John Allsopp discusses the startup ecosystem’s evolution from a “community” to an “industry”

0:00 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%. Their 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/t-e-a-m-i-f-i-e-d and get started today. Thank you. 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. 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 the 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.

3:16 John Allsopp: On the episode today, we have John Alsop, a web developer, author, and conference organizer who's been working in Australia's startup ecosystem since the '90s. In 1994, John co-founded WestCiv, a company which creates tools and training for web designers and developers. WestCiv was one of the earliest companies to adopt the internet as a distribution channel for software. John also co-founded Web Directions, a conference for web designers, developers, and digital creatives. Cameron Adams said you would be a great person to interview for this documentary. How do you know Cameron Adams? Do you know him?

3:54 Speaker C: I know Cameron extremely well. I kind of feel partly responsible for him meeting his wife. So, which is a very good thing, right? They're both very good friends of mine. So I can't— it's lost in the mists of time, but it is to do with Web Directions, and Cameron spoke early and often at our conferences.

4:13 John Allsopp: Right.

4:13 Speaker C: And he also did for 2 or 3 years at least these amazing experimental opening sequences. So like opening titles, but far more elaborate than that for the conference.

4:25 John Allsopp: Yeah.

4:26 Speaker C: For our major conference. Just sort of showcasing what web browsers could do. Like really amazing, 'cause you know, he's an incredible creative technologist. I mean, he's obviously well known in the world of Canva now, whatever, but really where he gained prominence and probably I suspect why the folks at the other founders at Canva approached him is he just has this extraordinary way of turning, integrating technology and design and creating amazing things.

4:56 John Allsopp: Did you mention the date that Cameron did those presentations?

4:59 Speaker C: So I reckon I could dig it up for you, but I reckon they were probably, So one of them was when he was doing Google Wave, but I reckon that probably like 2008, '09, '10 or '10, '11, '12, that sort of timeframe.

5:13 John Allsopp: Yeah. It's an interesting circle that happened here. So I know Maxine Sharon, I met her a few years back.

5:19 Speaker C: So Maxine and I were both, we founded Web Directions together, but many, many years ago we were life partners. And so we actually started our software company together in the early '90s.

5:30 John Allsopp: I did not know that.

5:32 Speaker C: There you go. So yeah, we sprung that one on you. We're still very, very good friends and very close, and we kind of continued to run the software and then the conference company together long after we were no longer together. But it was a very small world back then, trust me.

5:48 John Allsopp: It still feels that way now.

5:50 Speaker C: Ah, yeah. Well, I'm too old to try— like, the number of people is way too big for me to keep track of. Back then, you kind of could get them all together in a room, which is sort of what Web Directions was. It was kind of the room where people who are in the web got together and went, "Oh, I know you," or, "Wow, there's other people doing stuff I do," right?

6:07 John Allsopp: That's a great segue for us to go back. Do you wanna take us back to whatever time you think is most relevant to start this story of your involvement in this space?

6:17 Speaker C: Yeah, so very briefly, I was kind of a real nerd at school, and personal computers were starting to be a thing, like pre-IBM PC, pre-Apple Mac. We're talking kind of Apple II. We had a bunch of them at school. And also knew like, you know, friends of, Parents of my friends, who I was way geekier than my friends, and they were getting into like accountants and doctors and people like that. They were the people getting into sort of, we used to call them microcomputers. We're talking the very early 1980s. There'd be all these little meetups, what we call meetups now, where people go and they'd swap software on floppy disks and show off their— Right. It was all because there was no business in it. No one thought there was going to be a huge business there. They're all total nerds. Literally dentists and doctors and accountants, people who could afford a $2,000 computer, which was about somewhere between a fifth and a tenth of a price in inner western Sydney for a house. Seriously, I looked it up once. I think in the early '80s in Macdonaldtown, Newtown part of Sydney, you could buy a house for maybe $20,000. These were $2,000 or $3,000 computers. Wow. By today's standards, it's like $100,000 in some respects. But they didn't seem like that much money. So that's sort of the very earliest inklings I had. And then I studied in a roundabout way. It was really interesting back then, the hardware and software weren't things you sort of separated out. Like if you're interested in computing, you kind of had to be interested in hardware as much as software. Often when you're building, and that didn't mean just putting together like motherboards, it was like building computers. So I sort of studied— Um. Originally electrical engineering and ended up doing computer science at Sydney University when there weren't many people doing that. It was the mid-'80s.

8:07 John Allsopp: Yeah.

8:07 Speaker C: Yeah. Then I took a little hiatus and I was really interested in hypertext because I had these interests in the arts and a whole bunch of stuff. I studied law. I really thought about how could computing help you study law. I got really interested in hypertext as a concept and we started working on a hyp— Well, built and sold in the early '90s, a hypertext knowledge management system inspired by my study of law on the Mac. And that was my first foray. And I kind of got into the web because, well, back then the way you sold software was to do, if you were really lucky, a publishing deal, a bit like the music industry. And as we all know, because of Taylor Swift, it's not a great deal for creatives, right? So you get like 5% of whatever revenues, someone else completely controlled every aspect of the business. So we, Maxine and I, 'cause we worked on that together, we thought about was, well, this web thing started, maybe we could use the web as a way of distributing our software, selling our software. And in 1995, we'd started doing that. And I went to this conference and there was this Apple executive and there was about 20 or 30 people doing software export from Australia. And this Apple executive, I remember having a chat with him over a beer, he said, "What are you doing?" I said, "Well, I'm doing this." He said, "No one will ever buy software over the internet." He really said that, by the way. He genuinely said that. It's like a bit of the famous, no one will ever need more than 640K RAM, or there will never be a market for more than 5 computers. But this guy actually said that to me. He was wrong, it turns out. So I got into the web in the early '93, '94 because I wanted to use it, well, we were using it as a way to distribute our software. And at the time, like most computer people, the web we kind of looked down on, 'cause it's like there was a whole world of hypertext. People were doing a lot of research on it. And what the web offered was really primitive and really underpowered compared to what we consider the state of the art of hypertext would be. But it sort of slowly won me over. And along the way, especially back then, people were working, trying to create a software business. I taught a bit at TAFE, taught some web stuff. And just sort of slowly won me over until it kind of dawned on me that somehow this is something really different. Because back then, a computer was a thing that sat alone. If you wanted to transfer information to and from it, you used a floppy disk. There was really no network unless you were in an enterprise or a university or something. There was no networking, no one connected. And the web sort of kind of turned something about the network's nature of all these devices and really Obviously that had happened before, but the web kind of made it doable for most people. What I recognized then in the mid-'90s was it was hard, getting harder to develop for the web, particularly because a lot of people who were developing for the web weren't software engineers, weren't people from computing backgrounds. They were people from desktop publishing and animation and these other areas. I started working on developer tools and lots of training. We did these online courses for people. I have this great curse, I'm generally about 5, 10, 15 years ahead of what everyone else does when they finally make all their money. And by then I've got bored and moved on, right? So, sort of, you know, we had this period, Maxine and I had the software, we were building courses, people would take them online. And it was almost like backwards. We started doing in-person workshops and started doing them right around 2000. 2000. Right around the dot-com bomb, the first dot-com crash.

11:45 John Allsopp: Yeah.

11:45 Speaker C: And that was the first time almost literally I'd met anyone who did what I did. I knew people online. I went to New York and met a couple of people there, but I basically didn't know anyone in Australia. There were no meetups. There was none of that stuff, right? So if you knew someone, you knew them online. And then there was a thing called the Web Standards Group that a couple of folks there was Peter Firminshire and Russell Weakley. Sorry, Russ, who I still know quite well, particularly Russ. They started this Web Standards Group, which is very much about people using CSS and HTML and core web technologies. I went and spoke in, I think it was the end of 2001, at their big Christmas end-of-year celebration where there were 24 people, including the organizers and me. But this was a big meetup. We started talking with, well, I think what Australia needs is a conference, right? Because 24 people came to this free meetup, so clearly we needed a conference. So it sort of became the germ of something we developed over the next year or so. And the following year, 2004, we did the first kind of web design and development conference in Sydney. And there were a few around the world, none of which exist still. I can't— I don't think there was ever anything like that in Australia. And we had a whole— we had a couple of hundred people turn up. Including, I mean, one thing I always remember is one of the founders of Campaign Monitor, which, have they come up on your radar? Have you spoken to either of those?

13:14 John Allsopp: I haven't spoken to them yet, but I'm trying to.

13:16 Speaker C: Yeah.

13:17 John Allsopp: Yeah.

13:17 Speaker C: So they, like, if people, young folks don't know, they were one of the first really early success stories of kind of Australian kind of web startup world. And this is before they even were, they were an agency that had built the software to do Email marketing. And I remember one of the founders coming up to me, he said, "Oh, this is so great. There's all these people doing stuff like us." And I'm like, "Wow." And he said, "Oh, we're looking to hire someone." And I thought, "Wow, this is real. People will have real jobs in this industry now." And I remember a few years later joking, so I just should have just taken a job with him instead of trying to bang my head against the wall and do the conferences for the last 20, nearly 20 years. So that kind of leads us to how we more or less started the conferences in Australia. And as I said, it was sort of, a place where a whole bunch of people who've been doing web-related stuff got together and realized, and they can meet people doing what they do. Because back then, probably even the biggest organizations might have maybe 1 or 2 people doing web stuff. And even if they were like ABC, ABC were quite big in that, but the way ABC works was they have individual web people working. They didn't have like a central web team. You work in sport or news or whatever area. So even in large organizations, you probably worked with very few, if any people. I mean, Fairfax, were really early trailblazers, not just in Australia but globally, doing a lot of really cool and interesting stuff. Yeah, so I guess that was the sort of origins of what we've continued to do for the last 16, 17 years.

14:48 John Allsopp: So 2004, 2006, when you started the conference, that's still about a decade before kind of the community really— the startup community really started to get going.

14:58 Speaker C: Oh, absolutely. Yep, yep, yep.

15:00 John Allsopp: And a lot of people have said that really early on it was just a case of these little tiny little communities of people catching up at coffee shops or bars and they were very much that crowd that you're talking about, the web people, the programmers, the coders, that was the community.

15:17 Adam Spencer: Absolutely.

15:17 John Allsopp: So I'm glad you brought that up but can you speak to that a little bit more? I don't know, just your involvement in that?

15:22 Speaker C: Yeah, so I remember probably the very, very first thing I did in person, I remember these in-person workshops where— because I had these online conferences and there was a chap down in Melbourne who teaches photography and he said, oh, if I got a bunch of people together in Melbourne to do a workshop, would you come down and do it for us? Right. And this would have been, I think, 2003. And I said, sure, that's super exciting. Right. So because, you know, even like funny thing is people didn't fly around to do stuff, right? Virgin was pretty new. You know, even just flying to Melbourne to run a workshop was like It seemed super exciting to me, right?

15:59 John Allsopp: I'm going to be way off here probably with this guess, but was that Darren Rouse?

16:04 Speaker C: No, no, he's—

16:05 John Allsopp: Because he's the only Melbourne photographer guy I know.

16:08 Speaker C: No, it'll come to me now. It'll come to me. I think his surname is Murdoch, Stu Murdoch, I think it was. I'll look it up. I feel really bad because I really, I sort of feel I owe enormous amounts to him because he sort of catalyzed, because he'd sort of seen the online stuff and he said, would you do it in person? And so I kind of took the online courses and put them together as a one-day workshop, went down there and there were about half a dozen people and that was done at the TAFE he was teaching at. I think it's safe enough to say that now. I think we snuck in on the weekend to do it. And so I'd done that once. So I did it in Sydney and that was sort of, that kind of had half a dozen people, maybe a few more, like 14, 15 people did that. And one of those is someone who is now the, was one of the founders of BuildKite, Tim Lucas. So Tim, who kind of, in a sense, interned with us. He did a little bit of stuff with us around that time. So what I did was, there were 2 or 3 people, there were a couple of people at that workshop who lived around Bondi and I lived at Bondi at the time. So I said, "Oh, we'll interview in Bondi." So we put this word out and a half dozen people, Peter Oddery, who was at Whistle Out, amazing designer who was at Fairfax at the time, Tim and a couple of other people, we all had a beer at the Beach Road Hotel in Bondi when it wasn't what it is now, right? So it was a very different world, 2003. And that was sort of what it was. It was like people knew, "Oh, let's get a coffee, let's have a beer." Then the Web Standards Group, which was definitely, I think, the only thing like that that I knew of. That was sort of how it worked until— I would like to think without being too conceited that Web Directions really did bring together people at a scale that hadn't been. Not just from Sydney, people were coming from Melbourne and even Perth. It was like, people coming from all over Australia. Yeah. Maybe even a couple from New Zealand because if you did this stuff, there just wasn't anything else like it.

18:01 John Allsopp: Why a conference?

18:04 Speaker C: I know. It's almost like counterintuitive, right? I was doing all this online stuff. I don't know. Even then, I think the instinct was, and maybe especially because I taught at TAFE in person, because I'd given these workshops in person, I mean, I've always felt there's a tremendous power in humans together in a room. I think by connecting people together, it's short-circuiting a lot of the things that can take— Back then, there was no Twitter, there was no Flickr, there was nothing. There was no Facebook. There's no way really for people to create online community. Probably the chief thing was things called newsgroups, which were— but they were very very kind of structured and focused on the topic and conversation. So, you know, I think there was even more need for that in person back then when there was just nothing social online really to speak of.

19:03 John Allsopp: Is there a point in time where you, this web community, this web-based community, and then you've got the startup/tech, I see those as two different things, although very similar, two different groups. Was there a time where you started to see that other group emerge out of your community?

19:24 Speaker C: Yeah, look, it's a really— I think where it's more obvious in a way is in the US, right? So you sort of have people— I was having a conversation with someone in the web world, very, very well known that I know about. So there's people of the web, right? I guess they're very much like, for them, the web is a medium in the same way that television, radio, cinema, whatever. It's a kind of It's a kind of media to be explored, a way of communicating to be explored. And in the US, that largely focuses, not exclusively, but on the Northeast, which is where traditional publishing was, New York, Boston. So you'll find a lot of people who are of that kind are very much based in the Northeast. And then you have the people who, I guess it's the startup world, it's the Silicon Valley world, whatever you, the product world, whatever you wanna call it. And it tends to be more Silicon Valley-based. And the web is a means to an end. It's a delivery mechanism rather than the web being the end in itself, like the medium to explore. And I suspect for the most part, the people who first gravitated to our conferences, they were of that latter kind. And partly because in Australia, as I'm sure many of the people you've interviewed will have said, there just wasn't the same kind of community. Certainly, probably our third or fourth conference, we decided we'd do a day for startups where we would focus on the things you need to know as a startup, like around intellectual property. Because we talked to all these people, some of them are really well known now, and they had no idea about IP. They'd be doing some stuff that was probably legally problematic, or at least opening up to the possibility that someone doesn't like what they're doing and just shuts down their entire business, right? And so legals and— we thought we'll put together this thing, which is sort of like a bootcamp. We called it that. I think it was the Startup Bootcamp, right? And you were going to get these insights from lawyers and accountants and all those sorts of people about how to do startup right. And we had like 2 people sign up for it, right? So we just canceled it because there wasn't a demand, at least in our industry, for something like that. Mm-hmm.

21:43 Adam Spencer: Mm-hmm.

21:43 Speaker C: This is years before StarCon and some of these other things. It wasn't really on most people's radar. I guess I could dig out the details, but they can't have been any earlier than 2006. It could have even been 2007. I don't think that they spoke to the fact that our world wasn't like that because a lot of people in our world— for example, Mike Cannon-Brookes spoke at our sec in 2006. That was their first year. It's not like we We didn't have people in our world that, and as we talked a bit about Ken Adams, so they've had spoke numerous times at our conferences. It wasn't like people who didn't either were in or didn't end up in that world weren't in ours. I think it came much later in a lot of ways. Because I think a lot of people went to Silicon Valley. People, well, either side of 2010 were going off to Y Combinator, they're going off to Silicon Valley. That was very much a thing, either to work or start their companies.

22:41 John Allsopp: I do want to talk about that later period in a second. 2006 is when it says Web Directions was kind of started.

22:49 Speaker C: Yeah, so we did two, 2004, 2005 with Russ and Pete, and then 2006 onwards, Maxine and I.

22:56 John Allsopp: Right.

22:56 Speaker C: So we sort of, the original one was called Web Essentials, and after a couple of years, complicated stuff, whatever, the C history, Maxine and I continued. We sort of like took it a slightly different direction, but Very much based on the foundations of Web Essentials.

23:11 John Allsopp: Right, okay. What can you tell me about that first year, the 2006 year of running the first— how the conference— sorry, how was that like?

23:20 Speaker C: Yeah, so we— it was the last year we did it at UTS. So we did 2004, '05, and then '06. So '04, '05 was a relatively small place at UTS, and then 2006 we went to quite a big— and then we had like 350 people. We built a Wi-Fi network because there wasn't one at the university. You think about, "Oh, wow." I was like, "Well, the average laptop probably—" like Macs would have come with Wi-Fi cards. The average laptop didn't. There was no iPhone. There were no smartphones to speak of. But we went and built a Wi-Fi network where we had to do wireless backhaul, which would have cost us an unbelievable amount of money. I think we had a sponsor who were—

24:02 John Allsopp: Yeah.

24:02 Speaker C: Who were like air hosts, whatever. They probably don't exist now. But we had to buy, so we bought a whole bunch of like radio routers to put around the auditorium and then we plugged them in back and did all this backhaul. Just to give people a sense of like how primitive some of this stuff was, right? It's the first time we had two tracks. Yeah, because what's really important to think, and this is a bit more on the geeky end, but These days you have such specialization— product roles, design roles, engineering roles, backend roles, frontend roles. You did everything. You had to do everything. You were probably called a web developer, maybe called a web designer, and you kind of did everything. You did the backend, you did the frontend, you did the product people. They were simpler times. Our content was very much— there was But this year we had the first split track. We sort of had more designy, producty— I don't think we really used the term product in 2006, but we had more design product stuff and then we had more of the engineering stuff in the other room. So we were starting to see a little bit of specialization, but it was still very much— I remember even 2 or 3 years later we had a conference in Canada and we had one of the big famous UX people saying, "Well, our research shows that the average The average e-commerce team is 4 people, right? That was it. That was like the whole team was on average 4 people. And that was, oh my goodness, what a big team, 4 people. What do they all do? So these days you have button engineers. Back then you did everything. You plugged in the Wi-Fi, right? You just, you seriously, you ran the servers in a cage in your room.— the whole business. Obviously, it was very interesting to try and program conferences like that. Sometimes it's easier because you pretty much did something on everything. I think that was probably what was starting to happen. I think, as I said, Mike Cannon-Brookes came and spoke. I think it was the only time the two founders of Kanban Monitor agreed to ever speak on stage. I think Maxine, who has this kind of magical power with people, and somehow she got them to come and speak. Wow. So we had like the founders of Campaign Monitor, we had the founders of— one of the founders of Atlassian.

26:22 Adam Spencer: Wow.

26:22 Speaker C: We had a person who's now the head of product at Zip. She's still a very good friend of mine. You know, so some really people who've kind of continued to really impact, you know, Cam spoke actually, I think that might have famously been when he met his wife.

26:37 John Allsopp: Wow.

26:37 Speaker C: They'll correct me on that, but I have a feeling it was that year because Lisa was the stage manager for So it was like the Woodstock. It was like the Woodstock of the Australian web industry.

26:48 John Allsopp: That is a great line. There you go. That's going in the documentary.

26:55 Speaker C: There you go. Well, you know, look, it seems so long ago and it seems so like in some way it is so long ago. I mean, I've got 4 kids now and none of them were born back then. Well, 2005 is my oldest, but they, you know, it was It was a time when I think the Australian industry was emerging and things were becoming real jobs that people actually got paid for. Whereas you go back much before 2000 or even into the 2000s and there'd probably be fewer than 100 people in 2001 being paid as a job in Australia to do web stuff. Might be slightly exaggerating, but I think I have the right order of magnitude there. So this was the time you could sort of sense something was really starting to happen.

27:43 John Allsopp: Can you comment on— so you started the conference 2006 or 2004, 2006. How quickly did you see the community grow?

27:51 Speaker C: Yeah, so 2006 and then '07, so the UTS Towers were too big, we had to go away. So we went to the convention center in Sydney and really stepped up again to like 500 or so people who came and we started adding multiple tracks. I think we were doing 3 tracks. We used that similar model then till about 2013 at the convention center. We have a design track, engineering track, so what became a product track as well. It was certainly, I think what you were seeing was this growth before there was this real splintering of the industry, perhaps 2013, '14, where— Yeah. Probably with the real start of the rise of startups in Australia and a proper startup ecosystem. Before that, we always used to joke about everyone calling themselves a VC, but literally no one, none of the VC funds in Australia actually had any money, right? And never invested in anything. I'm not kidding. Well into the 2010s, people would talk about being VC. There was almost no VC in Australia. Yeah. There was still very much this model. So we used to run conferences in North America and Europe and Japan as well. So I was spending a lot of time in North America, a lot of time in Silicon Valley and talking often to product people who would, founders and so on and say, you were required to come and be in Silicon Valley. If you say you got invested, you bring your whole team from Atlanta, you bring your whole teams from, it was sort of this expectation. I think that was one of the challenges in the early days Australian industry faced was the expectation was, well, you know, if we're gonna invest in you, you're gonna come to Silicon Valley, right? And that was probably a very big ask for a lot of Australian companies, right? Yeah, so I think this is sort of the time when that was starting to happen.

29:43 John Allsopp: From an operational standpoint, like, you know, yourself and Maxine running this conference and growing it, how steep was the learning curve? Because, you know, today I'm just reading this off your website, 12 cities, 13 years, 67 events, 600+ speakers and 10,000+ attendees, you know.

30:02 Speaker C: And that's probably going to be bigger since we wrote that one. Right. Of course now we've gone online.

30:06 John Allsopp: Well, that's really interesting though. The difference between these tens of thousands of attendees and we're right now talking about 2006, 500 people.

30:15 Speaker C: Sure.

30:16 John Allsopp: Yeah, I'm just— A, the operational side, like how steep was that learning curve for you? Like how did you pull this off?

30:22 Speaker C: Well, it was very organic and incremental. I think we acquired capabilities as we went. I think it's sort of been this challenge and somewhat frustration for us in a world of massive rapid growth that we— and this changed a bit in the last couple of years, ironically— but with physical events, right? In Australia, where in the scheme of things, it's a tiny market. The size of the developer/designer market in Australia is tiny compared to Europe, North America, and elsewhere. How do you grow a business like this? It's very different, ironically again, to the sort of businesses who would attend our conferences.

31:07 Adam Spencer: Yeah.

31:08 Speaker C: For them, growth was going global, growth was that sort of massive total addressable markets. And our total addressable market was tiny. We probably have a non-trivial percentage of the entire TAM in Australia of developers and designers, but it's not actually a super great business. Essentially, I guess we'd run in-person workshops for 15 people and worked out how to do some of that. We ran a conference a couple of years for 200 people and it became 350, it became 500, it became 600. Then we reached this relative local maximum, at least. We started doing some more focused events in Melbourne around engineering and design. Design. We picked up a partner in Japan and we started running some conferences in Japan. We had a couple of partners in Canada, we ran a couple of years there, and then we took that to North America. And then we acquired a conference from someone we knew who was leaving the industry in the UK. So it's sort of our biggest. We probably did Japan, Sydney, and Melbourne, and US, and it was just all a bit ridiculous really. Because the costs increase kind of linearly. Marketing is very focused and local, I guess. Our business is very different, at least until the last couple of years, from most of the people who come to our conferences, right? Certainly most startups, right?

32:30 John Allsopp: Yeah, so I imagine going on, you know, you keep saying last couple of years has changed, and that's the going online part.

32:37 Speaker C: Yeah, so look, we've been exploring online stuff around conferences for years, So once streaming became in any way feasible, I think in 2012 we really explored the idea of streaming to say a non-Australian audience our developer conference in Melbourne. So you immediately run into some issues, which is, well, it's the middle of the night most of the world, right? Yeah. So we've got Southeast Asia and wherever, but they're generally, they're good large markets in some respects, but they're generally, the average income's generally lower and so on. So we explored that and we finally, We did a lot of work exploring how we might do that and we never really did it. But in the meantime, we had been videoing and producing high-quality versions of our presentations since 2012. We built up this ever-growing archive of hundreds and hundreds of these presentations, some of which literally introduced the world to groundbreaking ideas. Progressive web apps launched at one of our conferences. Just by way of example. So we've been long thinking, well, what do we do with these? Because people at conferences take video and just put them on YouTube and then like, well, no one benefits really. I mean, the conference has spent a lot of money and let me tell you, we've done this and we've got some videos with hundreds of thousands of views and collectively millions of views probably, and no discernible marketing benefit for us. Plus, you know, how does the speaker benefit? Well, you know, like at the end of the day, they're not monetizing their IP. We just felt there was value that was just not being properly recognized. So we've been working a long time on how we can do that. And so about 3 years ago, we sort of softly launched and we've been organically building, again, essentially a platform for conference videos. I guess, in want of a better word, Netflix for conference videos. And most of them are ours, but they're all from us. We've got a few partner conferences, people we know and like, there on that platform as well. We'd been building out a lot of ideas about what online stuff should look like, and then COVID hit and we essentially didn't have a business anymore. But I think because we'd invested a lot in building that technology and more importantly thinking about what that could be like, we were able to move our conferences online.

34:58 John Allsopp: Right.

34:59 Speaker C: I'd like to think we did in a way— well, firstly, it's been really successful. We now have 40% plus of our audience outside Australia, up from close to zero at the beginning of last year. We've grown to 6 specialized conferences across the year. So we thought really deeply about what you should be doing online, that if you were doing a conference online from scratch, what should it look like? And you see most conferences are still just taking their 2-day, 8-hour-a-day conference, slapping online, It's all live, the quality is like this. And what we thought is, no, no, no, no, all of this, we got to rethink all of this. So we prerecord everything, we really produce it well, we do great transcripts, we do a whole bunch of stuff around accessibility. We make the day shorter, right? So we're not expecting people to be 8 hours a day. We make them 3 to 4 hours. Once it's 3 to 4 hours, you can run it as prerecorded. You can do it 3 or 4 times and cover the whole world. Yeah. In a day. We don't do them multiple days, we do 2 days over 2 weeks. So you can create a whole different kind of event if you think what is native when you go online. So that's where we've got to, bringing a ton of what we've learned from running conferences. It's sort of all come together here. Now we actually, we're about to announce that we're going to do one in-person conference next year. We're going to do our big end-of-year summit, but the rest is all going to be online. It's gone really well, and I genuinely think that it delivers enormous value for everyone. And yes, you don't have the people meeting in person, which is an important part of conferences, but not the only part of it. So it's been an interesting journey. Hopefully every step has sort of been informed by what we've done before. So going back to your question that prompted this long diatribe, I think it's very much about organically— Yeah. Learning and each step of the way. If you go back to look at me teaching at TAFE in the '90s, in a way there's a through line here because it's about education and professional development and how that works. And that, ironically, the in-person at TAFE became the online, which became back to the in-person, and now we've gone online again. So there's these sort of cycles, but hopefully each of those cycles we've learned what to do, learned what can be improved, learned what we shouldn't be doing. Yeah.

37:26 John Allsopp: Before I ask you, there's this last question that I ask every single person, but before we get to that, how much has your audience, the conference audience changed, you know, since it first began to now when, you know, this startup community is technology community has really grown quite a bit in the last 5, 6, 7 years. Has that changed your audience?

37:51 Speaker C: Yeah, so I think at the macro level, when we started, it was about a community. It's literally like people were there probably getting paid less than they could be paid elsewhere in many cases. They were driven by interest and a passion, a bit like those accountants and dentists and doctors I talked about in the early '80s. The driver for them was not, "This is a great career, this is a great business," because it wasn't. It was interesting. There was an intuition people had, there's something new and interesting here. And that is very much a community. And I think we spoke to that and that motivated us and drove what we did. I think now I would describe it as an industry and as a group of professionals. And this is not a discouragement, a disparagement, it's not a criticism, it's just an observe. Mm-hmm. A transition that's occurred, right? Where, you know, people often, it's what they, no one studied web design at university in 2000, right? Like, the career pathways were very eclectic and people coming in from all different angles, usually not, I was unusual in someone that had a computer science background in the web, at least in Australia, people I mixed with in the late '90s, early 2000s. Right. So I think what's happened is we've become an industry and a profession, and I think along the way, the sort of events we've run have initially probably instinctively, but increasingly more kind of consciously adapted on the basis of that. It's less about that meeting someone like you because you're the only person in your workplace and you probably barely have ever spoken to someone who does what you do. You do. That's just not the case for most people anymore. That's not the job that they need a conference for. They need it to be— we continue to be this incredibly fast-moving— doesn't matter if you're in product design, engineering, whatever area you're in, it's incredibly fast-moving. So how do you keep up? We're very much about, well, that's our job. Our job is to help you keep up with developments in the field. I guess the audience has changed because— We still have a lot of people who came right at the beginning and are still coming. All the people they run, they're right at the top of the organization, but people in their organization come. I think how I characterize them now is they're not members of community, they're professionals. We're not a community, we're an industry. That's inevitable. Do I miss the early days of what the web was like? Absolutely. Although it might be a bit more nostalgia than anything else because maybe at the time we certainly didn't think it was was super awesome to be not earning a lot of money and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, now it's definitely a profession, definitely an industry, and that's definitely what we kind of cater to with our events.

40:40 John Allsopp: Last question. Keeping in mind that I'm trying to— what we're doing here, this interview, is going to be part of a documentary about the history of the Australian startup ecosystem. I want people from all corners of the ecosystem to listen to this story. So founders, investors, policymakers, academics, Do you have a message? Do you have something that you want to tell everybody that's listening?

41:01 Speaker C: Yeah, so I have long thought about this and having seen this very, in the scheme of things, long transition. What I felt for a long time, it frustrated me a great deal and I saw it in people in the industry. I saw it certainly in policymakers and elsewhere. And look, it's not unique to Australia by any means.— I think that the best way of putting it is that you know how many times you have to put Silicon X, including Silicon Roundabout, Silicon Beach, Silicon Alley. I mean, they even do it in New York. But I think the challenge continues to be seeing that there's a single model of development in a startup ecosystem. It's got to look like Silicon Valley. And I think a lot of the time we kind of ape those rituals, right? They're like rituals you perform. You have a VC, you have seed, you have out, you know. And I think a lot of time as founders and entrepreneurs and people, like we're kind of a bit obsessed with the trappings of that rather than going, I think, thinking about what is unique. So Silicon Valley is unique, right? It's a unique circumstance. And I think everyone wants to talk about it, should think about the history of Silicon Valley, where it comes from. And I think Fred Wilson wrote this marvelous piece that was very critical of the new, and he's a VC in New York, and he was very critical of what I'm talking about in New York of all places, which is probably the second, if not the third kind of most vibrant startup ecosystem in the world. And he talked about how what's unique about Silicon Valley is it's had probably 7 or 8 generations of startup leading to success, leading to spawning dozens, if not hundreds of people with real money and the experience of being involved in fast startups. Australia's had what? We've had a handful of really world-class successes and there's not, again, not disparaging or criticism, and hopefully we'll have many more. And I think a lot of the time, rather than thinking about what is unique and special about Australia, right? What do we have here that we can really take advantage of? And so for the longest time, I think things like areas, you know, I think it's one reason why financial technology, fintech, has done quite well in Australia, relatively speaking, is because we do have a really strong financial services sector, right, that is world-class. It has a lot of issues and challenges, probably in no small part due to its success. Mm-hmm. Right, so to me it seems that rather than this scattergun approach, really identifying what does Australia have some kind of relative strength in. So one area we do super well in is in the whole developer, developer tools, developer, you know, we've got like whether it's Atlassian, whether it's Buildkite, there's a whole bunch of successes in that area, right? And I don't think that's an accident, right? 'Cause you get these virtuous cycles of kind of interrelationships between, in startups and their market. And I think a similar one is around education. I think the last couple of years should have shown us that online-based education is a shit show. And I speak as someone who has 4 kids under 16, one of whom is 8 and I worked really closely with, particularly in the lockdown in Sydney for 3 months. And we were using products from the biggest names in technology and they were fucked.

44:26 John Allsopp: Right.

44:26 Speaker C: I think there's this huge opportunity opportunity in specific areas. And I think Australia in the education sector has huge advantages, right? We have a really healthy, well-structured, despite everything that's happened the last couple of years, well-structured education system. It's really incredibly interestingly regulated. And I think there are real opportunities there. So I think, I think, you know, from the perspective, maybe the bigger picture, I think, you know, what we really should be thinking about is, is where do we excel? And then whether you're a policymaker, whether whether you're a government, whatever you are, whether you're an investor, think about what are those 2 or 3 sectors we do super well, right? And let's really put all the wood behind those arrows rather than try and, you know, think we're a mini Silicon Valley and just, you know, fund everything that comes up above the parapet and see what works. I, I don't think we have that luxury of doing that in the same way that Silicon Valley and pretty much no one else does, right? That would be my thinking, right? What are things that we do super well in Australia and where there are real opportunities. And, you know, health is one obviously, and, you know, some great korvu and some great success stories around that space. I think education, developer tools, let's really focus on those, right? Because we've already seen some great success there and hopefully we'll see more.

45:39 John Allsopp: Thank you so much, John. Thank you for your time.

45:41 Speaker C: You're very welcome, Adam.

45:46 Adam Spencer: I hope you enjoyed that interview.

45:52 John Allsopp: More interviews are on the way. Follow the podcast wherever you're listening right now.

45:56 Adam Spencer: Stay tuned for more interviews with many, many more amazing people from the Australian startup ecosystem. Thanks for listening and see you next time.