1. It’s hard for one person to comply with all the regulations and paperwork as well as run their business

2. Our conservative federal government has cut funding to universities by a huge amount in the last 10 years

3. Fewer people each year are studying IT at university because a lot of the IT jobs in big companies have been downsized or outsourced overseas and people don’t see the possibilities for a stable income

4. A lot of Australians setup small businesses but the vast majority of these are “old school” type good/services businesses, not dealing in bit and bytes.

5. Our government and large businesses often award IT projects to overseas companies even when a local company could have done the job better and at less cost and as a result of that and hardware imports we have a huge ICT trade deficit

Joey has been pontificating http://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/5/24/1981829.html

The culture of risk. The combination of rich people and nerds. I think Aussies are really similar to Canadians.

I’m not sure I want to live in Silicon Valley, but I do want a vibrant open creative community. And this requires a lot.

No idea what it means. I guess some sort of proximity to the US and Silicon Valley, SFO in particular may have something to do with it. But I do think it casts a bit of a harsh light on what we have going on here in Australia.

scientaestubique on 26/02/07 at 11:35 am

“… While there are many conferences running, many of them are high cost..”

I definitely agree with this — there are a lot of industry events (breakfasts with key people in the industry) etc, but at around $150 a pop, these don’t come cheap for a student (or some boot-strapped start-ups for that matter :) )

Cheers,

M

We have some really bright ideas down here, good networking between people, and a unique coding/usability aspect and culture that stands us apart from the US/UK.

As the founder of atmail.com based locally, we have experienced some fantastic export success for our software solutions, and encourage other startups to take the plunge, keep your idea simple and lean, and FOCUS!

Remember, its not the idea, its the execution. Take a leaf out of the US marketing book for that one …

For those people who are not currently connected to the startup community here in Australia, there aren’t any large signposts pointing somewhere for people they can look to for guidance, or at least exchange war stories with.

Stronger ties with universities, community groups and the public will raise the profiles of current Aussie startups and help those kids in high school find a path for their next cool thing.

Great challenge, I talked a bit about starting up Minti and also the challenges of fund raising on a podcast with the 2WebCrew shortly after we first launched. It’s long but deals with a number of your questions: http://2webcrew.thepodcastnetwork.com/2006/04/28/2web-crew-007-matthew-macfarlane-from-minti/

A key point I would mention is the difficulty in getting access to capital pre-launch. Generally the VC’s we talked to had a very very hard-nosed approach to the business and stated that “targets would be set and if they are not met then a professional management team would replace the founders” — the Web 2.0 world is not about setting targets, its about being flexible and dancing to the latest tune that will bring you revenues or more value creation. For example we recently launched a whole suite of photo tagging and ranking functions on Minti.

Minti/Vibe has changed dramatically in it’s focus since launch and we are now actively negotiating software licenses (nope that was not in our pitch to the VCs) and also launching new verticals from our parent company Vibe Capital (that was a one line bullet point in our initial pitch).

Minti is not currently generating substantial revenues but that is a tap we can turn on when we choose. There are no other parenting sites on the web with as few ads as we operate on. Meanwhile our content base is growing wonderfully with over 3,800 parenting articles there is something there for any parent and we are larger than most of the big US players in terms of content depth.

Australia is an awesome place to live and well founded web based businesses give you a choice in base location, although I dare say we may have missed a few funding opportunities compared to if we lived in the valley but we are doing very well in terms of funding and now have a lot of interest in the site due to our focus on execution of the vision.

All the best
Matt — Minti/Vibe Capital Co-founder