What made Australian startups different from American ones?

“Yeah, it's a very good question. It slowly crept up. There were more founders that were interested in creating a startup. There was a Campaign Monitor was building and lots of other companies. They were partly getting funding from Australian companies, but also from the US. In 2006, it was impossible to get a US company to invest in you in Australia. By that time, and I do think it's probably partly because of the Atlassian success, by that time, companies in the US, investors in the US were looking to also invest in Australian companies. So money was flowing in. I believe the setup of the super funds were starting to actually look towards investing into startups. And so there was money coming to the VCs through super funds. That was starting to happen. There were a number of, in what I would call, experienced startup founders. So people that had gone during the dot-com to the US and maybe after that and had experience in the US, had built companies in the US and then came to Australia. And became investors in Australia. And that also started changing things. There were people starting to build co-working spaces. It just all seemed to start to happen. And all of these pieces started to come together to really make it a vibrant ecosystem.”

“Yeah, I think the biggest difference that I noticed between Australia and the US is everybody says Australians are laid back, which I didn't really appreciate until living in the US to have that contrast. The US in particular is fantastic at connections and networking, and you can bump into somebody that you've never met before at a coffee shop, and they'll want to introduce you to 3 people that can help your startup. We don't quite have that here in Australia yet. I think it's definitely moving a lot more in that direction, but not at the level of the US. And the other thing I see in the US as well is more more movement between the sectors. So people spinning something out of a university, cycling back in, just more free flow of people, I think.”