oz would essentially have a planned obsolescence. I always thought, gee, if we're successful, Startup Oz should one day go away because we won't be needed anymore. We won't need to be promoting tech startups.
Adam Spencer: Yeah.
Speaker C: That's partially true in the sense that we believe now the focus should be on the tech ecosystem as a whole, not just startups, which is why we could enlist company, much, much larger companies, scale-ups and larger companies such as Atlassian and Canva over to the Tech Council. It was harder to attract those companies to Tech, to StartupAus because they were already large scale-ups by the time StartupAus came along. So it was, yeah, it was really Startup Aus was an attempt to move very quickly and hopefully get some runs on the board, which I believe we achieved. Tech Council has more structure, is a membership-based organization, and also honestly represents a much larger industry. And if you look at the combined value of the companies and the, that, the Tech Council represents, it's billions of dollars of contribution to the Australian economy and many jobs.
Alan Noble: What do you think we're doing really well?
Speaker C: I think Australia has always done a good job in the innovation department. We are creative, we can produce graduates that are able to solve difficult problems, solve problems that can, you know, make a difference. I think the universities and the graduates, by and large, that's a plus for the Australian ecosystem. Some would argue perhaps commercialisation is still not as strong as it needs to be. I do think that's probably improving. There seems to be much greater awareness on, you know, sovereign capabilities now that's been brought upon by COVID. You know, there seems to be a new awareness that perhaps we should—
Alan Noble: Mm-hmm.
Speaker C: You know, be making things again as a country. So I'm quite optimistic about that. I think we just have to, you know, not let our guard down because it's a very competitive world in which we live. And there are a lot of other smart people around the world, you know, doing innovative things. So I'd like to see us continue to invest heavily in the programs that have a proven track record. R&D, you know, tax incentive, you know, Commercialisation Australia programs that have been very, very important to startups in the past. I think I wanna, I'd love to see us continue to invest in those programs fully because they've been of proven value to Australia. So, yeah, I'm optimistic. I think we're moving in the right direction. You think about how far we've come in less than two decades, it's actually quite impressive.
Alan Noble: According to your LinkedIn, the founding of OzOcean overlapped with working as the engineering director for Google Australia. Was that the case and was that challenging, founding a startup while also working, I imagine, full-time?
Speaker C: That's a great question. Yes, you're quite right. I overlapped. In fact, I started OzOcean back in 2017. What made it work? I would say two things made it work. One, I was working part-time at Google at the time. So that freed up some time. And secondly, Google was quite supportive. A lot of employers wouldn't let an employee go off and do something like that on the side. But OzOcean was not competitive with Google. It's probably one of the few things that isn't competitive with Google. So I was able to go off and start to spin up OzOcean. I only really spun up OzOcean in earnest though when I quit Google in 2018. So my message to entrepreneurs is it's really hard to be a part-time entrepreneur. I tried. And I realized, no, if I'm gonna focus, if I'm going to focus on OzOcean, I need to be doing it full-time. And so eventually I made that decision in 2018 to leave Google. It was a tough decision. By then I'd been there 11 years. I expected I would stay at Google only 3 years, achieve that original goal of hiring 150 engineers, and then I would go on and do another startup. That's what I told myself, that's what I told my family. So I was quite surprised that that 3 years stretched out to become 11 years.
Alan Noble: Yeah.
Speaker C: But OzOcean was the thing that really made me really want to focus full-time again on something different. And I've always had, obviously, a love of technology, which has drawn me to tech opportunities throughout my entire career. But I've also always had a love of the ocean. So OzOcean was a chance to kind of marry those two loves, my love of tech and my love of our oceans, and see how we could, you know, use tech for the good of our oceans.
Alan Noble: I really love the logo. It looks like a combination between some kind of vessel on the water and also like a squid.
Speaker C: Yeah, it's a cuttlefish, but—
Alan Noble: Cuttle, sorry.
Speaker C: You got cephalopods, so cuttlefish are in the cephalopod family. So they've got basically squid, cuttlefish, and octopuses, all very, very smart animals.
Alan Noble: It's interesting that you said, you know, you would caution entrepreneurs that it's very difficult to be a part-time entrepreneur, which is a great segue into my question, my advice question. What advice would you give a brand new founder?
Speaker C: My advice to a brand new founder is basically follow your passion. You know, if you're passionate about something, don't just sit on it, figure out a way to do it. And you know, nothing's going to happen unless you actually put, you know, throw yourself into it. That startup idea and start working on it. You can have all the best ideas in the world, but if you don't actually take the time to actually start to, you know, work on those ideas and transform those ideas into an implementation, you know, prototype or product. So yeah, basically follow your passion. Life is surprisingly short. You don't know how much time you have, so don't wait too long. I think the entrepreneurs that do that are the ones that will ultimately succeed. So yeah, follow your passion.
Alan Noble: The last question I have for you today is not exactly a question, but I want you to just share something that's on your mind. But keeping in mind that, you know, we're trying to put together here a documentary that will holistically and hopefully as honestly as possible tell the entire history of the Australian startup ecosystem, you know, to the best of our ability. We want people from all corners of the ecosystem to hear this story. What do you think people need to hear from you? What message do you have to share?
Speaker C: The message I would like to share for entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs is make sure that you choose carefully and make sure that your choices have the right impact, the impact that you care about, the impact that makes a positive difference. And this is not just for nonprofits like OzOcean. I mean, obviously, OzOcean and other nonprofits, we're in the business of helping our oceans and delivering on positive environmental impacts. But I'm also of the view that regardless of whether you're a not-for-profit or for-profit, you should be thinking about how your business and how your decisions impacts on the world. Whether it's impacts on the environment or impacts on people, impacts on— Communities. Impacts on the way that essentially people live. So yeah, choose. I'd like, I'd like more entrepreneurs to be a bit less concerned about building the product and a little bit more concerned about how that product sits in the world and how that product hopefully improves people's lives and possibly also improves the world in general. So yeah, think about that. Thank you. It's very easy for an entrepreneur, especially with all the pressures that founders face, you know, oh, you know, I have to build the product, or I have to get funding, I have to pay my employees. So it's understandable that founders, entrepreneurs might lose track of some of these bigger issues, but I would be encouraging all entrepreneurs to be thinking broadly about the impact of their decisions, of their choices.
Alan Noble: Thank you so much for your time today, Alan.
Speaker C: Thank you, Adam.
Alan Noble: Is there anything, anything at all that you wanted to talk about that I didn't ask you about?
Speaker C: I mean, I'm optimistic. I'm optimistic about Australia's tech future. I'm optimistic that Australians can continue to innovate and build world-leading businesses. And it is our future, and there's no doubt about it. We can't be relying on resources indefinitely. And so it's essential that we continue to invest in these new industries, and those new industries are tech-based. So, but we've come a long way in a few years, and I have every expectation that we'll continue to make great strides.
Adam Spencer: I hope you enjoyed that interview.
Alan Noble: More interviews are on the way. Follow the podcast wherever you're listening right now. Stay tuned for more interviews with many, many more amazing people from the Australian startup ecosystem. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
Speaker C: Bye.
