Mick Liubinskas: Australia’s startup ecosystem would be stronger with a single city leading it

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%, cent. 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/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.

2:46 Mick Liubinskas: Hi, I'm Allan Jones, and I am today's guest host for this episode of Welcome to Day One, the podcast for Aussie founders, startups, and the organizations that support Australian entrepreneurship. And my guest today is Mick Lubinskis. Mick, could you please introduce yourself?

3:05 Speaker C: Hey, Alan, Mick Lubinskis here. I work in climate technology. I help people who are building climate technology companies grow them to scale. I do that to support the environment getting to a place of comfort. I run an ecosystem called Climate Salad, and I directly invest in climate tech companies.

3:25 Mick Liubinskas: So Mick, you and I have known each other for centuries, decades at least. Do you remember what you were doing, what I was doing when we first met?

3:38 Speaker C: I think we may have met way back in Yahoo days. I was doing some work for— I was running marketing for Virgin Interactive and selling computer games back in the late '90s when I first started getting into doing HTML and I think we were doing some ads on the Games Network there with Yahoo Australia so maybe the first time there but I think more importantly we met when we were trying to build out, you were doing Blue Pulse. We were back when the industry could fit into one room.

4:11 Mick Liubinskas: And it did, and it did. There used to be a thing called Silicon Beach.

4:15 Speaker C: Drinks, yeah, exactly.

4:16 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, Silicon Beach drinks, Thursday nights. Yeah. And the whole industry in the one room. And it started to get a little bit crowded relatively early on, but that was one of the things that made it special, wasn't it?

4:27 Speaker C: Exactly.

4:28 Mick Liubinskas: Do you remember the point at which you decided to make a transition? I mean, you were in a marketing role with a game software publisher. Do you remember the,— the decision point when you decided it was time to switch careers to startups?

4:40 Speaker C: Yeah, so it was partly forced upon me by Virgin Interactive moved their office back to London and they gave me 6 months' notice so I just started helping out people building out websites and then I started my own business doing that and then I started building a little platform and had a few people invest in it. I was really, really, really naive like it's taken me a long, long time to learn the basics in technology. So my path has been really wildly meandering, but I've loved it. I love working in small businesses basically because you get to be a part of that team of starting something new. You get to touch all parts of the business and it certainly appeals to my poor attention span. So, and startups were, you know, you have a big mission, you work really, really hard to try to get something off the ground. You build a new product, get first customers and first revenue and grow these things and it's wildly, risky and certainly I've had a ton more failures than successes but I love that part of the journey. I think the biggest change for me, the two big changes was going from kind of corporate to startups and then the next one was going from a single startup into multiple startups and that was again after working at Tangler, Phil Moore and I just started helping out multiple companies and we kind of accidentally started Pollinizer.

6:04 Mick Liubinskas: Before we go into Pollinizer, tell us a little bit about what Tangler was and why did that start in Sydney, who started it, how did you join?

6:14 Speaker C: Yeah, so I actually ran marketing for Kazaa, which was kind of a startup but kind of also my last real kind of pure marketing role.

6:25 Mick Liubinskas: Now we're gonna have to tell the kids at home what Kazaa was. Exactly, I mean, they can look it up on Wikipedia if we spell it for them, but it's got way too many A's, doesn't it?

6:32 Speaker C: Way too many A's and spelled in the old hacker language. But yeah, 'cause I was basically the follow-on from Napster. So Napster allowed you to download music from servers and Kazaa got a bit clever and said, we can download music from a distributed server. So basically the index was distributed. So kind of a bit of a precursor to, certainly to BitTorrent and certainly a little bit to blockchain and some of the crypto stuff. But I was hired into Kazaa to turn it into basically kind of like Netflix and— Netflix. Spotify. The view was this peer-to-peer distribution of content was massively efficient. Can we use that as a new distribution network? So that was my vision. So that was the vision that I was hired in to do. We eventually ended up stop fighting that fight and I went traveling around the world. I came back to Australia, wrote a book on my travels, started helping companies, and then I met Marty and the team from Tangler. They were growing a— A a chat tool. So they were trying to build basically a live chat tool. This is back again pre-Twitter, pre— even Facebook was only really— Facebook was still only for universities at this point back in 2005. So Tangler, they asked me to come and join and help them build the product and launch it into the US. We did that for a year. We made a whole bunch of mistakes. This is kind of even pre-lean and pre-agile. So we spent a year and $1 million launching a product and to find out that nobody wanted it. I think we had all the elements there, but we didn't take an agile lean approach, we had an old stealth approach. So, yeah, a lot of lessons learned and, yeah, a great group of people, but, yeah, it was, we just didn't get the approach right and didn't have the patience to go and build it out.

8:25 Mick Liubinskas: And why do you think we used to do things in a non-lean way? Why did we take that waterfall approach back in the day? Was it because that was the only thing that anybody knew how to do? Or was it something that was forced upon us by the technologies that we used? What was that about, do you think?

8:40 Speaker C: I think it all plays into it. Again, right back when we started, you literally had to buy servers and everything you did, there was no SaaS tools. Starting a SaaS tool company today, you probably buy 20 products which does half of the heavy lifting. You had to do every single thing yourself. We had to build individual gateways into every single bank. All these things were really, really, really hard. Really hard. So I think because of that, the technology costs were higher, it took longer. So it was just harder to be lean and agile.

9:15 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah. On the banking front, I remember there was a time when NAB was the only Australian bank that would offer any kind of services to Australian startups, you know, a gateway. And I think they used to make you put down, maybe it was a quarter or a half a million dollar security deposit before they would even start to process credit card transactions. Am I remembering that right or something like that?

9:36 Speaker C: Yeah, they were for different levels and depending on what you wanted to do, but it was so manual and clumsy, but that was the foundation times, right? So it was almost impossible, but the technology was actually hard to build. And then the technology got kind of taken off the table to be like, well, you can kind of build anything. And then it became okay, if anyone can build anything, then you've got to build something. The hard part is finding something people want to build. That other people can't build. So yeah, the game really, really, really changed. It's hard, you've got to— and it's still changing, like it's still changing even faster. So I think it just says what you have to be completely constantly keeping up to speed and learning new skills which is exciting but tough.

10:27 Mick Liubinskas: Mark Pesci and I were speaking once and he was saying he thought one of the reasons why Waterfall was the way forward back in those days was was that you really only got one chance to launch a product because you would then, you know, launch was mainly about the marketing and advertising that you would do for it. And because most consumers, nobody had a smartphone and most consumers were really only on the internet maybe once a day. So you had to reach out to them to promote your brand and your URL on the sides of buses and in cinema ads and print ads. You know, like you used to advertise startups in print, you know, in the AFR to try and get people to remember to, oh yes, I must check that URL when I get back to my computer tonight after work, you know. And so that kind of forced you in a way that you had to make the product as perfect as it could be because if the customer wasn't surprised and delighted with it the first time they used it, they would probably never come back.

11:25 Speaker C: Yeah.

11:26 Mick Liubinskas: Do you remember it that way?

11:27 Speaker C: Absolutely, it was completely different. We were still It's one of the things we're facing I think with the climate at the moment is back then, it was on the premise of actually getting people online and to your site and liking the product and paying for it. There were just so many things and actually the early adopters, there were so many challenges and the early adopters were really only the 1%. There wasn't just the money being spent on B2B SaaS, on consumer e-commerce that we have now, the comfort we have with the technology. Has taken many, many years, like more than 20 years, of course, to get to this point, but it took at least 10 years to get to the base point of comfort. And again, I'm asking myself the same question around that with climate, even though there's a lot of people being positive about it, there's a lot of news, there's a lot of tech, is the world ready to comfortably spend money that way, whether it's government, consumers, or business? I think learning those lessons, I always think, don't just learn the, individual lesson of, hey, it was hard to go and launch a product, you had to go and buy ads. Learn the principle that actually, what do you have to do to make this work in the current environment? And ask yourself that question. And that's, you've always got to go back to first principles because everything changes constantly.

12:43 Mick Liubinskas: Everything changes constantly. So the next big impact that you had with your co-founder Phil Maul on the Australian tech startup ecosystem was Pollinizer. Can you tell us a bit about the formation of what Pollinizer was and why you chose to take that step next?

13:00 Speaker C: Yes. So again, as with a lot of things in my life, I accidentally find myself in them. After Tangler, Phil and I just started— Phil started helping companies out doing CTO work. I started helping out with marketing and product work. And we started just referring customers to each other. And then it was like, you know what, there's a lot of there's a lot of these companies starting and trying to work out how to build tech products. So let's just do it together. And it was really just for the first 6 months, it was just Phil and I basically working together and helping companies out. And then one of the companies basically said, well, you know, I can't— we were charging like $200 a day, so really, really, really low rates. We just really wanted to learn whatever we could about helping these companies. But we were working with a lot of them and then some of them were like, well, "I can't even pay you $200 a day, but I'll pay you $100 a day and I'll give you some ESOP." And I was like, "Okay, sure, why not? It's only Sunday to give up." So we just started basically then building a portfolio of this bit of equity and some of that started to grow. And back then, it was really difficult. ESOPs in Australia were kind of taxed badly and people didn't want to work for startups. It was too risky. So we said, well, what if we can hire engineers into Pollinizer and then put them to work into startups? And then at least we've got some, you know, they'll leave their safe job at the bank to come work for us and then go and work for startups. We're kind of a midway point. So I think we had some good timing in terms of the shift towards growth in startups. Where I think we were challenged was it was so hard to basically just keep the lights on. We had too inexpensive core. The accelerator model came sort of a few years after we got started and we were one of the first investors into Startmate and mentors there. So I'm really excited about what Pollinizer was able to do in terms of the positive impact in the industry, but we didn't get to really capture much value because we spent so much time learning about it and creating, investing in it. In the creation of it that we didn't actually invest in enough good companies. I will unfortunately always look at Pollinizer as massively underachieving because even though we had a couple of good companies come through it, we were just a few years ahead. We should have got, you know, we should have lasted longer, done something different. We were a few years ahead of the big growth curve. And that's hard. Like, that's hard to look back on.

15:35 Adam Spencer: Yeah.

15:35 Speaker C: And to know that we worked hard and we were right there, but we just were a bit early and had the model just a bit wrong.

15:42 Mick Liubinskas: So although you'd do it differently if you could do it again, there were a couple of great successes that came out of Pollinizer. Do you want to name drop a couple of people or a couple of companies?

15:53 Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, Spreeds was the big one, but again, Spreeds, we built and sold it in 13 months and it was more of a clone business of Groupon. But it had a great team and a really hungry co-founder in Dean McAvoy who, again, I think for our benefit, we backed Dean's previous startup, Booking Angel, and we supported him building out some tech and having a swing at it. That didn't work out and then we went again with him and that speaks to the resilience required of participating in this space and also the portfolio required. And fast forward to today, we were co-founders of Lawpath with Dom and the team who are now just doing incredible work and growing great. So we had early successes and slow successes and that's the challenge of startups.

16:37 Mick Liubinskas: Just to make sure you're not too modest about Spritz too, that was in 13 months. Built and sold that business to Yahoo for $40 million, which at that time was an incredibly big amount of money. And still even these days, to go from zero to selling a startup for $40 mil would be, you know—

16:53 Adam Spencer: Yeah.

16:53 Mick Liubinskas: A lot of pats on back for that achievement.

16:56 Speaker C: It was. And look, the team, Dean Eustace and, you know, Phil was a really big driver of that, but we had Fleur and Oliver from Pollinizer and John Tyson, who were an amazing team. We had them ready. I remember someone afterwards saying, "You just got lucky." I was like, "You just completely and utterly disrespected that we backed Dean McAvoy a second time after a failure, that we had built this team up 2 years in advance and trained them and helped them be in the position so we could be right there. We worked our butts off and got sales like within 30 days. How dare you actually—" Sure, there was luck, but we did 25 things to give ourselves the chance to be lucky. Sprints was fantastic, but it was also— such an outlier for us that it kind of hurt us in some ways in that we were unable to repeat that. We wanted to build innovative technologies. We didn't want to keep doing client work that can be profitable. And we returned the first fund through Spreeds, which was great, but it's hard. You've got to find things you're really passionate about and find things that the world's prepared to pay you for. Yeah. In an industry that's just forming in Australia is really, really hard. So I really appreciate, again, Fleur, Oliver, John Tyson, Dean, Eustace, and everyone involved in Lawpath, and certainly Phil for backing that and pushing that really hard. But it was people like Claire Hallam who behind the scenes did all the ops work and sold the business brilliantly. But it's emotionally draining. What I love about being involved in multiple companies is I try to put my heart into everything. Yeah. And it doesn't always work out. And back then, I was a bit more resilient, irrepressible. These days, I feel it's like putting my energies in these different things. You've got to be aware that you're committing to it wholeheartedly. So sometimes it works out like Spreets and sometimes it doesn't work out. Like, you know, WooBoard, we sold to a public company. It went up and down and now it's worth 1 cent. Now the whole company's WooBoard, but— Yeah. That's the thing I started from scratch and could have been great, maybe should have done something different. It's, yeah, it's an emotional connection.

19:11 Mick Liubinskas: Definitely an emotional connection. And I think another important thing for people to understand if they want to understand what it was like in the very early days in Australia in the startup industry was that, you know, you said before that you kind of found yourself in the startup industry rather than really consciously choosing it and you kind of were at a point where you're kind of unemployable on other things. It wasn't like you went into startups thinking, you know, oh yes, this is going to be a gold mine. This is going to be a money printing factory. You went into it going, shit, maybe this will bail me out. And I think many of us were in that position, right? So that first generation were misfits, people that weren't excelling in other careers and other professions at that time. And this was kind of our last ditch attempt. Nobody thought, oh yes, I'm going to have a career in the startup industry. And especially not that I'm going to make hundreds of millions of dollars. Now there is a bit of a career path. There is a big enough startup ecosystem that you can look look forward to 10 or 20 years of working in 5 or 6 different startups and learning and growing with each experience. And that's a fantastic thing, but I think that is one of the different aspects of the startup community today. It is an industry, it does exist.

20:20 Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the things we wanted to go and create. Like, it's— I'm sitting here at Fishburners right now, and back when we had those drinks at the Grace Hotel, and we were like, man, well, what if we can— imagine if we just had such a concentration of technology that you walk around, you see what I see today. Like I saw, I walked past the Immutable guys today in their t-shirts and hoodies and I was like, man, startup shirt, startup shirt, startup shirt. Like that's fantastic. I just love that there is that career. It is really hard. It goes back again to thinking, to finding what success is to you. And for some people, the founders that I really, really respect, it's they'll do the one thing for 20 years and they'll build it up slowly and slowly over time. Well, I'm—— you know, Jin Dao from HappyCo who just raised a massive round. When he came into Startmate, I remember he was like, he's doing a checklist, like he's out with his checklist. He's like, "No, I'm going to build a big business around this. I'm going to—" It's like, "Really? Wow." And he's done it. He's just done it for what, 7— what, must be 10 years now, 9 years? I don't know, but—

21:28 Mick Liubinskas: 10, certainly 10.

21:30 Speaker C: I love that commitment. But then I see people like you and I who struggle to fit into a single company for a long period of time. We've done a lot. We've done, seen probably thousand term sheets and we've helped companies a lot of ways. And you've got to define success again in what yourself and how, what you want to get out of it. I love really, really helping people and I put that above commercial and I've put that above commercial many, many times. And so I'm, I'm now don't have a billion dollars in the bank, not to say I would have if I took other paths, but maybe, but I love what I do. And I'm very, very privileged to even have the opportunity to try to do it. Totally unemployable. I ran into Nick Goniós yesterday. We would always laugh about being totally unemployable and we've got all these skills and we want to help and that's okay. You just got to go find a way to help and if you can work that out long-term, have a long-term alignment with people, then that should be fine.

22:25 Mick Liubinskas: So I want to ask you a little more about Climate Salad, the thing that you're working on now. And I just want to ask you, you know, you've had some kind of come-to-Jesus moment there. You've had some kind of experience or decision that you made where you decided that saving the climate was not only the most important thing for the world, but for you personally, because you're now one of those annoying friends on Facebook that won't let any of us get away with our greenwashing. But what's going on? Is that because you're a dad? Is that because you really want to save the world? What's going on with Climate Salad?

23:02 Adam Spencer: Yes.

23:03 Mick Liubinskas: How did you make that decision?

23:04 Speaker C: It's a number of things. Partly it's like the world of technology had moved so far forward, just doing core technology in SaaS to me wasn't— like I looked and I turned 47 last year. I want to work for another 20, 30 years and if I do more SaaS marketplace apps, I won't be able to get up and get excited every day. So I wanted to find something new so I was kind of very, very open for that.. And I've always been a privately annoying environmentalist with a Keep Cup very early and going around the house turning lights off and tiny things as a consumer. And then I moved to the US about 5 years ago and one of the reasons to do that was that I was so deeply entrenched in the Australian tech industry that I was doing 20 to 30 15-minute calls with entrepreneurs each week for free and and I felt like I was just beholden to it and I was never going to be able to make a change. So one of the reasons to go was to put myself in a tougher, different environment and it was actually so tough that I was even more unemployable over in the US. But it just so happened that a certain person got elected president in the US and that person pulled out of the Paris Agreement and my best mate in the world, Nathan Fabian, works for a company called PRI which basically has spent 12 years trying to convince all the biggest financiers in the world that climate change is real and important. And as you do to mates, we used to play competitive basketball together and I said to him, I sent him a note and said, "Haha, your job just got harder." And he responded back and said, "Maybe it's time you got in the game." And that was like one of the best touches I've ever seen. And like, you know, I was there in the US, so I was like, "Well, what the hell can I add to clean tech and sustainability?". So I went to the Berkeley University program called Cyclotron Road back then. I think it's called Activate now. And Singularity University had a sustainability program and Stanford and Y Combinator had a couple of sustainability companies. So I just went to those companies and said, "I've got no idea what you do in terms of your tech but I've done a bunch of stuff. Can I help?" And I found out they had the same problems. They just— they need to build a team, build a product, go get customers, maybe raise capital. Uh-huh. And then some of those people People said, "Hey, here's 4 or 5 books to go and read." So I just read a couple of books and then you can't unsee it. Once you start thinking about how many like billions and billions of coffee cups, the reason I scowl at people with, especially with espresso takeaway coffee cups, it's like we just are so oblivious to the fact that you throw that away and there's no place called away. It's somewhere else. It just gets taken out of your comfortable life and then you drive your car around and it pumps Carbon into the air and you get food and you don't eat it. Again, I'm massively privileged in the world. I just throw it in the bin, someone else will take it, who cares? Like, it's— So once you start reading that and you look at all the David Attenborough documentaries, I did spend about 3 months just going deep in it and I— and it's scary. Like, the climate anxiety is really real and there's no guarantees. Hopefully we save it and it doesn't get too bad. But you combine that with being a dad of 3 kids between 7 and 11 and of age and like, oh my goodness, they're not going to grow up. Like you want your kids to grow up and have a better environment than you had, a better world and better situation, right? And my 3 kids are going to grow up with more floods, more bushfires, more storms, rising waters, and it's no individual's fault. Although definitely there's some people who could have helped avert it.

26:48 Adam Spencer: Yeah.

26:49 Speaker C: But we've got the opportunity to go and change it now. So yeah, like it's scary. Be careful doing it, but going to read books like Gates's book and John Doerr's new book, Sides of Scale. I mean, they're mind-blowing, reading it and understanding what we've done to the environment. Like all the growth, it feels free, right? You feel you throw it in the ocean, the ocean is so big, how could you possibly fill it up? And there's a billion people. Actually, one of the best ones I heard— my dad's like, "Fill the kettle up fully and boil it all the time. Just have it boiling." And I'm like, "No, that's a waste." So, "Oh, come on. It's just such a tiny thing." And someone quantified it and worked out that like the amount of boiling that happens every day is just incredible, like literally billions and billions of times water is boiled.

27:39 Mick Liubinskas: Oh.

27:40 Speaker C: And like it just adds up and you just feel like you just— how can one person's How can one person's contribution be so— matter? And of course it doesn't, it's so small. But there are billions of us now. There's a billion people doing 1,000 things a day bad for the environment. Like that is 100 trillion negative things a day. Like so yeah, like—

28:06 Mick Liubinskas: That's got to add up.

28:08 Speaker C: It does add up. And the beauty of it is though, we can change it by just changing the little things we do every day and it's not that hard. I'm not some amazing hero. It's like, carry your keep cup. Like, just get the bus, walk a bit more. Like, there's the same trillion things can be turned into positives.

28:27 Mick Liubinskas: I get it. That's really cool, Mick. Really cool. You've always been a goal guy. You know, I remember visiting your house at Woolloomooloo 20 years ago and you had a whiteboard up on the wall and you and Karen both had your goals and there were daily goals, there were weekly goals, then there were quarterly and I think you had long-term goals as well. With Climate Salad specifically, what's probably your biggest near-term goal and then what's your big hairy audacious goal for the future?

28:56 Adam Spencer: Yeah, thank you.

28:58 Speaker C: So, it's hard again with the reflections on Pollinizer and seeing some amazing venture funds out there My reflections on that is don't— is get the model, try to get the model right. So don't just— it's easy for me to start things, and Climate Salad definitely just got started as a blog and has morphed into big potential impact on the ecosystem. But the— you do really want to get the model right. And so I'm trying really, really hard to keep entrepreneurs building climate tech companies at the center of Climate Salad so it doesn't pollute with, with other, with other elements. And that's been great. So the short-term and the long-term goals are quite linked. And the way that I believe that ClimateCellar can have an impact on these companies is to help them get customers as a priority. So customers solve most of the problems with startups. If you get customers, you get revenue, you get proof points, you get momentum, you get more customers. And so that's our focus. So we've been working with great people like Stefan Knight from AWS, and other growth specialists. And it's like, if we can help these climate tech companies get someone help them get their business model right, get the new customers, and especially for Australian companies, get customers in big markets. So Australia is a big country, but it's a small market. Not many companies can reach scale purely in Australia, though some can, especially in climate. So that's been the focus. So my goal last year at SouthStart was to help 100 climate tech companies over a year, just help them somehow. That was pretty vague. My goal for the next year is to help 100 climate tech companies get a new customer. So that's the goal. And the goal over between, for 2030, my hairy audacious goal is to help 1,000 climate tech companies. Yeah. 100 a year seems like we should be able to do it, 10 more over the next 10 years. The other way we help is also trying to help them get team members and capital, but the primary focus is on customers. Yeah, that's what I'm working towards. I do have a very, very big follow-on goal, which is Climate Salad needs to get to sustainability, financial sustainability, 'cause at the moment it's me working my butt off with amazing support from Charlotte Connell and some advisors. So I'm trying to find partners and sponsors at the moment, people, companies who are prepared to help us grow Climate Salad, and governments, government grants I think should support as well. But for members, it's $100 a year. We're trying to keep it very small but committed.

31:32 Mick Liubinskas: I'm a member. You've got me. Yay!

31:34 Speaker C: Yay!

31:35 Mick Liubinskas: Thanks, mate. Hey, so we're a little over 10 AM, and I still actually have all of the questions still to ask you. Can we extend our interview a little bit longer?

31:44 Speaker C: Go for it, mate. Yeah, go for it, absolutely.

31:47 Mick Liubinskas: All right, cool. So now we're gonna go through the questions that we ask every one of our guests. What do you see as the biggest gaps in the startup ecosystem in Australia today?

31:56 Speaker C: The biggest gaps in Australia's startup ecosystem, I still think, is actually the export focus. So we still— you solve problems around you, and the problem with Australia again is that that often leads to a small market. I look at New Zealand, and they very rarely build for New Zealand. They're much more likely to be global because they're kind of forced to, whereas Australia, we don't have great exporting skills. So I think that's probably the biggest unlock. And combined to that is actually we produce some amazing IP and research and technology, but we are not commercially driven to build that into a business. They're the two elements that I think we would love to keep developing.

32:38 Mick Liubinskas: Do you have thoughts on how we might be able to fix that or improve?

32:43 Speaker C: It looks much harder in COVID. The way we did it with Pollinizer, Mirrody, and Startmate was just get people on planes. Like, you just have to— the amount of times I've taken people massively reluctantly to the US and then have them 2 weeks later be like, "Oh my goodness, why didn't I come here earlier?" So that is harder to do without being able to get— I haven't been to the US for 2 years now. And that's negative, right? Because it helps you go and get to that much significantly bigger market. And for climate tech, Europe is massive because it's significantly more advanced. Asia is a big opportunity for Australia given the proximity. Yeah. But getting on a plane, I think, solves a big part of that. And there are Australian programs, federal and state level, which you can offset your costs. But again, if you can't just get on a plane 'cause of COVID that doesn't really help that. But what we do have now, I think, to your other point, is we have people who've done it. We've had tons of people, whether it's through Atlassian, Canva, Airwallex, and others who have built products in Australia and sold them internationally. So we do now have— Yeah. More than 100 people who've been through that process. So that is definitely a positive. On the commercialization side, it's the pressure. Like, how do we create pressure on the ecosystem so that there's a burning platform to commercialize the research?

34:00 Mick Liubinskas: Mm-hmm. So then you touched before on you think that Australia is a great market for R&D. What else do you think as an ecosystem that we do well, that we do differently, that we do better than other markets?

34:15 Speaker C: Certainly one of the good ones is because of lack of capital, we build businesses that survive downturns and we build organic growth businesses. In the Valley, it's so much easier to raise so much more money that it's just— you can get addicted to capital. So I think building— we do that well, is just build fundamentally good businesses that grow slowly over time. And if we can keep that, I think that's quite good. So, I think that's quite strong. I think when we get it right in terms of the combination, we have strong engineering capabilities. And when that does come packaged with really good commercial entrepreneurship, and that's what you get from someone like Jindal at HappyCo and Christian from Sekona and Alex and Rory from Cecil, that I think that is a great fit. So, yeah, there's definitely those skills. Yeah, if we have our humility and hustle together, that's a great combo.

35:16 Mick Liubinskas: Cool. So next is the A16Z question, the one that they like to ask people when they're interviewing them for roles at the fund. Do you have, you know, tell me one unpopular opinion you have about the startup ecosystem, something that you believe about the Australian startup ecosystem that is not commonly held that other people would disagree with?

35:38 Speaker C: Oh, about the Australian startup ecosystem. Yeah, I've been trying to think about this one. I'm still, I'm a big believer in concentration. I think Australia will not progress internationally on the list of top countries until one city wins over other cities. I have wonderful friends and colleagues and there's amazing businesses that have come out of Brisbane, Hobart, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney. Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong, etc. But until one city becomes massively dominant, I think we will still be fragmented.

36:13 Mick Liubinskas: Okay, well I'm rooting for Hobart and my very good friends down at Biteable.

36:20 Speaker C: You know, I'd be totally in for Hobart and number one. The second point is with climate change, it's going to be much warmer and nicer down in Hobart. So that's a good call. Look, I live in Sydney. Sydney has some momentum, but I don't care where it is. I want to move there. I don't want the pressure to be like, I should move there because that's where it's happening. But at the moment, like— and again, I don't know, combined with the— I know Nicky Shevack from Blackbird has a— you can start them anywhere, and I think that's true. But I think there are benefits of a strong village, and we definitely don't have that yet.

36:55 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, there's the people who go to Fishburners every day and open their laptop and work at their laptop and then go home. And then there are other people who go along to go to all the meetups, Friday night pitch events, hang out in the kitchen and meet new people. And it's those people have less trouble finding team members, finding co-founders, right? It really helps to be a village sometimes.

37:16 Speaker C: I think it does. There's no doubt there's a bunch of amazing entrepreneurs who've sat in garages and never met anybody and just built a good company. But I think the village does help with various stages and for a number of people. Maybe it's just 'cause I'm a massive extrovert, But yeah.

37:31 Mick Liubinskas: So do you think that problem, we get back to solving that problem when lockdown is over, when the pandemic's gone away, I guess? We can set that on the long-term goals. In the meantime, is there something that we could be doing better as a community?

37:46 Speaker C: Where it's come from, I'm still blown away. Like, I really, really wanted to be blown away when I came back from the US and Australia, and I was. Like, just, it's a tiny little thing, but walking past and seeing sign-up t-shirts just constantly, and not just at Lassie and Cam, but I think that's fantastic. I think, what do we need to be doing? I mean, I'd love to find a way to get more people investing in startups and the sophisticated investor rules make that hard. A big shout out to Cheryl Mack for Aussie Angels who I think is doing an amazing job of bringing in a new group of investors and that is something, and I know she's working with a number of people on trying to expand that out. Yeah. And that's, you know, it's just crazy to think that we, what do we spend a billion dollars on the Melbourne Cup, but you can't invest into a climate tech startup that you believe in. So yeah.

38:40 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, absolutely agree there. A hard yes from me. So let's finish up with the advice question. So if a new wannabe founder entrepreneur comes to you, what's the most important piece of advice that you'd wanna make sure you give every single person that you meet the first time you meet them that might help to help increase their chances of success?

39:01 Speaker C: So I'm a big believer in, like I'm well known, but I'm certainly not a massive success. I've done a lot of things. The thing I try to get all mentors to do in all programs, certainly through like Climate Salad, is to ask questions rather than give advice. And so I'll flip that around and say, what question do I ask people? And by far the biggest one is, are you committed to solving this problem? There are startup programs and hackathons where you might meet a team and have an idea and on Sunday you fall in love and want to start a startup. But are you prepared to do 10 years to solve this? And would you solve it even if it meant no financial return? That's the biggest thing I think is the long-term commitment. It's one of the things I really got with the Ripe Robotics team that I invested in last year. Someone's like, "Why don't you raise more money?" We don't need more money, we're going to do it slower. We're just going to do this slowly and I don't care if it takes 10 years, we're going to solve this problem. We're going to help the world harvest fruit better. It's like they're just so committed to solving it that I believe they're going to get through it. So that's my main thing because once you have that commitment, you'll get through almost anything. So that's the first one.

40:13 Mick Liubinskas: Very cool. Thank you, Mick. And one more question just to wrap up. What new developments in the startup industry are you most excited about? That might be a technology or a trend or a sector.

40:24 Speaker C: Well, certainly climate. Like, I think the climate tech as a sector itself, combining clean tech, sustainability, circular economy, energy resources, materials, like the fact that we now have capital coming to this space, we have this amazing opportunity to turn turn this IP and resources into just, into actual real, real businesses is incredible. And such a broad range. So Olivia from Goterra, Yasmin from World's Biggest Garage Sale, again Alex and Rory from Cecil and others, they're just, this is really exciting because it's no longer about philanthropy and environmentalist and save the whales. It's actually good business, which I think is really, really exciting. Yeah. Important. Look, it has to fit into the current model, otherwise we just won't solve it. So that is, is really exciting. But last year was, I think we had good momentum, but it was just a formation year. I think what we really need to see this year is significant progress at all levels. We need R&D turned into products, we need products turned into customers, customers getting to scale. Companies like Vitu and VOW and Fable, like we need those foods to be normal and just get to scale. So, so excited about where climate tech's gonna go this year.

41:46 Mick Liubinskas: Very cool. Everyone, listeners at home or on your walk or your run, I hope this has been an inspiring conversation today. I've been your guest host, Alan Jones, and I've been talking today with Mick Lubinskis, startup industry stalwart there from the very beginning of the startup industry. Industry, happened to find himself in startups and made a career and made a huge difference in the Australian startup ecosystem. You can find out more from him at Climate Salad. Mick, what's the URL again?

42:14 Speaker C: Yeah, climatesalad.com. Drop in, become a member, help climate tech companies grow. And Alan, thanks for your work, mate. Love to chat to you.

42:27 Adam Spencer: I hope you enjoyed that interview. 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.