Picture taken from cebit.com.au
I made a trip down to Sydney last week and met up briefly with Kim Heras, the co-founder Of PushStart and former editor of The Next Web Australia, to understand a little about what is going on in the Australian startup scene.
Kim shared that areas in marketplaces, enterprises, and mobile space are looking sunny bright in Australia. A few examples he quoted were:
- Big Commerce: A Sydney-based e-commerce platform company which raised $15 million in series A funding from General Catalyst and recently launched an integration fund to aid the development of BigCommerce integrations and third party applications.
- 99designs: A Melbourne-based online marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design which received $35m first-round investment led by Accel Partners last April. It is projected to pay out $25 million to its designer community in 2012.
- OzForex: A Sydney-based online foreign exchange payments platform which received growth investment of $70 million – $110 million from Accel Partners and The Carlyle Group last November 2010.
Australian entrepreneurs understand the true meaning of being bootstrapped and know how to run their businesses cheap. Kim describes this phenomenon as a by-product of the absence of capital in the Australian startup scene. Australian VCs are generally risk adverse, so entrepreneurs value every single cent that is given to them.
Australian entrepreneurs aim for the world market and possess a more global outlook. Let’s take some factors into consideration: Australia is relatively close to Asia, used to be a British Colony, and looks to the United States for expansion of their companies. They are well-positioned for a true global understanding of markets.
Kim also shared that the real market outreach in Australia is about four to five million users, which makes it difficult for startups to scale. For that reason consumer web startups have trouble gaining popularity. It is essential for Australian entrepreneurs to think globally and integrate with other markets.
But having said all that, it seems that there is not much of an entrepreneurship culture in Australia. In fact, most students choose to seek comfortable high paying jobs instead of venturing out on their own upon graduation. It takes time to build an eco-system, and Kim actually sees the potential in Australia to produce the next big thing:
Companies that come out of smaller countries must have a global focus, and those are the type of businesses that Australia is producing.
I thought this was applicable to our Singaporean entrepreneurs too, given our small market. And something motivational for all entrepreneurs:
It is the difference between small business owners and growth-minded entrepreneurs – The latter thinks bigger.
[Australia image from Shutterstock]