Peter Bradd discusses the expectation-shattering progress the ecosystem has made

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 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. This episode was conducted by guest host Will Cho.

3:20 Peter Bradd: Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Australian Startup Series interviews. Our guest today is Peter Brad. So good to have you on, Peter.

3:26 Speaker C: Thanks for having me.

3:27 Peter Bradd: Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you're working on?

3:30 Speaker C: Yeah, so my name's Peter Brad. I'm probably best known for my roles in Fishburners and Startup Oz. I was the founding director and the initial CEO of Fishburners from probably 2011 And then Startup Hours we did in 2013, which is now the Australian Tech Council, or has been merged into the Australian Tech Council. I also am a startup founder, so I founded quite a few companies. My first was a service we did with Qantas allowing their customers to turn photos into real postcards printed and posted in 24 hours. We did that in 2007 before the iPhone hit Australia, so that was pretty interesting. Right now I'm working on kind of corporate transformation, digital transformation, corporate transformation, growth, venture building. So keen to talk to you about that as well.

4:20 Peter Bradd: I'd love to take the audience back to when you first got involved in the ecosystem, Peter. Have you— would you say that you've always been an entrepreneur, even back towards university days?

4:31 Speaker C: Even before that. I mean, I've spoken about this a lot. in different interviews. But, you know, my, my parents both work for the government. Uh, I learned around being an entrepreneur really from jobs that I had when I was a teenager, you know, even from starting my own little car washing business where you go around and wash your neighbors' cars or mow their lawns, to working in small businesses like the Video Easy store, um, or the, you know, local, um, you know, milk bar. I did a lot of those kind of jobs, the Costy Seafood. And I, I learned around the difference between being, you know, an employee and the owner of the business, even though they were, you know, small medium-sized businesses and that I really liked the vision that the entrepreneurs had when they were founding their business. And I quickly learned that I was, you know, if you wanted to make a difference and have time, you know, have time back, not just be on the wheel all the time, you need to be the owner. So that's sort of where I got that from. And probably around the age of 15, I started working pretty early, so maybe even 13 onwards to 18. I sort of had that. In university, I think with technology where I got interested in, it was probably 2000 and I don't remember the exact year, but say 2002, 2003. I worked for a stockbroking company called Shore Stockbroking, and I worked on their, uh, they'd done a kind of corporate spin-out called Agoli, which was a website that it was kind of an ad-funded model where they would publish, uh, news about companies. So I, you know, public companies. And so I was a, I wouldn't say a journalist, but like a, you'd get the, um, get the reports off off the system and you'd rewrite the stories and publish them. And I learned, you know, in that business I had to learn how to code. I did agricultural economics at uni, so I didn't learn how to code at uni. So I learned how to do front-end coding in that, in that job. And I think that just kind of gave me the confidence to get into, you know, being a technology entrepreneur. In terms of my first business, I launched a company called ScribblePix in 2007, and we partnered with Qantas. We were Australia's, like Qantas's first non-core kind of travel partner. They'd never done anything like this before. And I was pretty much straight out of university and hadn't done anything like this before either. So, you know, I learned a lot from that business in, you know, 2007. I spent a lot of my time on it probably until maybe 2011, 2012 when we did Fishpanners. So that was sort of my first understanding of the startup ecosystem was as a founder. In ScribblePix, and there was just a lot of change, you know, with the iPhone and the advent of, you know, apps and every, you know, all of that. And I needed to be around other entrepreneurs, and so when I heard of Pete Davidson and Mike Casey creating this coworking space called Fishburners, you know, I did everything to get in there. And then also that kind of led me to my passion around helping, you know, helping create Fishburners.

7:17 Peter Bradd: Sounds like a very classic entrepreneurial story. You're dissatisfied with the status quo, you didn't like being an employee, wanted to become a founder, and then once you found an opportunity, and for you it was working in a stock breaking company in technology, you decided to capitalize on it.

7:33 Speaker C: Yeah, well, it's, I think that gave me the confidence, just having some exposure to learning how to code gave me the confidence that it wasn't that difficult. My sales background really helped, and so I again, jobs at university, uh, did a couple of sales jobs, actually worked for Cruel Price in his previous business. Uh, he was selling life insurance over the phone, and I had some really great training in how to, you know, how to sell to consumers over the phone from his business. Um, he mainly hired backpackers. I was probably one of the only non-backpackers that worked for him, but I learned a lot around sales. And so that helped also, you know, in my strategy around with ScribblePix, bringing on channel partners like Qantas, TripAdvisor, Expedia. the Hilton, and then even ishburners in being able to bring on big brands like Optus, News Corp to help fund our goals. So I think the combination of kind of confidence around technology, but also confidence around sales from some of the early jobs I had really helped sort of set me up for success.

8:31 Peter Bradd: Yeah, absolutely. What was it like starting your first business, ScribblePix? Before creating it, did you have any notions on what it would be like to run your own business and after creating it? Was it the same?

8:42 Speaker C: I think probably the biggest moment for me was knowing what kind of business I was running. With ScribblePix, I was, you know, I was a sales— my background had been in sales, you know, from an employee perspective. And so I was focused on doing deals and, you know, bringing in revenue. And so, you know, we did a partnership with Qantas, but we still needed to build the technology. And I was looking at raising funds and partnering with a, you know, a firm that could help me do that. But their quotes were just through the roof, you know, $200 grand, $300 grand to build a, you know, build an app. And this is going back to, say, 2007. And I met a very successful Australian entrepreneur, a guy called Greg Johnson, and he said to me, you're running a technology company, you can't outsource your business, you know, you need to do this yourself. And so we had a, you know, we had dinner at his place, then he flew off to Spain. And again, I've spoken about this quite a lot, but he created the website that this company said that they would spend, you know, $200,000 creating. He created the, you know, an MVP in today's language on that plane flight to Spain. And when he landed 24 hours later, he sent me a link to a, you know, an app that could do exactly what we needed it to do. And that's the MVP that we gave to Qantas. And so I learned a lot around what my business was. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs need to learn that lesson. Uh, it's, you know, it's very hard, you know, coming into a startup without a lot of experience, or you have the experience you have, but as a founder, you need so much experience. And, you know, finding the team that can help you. And for me, that was, you know, Greg Johnson and another partner, Elliot Cousins, that helped me. So that was, I suppose, a really key moment for me. And I still pass that lesson on to many other entrepreneurs that are— you do what you can do with your experience, but you really need to know what kind of business you're in and make sure you've got a good team around you who can excel in that business. You can't outsource your main function.

10:36 Peter Bradd: Yeah. Did you engage much with the startup ecosystem? So like funding or accelerator programs back then?

10:43 Speaker C: To be honest, and this is interesting because everyone has their own version of events and I've listened to a couple of your other, you know, in the series and it's interesting. I'm probably learning a lot more about their perspective as to what happened as you go back to, you know, 2000 and, you know, I kind of got more involved in 2011 onwards. But people that had been around before that. I didn't think there was anything available, you know, and most of the people that came into Fishburners in 2011 also didn't think there was anything available. And I'm probably in the media quoted for saying that, you know, Fishburners was one of Australia's first coworking spaces. And, you know, there were others, um, you know, with hindsight now that you, you know, you look, but you only know what's available to you. And a key, a key moment for me became when Stone and Chalk launched, and they launched fintech. You know, I don't think we had any entrepreneurs at Fishburners that identified as being a fintech. But quite quickly, Stone and Chalk was filled up with fintechs. And there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are out there in the ecosystem that are doing things. And I think Pete Davidson spoke about this in his series, you know, they're kind of quiet. They don't need to be a part of the community, or perhaps they don't know that it exists, but they're doing great things where they are. For me, that was kind of what I was doing with my business, ScribblePix, at the time. I didn't know what what was available. And because of that, I probably moved a lot slower than I needed to or could have because I didn't have other people around me to learn from, to tap into, to get advice from, all the benefits that you get from being a part of a program, whether it's, you know, a company like Fishburners or accelerator programs or other, you know, community-based programs. Um, if you're, you know, at home by yourself, your knowledge is limited to what you know. Your luck is limited to like who you can kind of run into. So I think for me, you know, '27 to 2010 was probably pretty limited in terms of what I actually thought the startup ecosystem was. And I think that probably is fairly similar to other people at the time.

12:34 Peter Bradd: Yeah, I'm curious to dig into this more because when you said that you were sort of just in your own corner building ScribblePix and not really engaging with the ecosystem, Why? Is it because, um, you didn't know it was out there, or is it just like some other reason you didn't need to?

12:53 Speaker C: Um, no, I certainly needed to, which is why I put my heart and soul into Fishburners. But I just didn't know that it was out there, and I didn't think that— I actually don't think there was a lot, you know. I still would have to go back to finding out, you know. Hamish Hawthorne had ATP Innovations, and, um, you know, Pollinizer was around, and, you know, Kim Harris with Push Start was sort of getting going, and there was a meetup at the a hotel in the city, you know, that happened. And, you know, Sydney Angels was around, so there was stuff in Sydney going on. I just wasn't really aware of it, and it wasn't in the media. And, you know, one of the questions you've asked other guests is sort of around this 2012 milestone. And for me, I think what happened then— and I can talk a little bit more about it— was just a lot more transparency, a lot more visibility, both in physical working spaces like Fishburners and then other places like WeWork. And, you know, there's fishburner equivalents all around Australia. So you had that. You also had a lot more media. The media became really interested in it. And so, you know, that happened. And so before 2011, there just wasn't a lot of visibility as to what was going on. It wasn't in the media. We didn't have, you know, websites like Startup Daily or, you know, the mainstream media wasn't really talking about it. And so there's, you know, over the last 8 years from you know, 2012 onwards, there's been a huge shift in transparency and even programs in like university. You can do, you can study this stuff now. You know, when I went to uni, it wasn't available to you. So I think just the visibility shifted. Yeah.

14:28 Peter Bradd: Do you think that's a good or bad thing?

14:29 Speaker C: I think it's amazing because I think being an entrepreneur is an amazing thing to do. Not everyone should be an entrepreneur and people should probably work, you know, are more suited to working in startups rather than being the founder. Um, you know, I'm a, you know, I'm a founder, so that sort of suits my, my personality, but it's certainly not, not for everyone. I think we need more people being founders and solving, you know, solving real problems. I think it's good for, for them as individuals, and I think it's good for the economy and for Australia. So I certainly think it's a brilliant thing. And it's interesting that I think that's probably pretty, pretty pretty common. I know, um, uh, you know, Murray Herbst at UTS, uh, one of his latest sort of ventures is, is the visibility on, uh, the corner of, um, you know, a very high-profile street near UTS, uh, just trying to increase the visibility. So I think it's probably pretty, pretty similar to people that have seen, seen the visibility. If you don't have it, you don't know it's possible. And if you don't know it's possible, then it's not even really an option for you. You know, when I used to lobby, like with Startup Oz, I used to go down to Canberra and anyone in politics would know this. They've got these things called Friends of Innovation or Friends of Something and there's a million of them, but they had one spun up for Friends of Innovation. And so I went and spoke there and one of the audience members got quite upset. He's like, how dare you stand up there and encourage my kids, you know, who work at CBA or PwC to quit their jobs and to found companies when, you know, 9 out of 10 of them fail. And I said, my view is that if it was to fail, they will go back into PwC or CBA. If they wanted to, they'd probably end up in another startup or founding another business. But if they did want to go back and do their corporate jobs, they'd go back, you know, 3, 4 years ahead of where they would be able to get to if they hadn't have done that. So I'm, you know, I still sort of stand by encouraging people to give it a go. Uh, and particularly, you know, when you're younger, you've got a lot more freedom and flexibility to do that, and you just learn so much. It's, uh, it's a great life experience.

16:29 Peter Bradd: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Um, you actually front-run a question that came to my mind when, when you first started talking about this, because I was thinking in my head when you said that not everyone can be an entrepreneur, that was interesting. But then you also said that you advocated transparency and encouraging everyone to get involved in the startup ecosystem. So in my mind, that was like a little bit of a contradiction. But then you answered it by saying that the risk of a business failing is not as bad as it can seem because even if you worked at PwC, you would never have learned as much as if you failed your first business. That's why you can encourage everyone to get into it.

17:04 Speaker C: Yeah, well, I mean, it's just a journey. You know, we're all on our own journeys and our own paths, and I really believe in having experiences. And, you know, a lot of people talk about travel as an, you know, invaluable experience. I think founding a company or working for, you know, different companies is really valuable, whether it's working for startups, founding your own startup, working for small business, or, you know, working in large companies. I think they're all valuable experiences, and you learn different things from all of those experiences. And I think that gives you, you know, more pathways and more options in the future, but it also helps you work out what you love. And, you know, the more experiences you have, the better chance you have of doing something that you love.

17:43 Peter Bradd: Yeah. Is there anything that you see in today's ecosystem that we could still improve on for our future entrepreneurs and current?

17:51 Speaker C: Well, I think it's really important to sort of maybe just go back to what it was like in 2011 and 2012, you know. So in terms of like the timeline, Fishburners, which is a co-working space, and I was one of the founding directors and the initial CEO of, we registered the ABN for Fishburners in September 2011, and we launched our website a little bit earlier, March 2011. And essentially With StartupAus, we came together probably in late 2012, early 2013. And again, we launched StartupAus in 2013. And at the time that we launched StartupAus, Google was one of the big contributors to that. Alan Noble and Nancy-Elleann Williams were at Google and they're sort of pioneers behind that. They leveraged PwC to write a report, which is available online. I think it's actually even on Malcolm Turnbull's website. In that report, the headline statement was, The Australian tech startup sector has the potential to contribute $109 billion or 4% of GDP to the Australian economy.

18:51 Peter Bradd: Wow.

18:52 Speaker C: And 540,000 jobs by 2033. Right now it's only 2022, so this is, you know, 10, 10 years away. The Australian Tech Council, which we launched I think late last year from memory— so that's the, you know, Startup Oz we found formed in 2013, uh, and we've now sort of formed the Australian Tech Council. Their report when they launched, uh, so this is in 2021, so only 8 years between these two reports. They, they say, they report the Australian tech sector has become a critical part of the economy, contributing $167 billion to GDP, which is 8.5% of GDP. And they're predicting it could employ over a million Australians by 2025, not 2033. And so I remember being around when that PwC report was written, and, you know, I was the CEO of StartupOps, and I was talking to media about it, and this is the figure that we would, you know, get on Sky News and I'd talk about the potential. And if you look at the potential of 4% versus 8%, $109 billion versus $167 billion, I just think it's been an outstanding, like, amazing success story of what we've been able to do. Now the reports do have different authors' assumptions, definitions, and in 2013 Startup Oz we focused on tech startups with revenue under $5 million.. And now the Australian Tech Council talks about the tech sector as it's grown. So it's certainly not an apples with apples comparison, but it does tell the story to me of the maturity of the tech sector and its contribution to Australia. And unfortunately, you know, as we were building up, and I really love that you guys are doing this, but as we were building the startup ecosystem, I don't think a lot of that was sort of captured. And you can capture it by going back through reports, but I think just the outstanding success of the Australian tech startup ecosystem is huge. You know, the Australian tech sector is the equivalent of the third largest industry behind mining and banking, right? Yeah.

20:42 Peter Bradd: What would you say were the key drivers of that, like, stunning growth?

20:46 Speaker C: Well, everyone talks about different things from their kind of perspective. My perspective is a community perspective, right? I'm a community person. Fishburners is a community. And I, I think, um, you know, you go to many companies and you'll see it, you know, the hockey stick growth moment. And the startup ecosystem has had one of those sort of hockey stick growth moments. Like, Airbnb is a good example. They talk about their hockey stick growth moment is when they decided to go out and start taking professional photos of people's, you know, houses. That was something in their, in their journey that, uh, transformed their model. For us, I think visibility. So you spoke about visibility before. I think visibility really is one of the key things that transformed. And with Fishburners, we had, you know, we started off with one level in, um, 208 Harris at the very top, uh, and we were lucky enough to run into three very, I suppose, pioneering people at Optus, Peter Alfred and Rebecca, who decided not to replicate or create their own thing, but to partner with the community. And they agreed to give us $100 grand, which was enough for us to pay the rent on a second level. And what I did as CEO of Fishburners at the time was I created a platform for events. And at the time, if you wanted to go to an event in the tech startup ecosystem, you basically had to go to a pub.

21:59 Adam Spencer: Mm-hmm.

22:00 Speaker C: It was pretty noisy, you know, it was full of alcohol and it was hard to hear the speakers. And so what we did was we put on level 1 of Fishburners to become basically a platform, and I encouraged all those people that were running tech meetups to come and run them at Fishburners for free. And that enabled— I think it was brand, it was easy, the quality of the events went up significantly. The membership of Fishburners, you know, you'd always get 20 or 30 people from Fishburners coming, so there was always a crowd at the events. And that I think significantly changed the startup ecosystem in the East, and there are many other equivalents all around Australia. But visibility is really important. People would come and all of a sudden they realized that if they wanted to quit their job, if they wanted to give it a go, there was a community that they could join. There were people that would help them. There was infrastructure around them. If you're trying to do that from your bedroom in, you know, wherever your bedroom is, it's really daunting.

22:53 Adam Spencer: Yeah.

22:53 Speaker C: And you're less likely to give it a go. And so that was some of the main driving forces between Startup Oz advocating for places like the Sydney Startup Hub or now Tech Central was to create that density that you'll hear people talk about. Hamish Hawthorne and others will talk about density being important. It creates the density and it also creates serendipity. It gives you the opportunity to run into people. So be they investors or staff members or accountants, people that can kind of help you along your journey. Yeah. It's really hard to do that again from your bedroom and to have that luck when you're at home. So I think for me, part of the drive was visibility. And that wasn't just from Fishburners, that was also the media getting more involved, politicians getting more involved, Malcolm Turnbull launching the innovation statement in 2015. A lot more startups became successful and you'll hear people talk about the PayPal Mafia and what's happening. In the Australian ecosystem as, you know, wealthy, you know, people that have either founded companies or have worked for companies that have been successful and now reinvesting into the startup ecosystem. You're starting to see that flywheel kick off. So I just think we're just at the start of something, you know, great. It's been a lot of hard work, but I think the next 10 years is going to significantly increase.

24:15 Peter Bradd: One of the things that came to my mind when you mentioned density is regional ecosystem. Do you think regional ecosystem has has given the attention that they deserve?

24:27 Speaker C: It's a hard question to answer. My view, and, you know, we had this discussion with quite a lot of people, and it kind of launched like Startup Aus was an Australian-based organization. It was even in our name and it was in our DNA. And we had directors from, you know, tried to get directors from every state to represent. And then we had, say, Tech Sydney, who wanted Sydney to be the startup hub, and they weren't as interested in what was going on in, uh, you know, Melbourne or Victoria. Um, I'm not really interested in that kind of, you know, local level kind of competition. I think what regional— what any, any location has is it has the ability to influence what's around it, the business that is around it. Uh, and if you're in, you know, regional, there's all these amazing opportunities to innovate. And I, you know, Pete Davidson on, on his series spoke about, you know, innovation in some of Australia's strengths. And I think that regional regional focus, people in the region should be focusing, I mean, focus on what you're passionate about, but if you're passionate about stuff in the regions, you can solve some really amazing problems that our businesses in the regions are having. And I think Davidson spoke around adoption being really important. And I think, again, having people with high technical literacy and championing these local solutions will really help our— Yeah. Our economy out there to be more productive, more to grow. So I think it's really important. It's certainly hard, but less hard today with, I suppose, a lot more people have become a lot more used to running events online. And so I think COVID or the pandemic's probably really helped the regions. Most events these days are run online. And so where previously they weren't, you know, they won't run online, they weren't recorded. You're going to have to turn up in person or you miss them. So I think that's been a major, you know, major benefit. The other thing with startup communities, you know, Brad Feld talks about this, who wrote a book. He wrote a book called The Startup Community. Brad Feld's a US, well-known US person, and he says there's 4 things for startup communities to be important. And I think, um, you know, this, this needs to happen in the regions too, right? So leaders must have a long-term, long-term commitment. And many of the people you've interviewed on this series have been around for longer than I have in the tech startup ecosystem and are still involved, you know. And the startup ecosystem must be inclusive of anyone who wants to participate in it. Uh, the startup community must have continual activities that engage the entire entrepreneurial stack. And so there, there's some of the, um, the points, uh, that he talks about in his book Startup Communities. And I think if you were to try and replicate that in the regions, you need to be tapping into those, to those things. I certainly think they've, they've rung true from what I've been able to witness over the last decade. And it's really tough, right? So with Startup Aus, a lot of— and Fishburners and a lot of the community-based events, you know, it's done on commitment. So he says, you know, the leaders must have a long-term commitment. Many of the people that committed to building the startup ecosystem in Australia, they did it for free. You know, I volunteered for 2 years with Fishburners, or they did with wages at a discount. They could certainly earn a lot more money working in corporate Australia. It's hard. It's certainly rewarding, but people were investing years of their lives, you know, and I can rattle off hundreds of people that have invested a lot of their time in the startup ecosystem because they were passionate about it. And so again, you need that kind of commitment and passion if you were to try and do something in the regions, you know, similar commitment and passion, which is there. So I think that's probably some key thoughts on the regions.

27:53 Peter Bradd: Yeah, absolutely. Could you name a couple of those volunteers that have helped, you know, drive the Australian ecosystem to where it is today?

28:01 Speaker C: Yeah, well, there's— I mean, there's just too many to name, so I'll name some people that I think have been important on my journey. And so, you know, with Fishburners, we had Pete Davidson and Mike Casey were really important, but there were others, you know, original directors Matt Cameron, David Vandenberg. There were lots of people that were involved in Fishburners that contributed to the community. Brett Fox is a really good example of somebody. Tandora Shelley, who was, uh, you know, came in as a university student into Fishburners. She worked with Fishburners for a very, very long time and became CEO of Fishburners before she moved to the States. She contributed a huge amount of time to the startup ecosystem and probably isn't well known or, you know, called upon, which I think is you know, something that Australia needs to become, you know, better at doing. With Startup Aus, uh, you know, again, there was, you know, just so many people involved. Uh, there was 50 people that started, uh, Startup Aus in, you know, the first community event. Um, Bill Barty, Alan Noble, and myself put our hands up to be founding directors, and I put my hand up to be the initial CEO. But there were, you know, tons of people involved. I suppose Sally-Anne Williams is probably somebody that was heavily involved, you know, more than most people. But again, uh, probably didn't get, you know, credit or alike for it. Also, you've got, you know, stepping away from those people, you've got all the media that were, you know, involved, all the, you know, the journalists that are writing and about, about startups and what we're doing in communities. Um, you've got all the people that are supporting the ecosystem. So, you know, people talk about the, the, you know, the leaders and feeders in startup ecosystems, so people that have dedicated their entire businesses to supporting startups. So, you know, I met Shah at Startup um, sort of startup accounting, uh, people like that. Um, there's just been, been, I mean, too many, too many to count. And I think one of the not tragic things, but, you know, I've learned a lot from listening to this series of people that have been along the journey, but they've seen it from different perspectives. Um, I think it would be, you know, it's really, really great that you guys again are doing this because I've certainly, certainly learned a lot from hearing different people's, you know, similar timeline, but what was their view on what was going on. I think it's really, really important. And, you know, I could talk for half an hour just listing people that have been involved in the tech startup ecosystem. And I've only really spoken about Sydney. There's, you know, there's people all over Australia that did the equivalent thing.

30:25 Peter Bradd: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Listening to all the stories is absolutely awe-inspiring. It makes you realize that there's a lot more depth than you initially thought. It's sort of that, you know, iceberg analogy where you thought that you knew a little bit, but then there's a whole huge part that you didn't really explore. That was for me anyway, listening to the stories.

30:43 Speaker C: Yeah, and I mean, I think one of the most interesting things is just people have very different perspectives and it's sort of like your view on truth.

30:49 Peter Bradd: Yeah.

30:50 Speaker C: Everyone saw what was going on from their own perspective. And even if you were to ask, you know, 10 people about the history of Fishburners, we'd probably all give you different stories, you know, based on what was important to us at the time or, you know, what we saw. And I, you know, I think it's really important to get those stories so that you can start to, to understand and again help accelerate the ecosystems. You know, if we can codify it, it can be, you know, replicated or learnt from. And that's one of the main things I think this, this podcast is really helping, helping people to, to learn how communities are created. Because there was no, you know, when I started Fishburne as a, as initial CEO, I didn't do a course on how to run a co-working space. I didn't do a course on community management. When I was the initial CEO of the startup Oz, I'd never done any work in running, you know, a political lobbying business. You know, I didn't know any of that. We just sort of had to learn it, and it was people around us, the teams, that kind of taught us, and we kind of worked it out together. But if we can codify it, and, you know, it can be now— there's many books have been written on it, many people have studied it— you can learn and replicate, which I think will just, you know, speed things up again.

31:57 Peter Bradd: Yeah, definitely. So, Peter, As you know, what we're trying to do in the series is just document as accurately as possible the history of our ecosystem. And we're aiming to reach all corners from policymakers, academics, founders, investors. Is there anything that we haven't spoken about today that you believe that they need to hear?

32:15 Speaker C: I'm really interested in venture building. So Kim Harris, you know, 2015, they're probably the, you know, one of the ones in Australia that have tried to do something in venture building. Many people don't know about it, and I think it's going to be the future of many successful businesses. In 2019, Kim Harris, who runs— he was one of the directors at Fishburners with me, but he also was involved in Push Start and now 2015. He wrote an article saying that studios in Australia just aren't prominent for 3 reasons. One was lack of experienced founders, which I think we're really overcoming. Lack of funding, which again, I think we're really overcoming. And then lack of sophisticated kind of exits. He talked about that. Acquisitive tech M&A, which again, I think we're, uh, we're overcoming. And so I think the time has probably come for, for studios, um, both from a startup perspective but even a corporate, corporate growth perspective, you know. So where we're at now is the, the average— like, the predicted average tenure of an S&P 500 company is 12 years by 2027. Um, the average age of a unicorn, you know, billion-dollar business, privately held business, 6 years. Right? Um, traditional growth engines— M&A— it's expensive, right? And it fails 70 to 90% of the time, depending on, you know, which reports you read. Only 5% of R&D makes it to market. And so if you look at the VC index— and the Australian VC index seems to be producing better returns than some of the global indices— but the past 20 years, VC has produced the same or lower returns than investing in the S&P 500, right? And so, um, globally there's— we— I've been able to identify over 180 ventures, you know, over Venture Builders in over 25 countries, and we just don't have them in Australia. And so I think that's probably part of the both corporate strategy around corporate growth, uh, and Commonwealth Bank's tried to do that with their X15, uh, and, uh, startups. I think more and more founders are going to join Venture Builders versus trying to build startups, you know, by themselves. There's a really interesting quote, um, from a guy called Alex Chung, uh, who founded a company called Giphy, which they sold to Facebook for $400 million. Alex was a founder of a company that was very successful. He sold his first company to Google. He then joined Betaworks as a founder in a startup studio. And he kind of, one of the quotes I think is really interesting. He said, "The incubator model is old." He went through Y Combinator and he was a founder in one of those programs and exited his business to Google. But he said, "You become so invested in one idea, you put all your energy into recruiting and fundraising for that dream without really knowing if it works." And when he was at his studio works, he had the freedom to experiment and throw ideas away. And then, you know, when he finally found one that was getting traction, the studio model is to help you build teams and get capital. That's kind of one of the things they solve for. You know, when he was doing that, he had 3 ideas that he was executing in parallel, and Giphy was the one that got up. The other 2 kind of fell by the wayside. And I think for a lot of founders, they are doing what Alex spoke about. They're becoming so invested in one idea, they're pouring all of their energy and into recruiting and fundraising for that idea, whether it's the right idea or not. And I think studios give you the freedom to participate and lower the risks. So I think that's something that, you know, I'm certainly putting my attention to in the future. And I think we'll see, you know, if we look 5 years— in 5 years' time, I would, I would predict that we'll have a, you know, a couple of unicorns coming out of Australian-based studios. , you know, in a couple years' time.

35:44 Peter Bradd: Yeah, just in layman's terms, would you be able to explain what venture building or these studios are and how it differs from the traditional incubator model?

35:52 Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So if you want to learn more about it, the best place to learn about it is the Global Startup Studio Network. If you want to Google that, GSSN. The venture builder, they're also called startup studios, factories, venture company builders, venture studios, foundries. What they are is they're a company that build several companies, and they're using systematic, well-tested methods to do so. And the reason they're doing that is they want to increase return and they want to reduce risk. Now, they reduce risk through venture architects. So there's a team that operates in the studio, you know, the big consultancy firms— McKinsey, Bain— they're always advertising for them. BCG. Um, they're people that are really great at identifying ideas and validating those ideas, doing the kind of DD almost before you've even started building your founding team. You know, they're looking at the market size, business model viability, market dynamics. The second part that they solve for is execution excellence. So that's talent. So these studios have, you know, people like me with big networks and others, you know, founders. They're able to attract really amazing talent. They've also got capital. So most studios have— a venture studio will have a venture capital fund associated with it which backs their businesses. So instead of a founder going out and trying to raise capital and spending a lot of time, money, effort raising capital, that's sort of solved for. Uh, the third is the playbook. They've, you know, obviously they're using a systematic, well-tested method to do that. Uh, and then, you know, as a, as a business, they're learning how to do that better themselves. Uh, and finally, it's probably just the investment theory, which is, you know, common to VC, but it's diversified portfolio, uh, incremental funding and the ability to follow on in successful ventures. So they're kind of the key things to a venture builder. And the types of entrepreneurs they attract is generally like second-time founders, whether they were, you know, depending on the definition of success, but whether they were wildly successful or, you know, they didn't have the exit they wanted to have, or perhaps they closed it down. You generally get second-time founders that know how difficult it is to found a business, wanting to do it with a, you know, with a group of people around them. You know, their exit is lower than what it might be if they were to try and do it themselves, but the probability that they're going to have build something impactful and the associated benefits of that significantly increased.

38:03 Peter Bradd: Yeah, that's amazing.

38:05 Speaker C: There are some good examples, right? So like Dollar Shave Club is an example, right? They sold their business to Unilever for a billion bucks. You've also got Snowflake who did an IPO for $1.4 billion. They're venture builder-based businesses who, you know, the ideas are founded, you know, backed through these venture studios. So there, I mean, there's, as I said, there's 180 of them I could find globally. There's probably more, and they're creating billion-dollar businesses. eFounders, you know, recently had a billion-dollar business. We talk about billion dollars because that's sort of, you know, unicorn thing that people want to get to. So it's just, I mean, there's so many examples, and I just think in Australia, again, it's the visibility. We just don't have them here. People aren't really looking at them. So that's something I'm, yeah, again focusing on.

38:54 Peter Bradd: Lastly, Peter, if a brand new entrepreneur or founder came to you and given all your wins, mistakes, and experience, what would you tell them to increase their chances of success?

39:03 Speaker C: Join a co-work space. Go into Fishburners or, you know, something equivalent and learn from people around you. I think, I think you want to learn how to learn faster and being in a space like a co-work working space, not only do they have other people that you can talk to and learn from, they've got a whole heap of events, but even, you know, lunchtime, they run events all the time. I don't know how many Fishburners do, but, you know, they could be running 1,000 events a year, multiple per day. So you get all this amazing education and knowledge that you, you need to be successful. It's also serendipity. You'll run into people that you won't run into if you're, you're not in places like that. So getting into the Sydney Startup Hub or TechCentral or your equivalent depending where you are in the world. I think, you know, the number one tip that I could give is to join one of those spaces with the view on learning how to learn faster and learning faster, just getting more experience and learning from other people.

39:56 Peter Bradd: It's been so good to have you on the show today, Peter. Thank you so much.

39:59 Speaker C: Thanks for having me. It's been, been a pleasure.

40:06 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.