A few weeks back I posted here asking “Where are the Aussie Startups?”

There were quite a few who posted comments, or responses at their blogs, who argued that the startup culture was pretty healthy, but others, particularly in offline conversations, who generally felt that we just don’t have this kind of culture here. I must say that remains my general conviction. While it might be a bit much to expect us to have the kind of culture you find in San Francisco and Silicon (“The”) Valley, I feel we really do punch below our weight as a tech savvy, educated, highly connected society. We innovate, and buy into innovation in a big way. But with a few notable exceptions, we just aren’t making a splash in the “web 2.0” world.

The reason I am writing about this again is twofold. As Web Directions co-founder, Maxine Sherrin commented this morning after reading Tara Hunt’s recent post on the Canadian startup scene (read it to get a sense of the scope and number of startups in a country with only a slightly larger population than Australia) “I do think it casts a bit of a harsh light on what we have going on here in Australia”.

But the second motivation for this post is to point out something we are looking to try and do about this.

At Web Directions this year, one of our focusses will be startups - both showcasing what Aussie startups are doing, and also helping in practical terms develop a startup culture here in Australia.
To this end, one of our full day workshops in the days before Web Directions will be a kind of “startup bootcamp”. We’ll be covering all the fundamental things you need to know about, the legal issues, financing options, success (and failure) stories, and much more. Each session will be presented by an expert in the field or experienced entrepreneurs. There’ll be plenty of chance to network, pick people’s brains, swap stories, and it’s definitely the kind of thing I would have killed for nearly 15 years ago when we were starting out with Westciv - other entrepreneurs I’ve spoken with have said similar things too.
So whether you have a startup, are thinking about it, are working late night on some killer ideas, keep it in mind. Just one of the many things happening in late September in Sydney with Web Directions.

[tags]web directions, wds07, startups, Australia[/tags]