

Building a Startup Scene in Any City - T-A
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3037054/the-recipe-for-building-a-startup-scene-in-your-city?utm_content=buffer9c4eb&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

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mahmud
I never believed there was a formula for attracting hackers' attention until I
saw it before my very eyes. If you're a developer in Sydney, there is a good
chance you came to the Atlassian HQ for meetups. They give us space, beer and
pizza.

I met nearly all my non-coworker tech buddies there. I ended up adopting
Atlassian products, befriending Atlassian staff, and nowadays I tell all new
tech acquaintances to meet me there.

Now that I think of it, this is the very exact formula they followed to
establish their offices as a tech hub, whether they know it or not.

But they are not the only game in town. Fishburners runs a smooth but very
ambitious coworking/incubation space, and General Assembly does tech education
& training exceptionally well with some of the most talented people around.

It's almost impossible to launch a tech startup in Sydney without having a
foot in one of those places. And in our case, all three.

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liamzebedee
Interesting! I live in Brisbane and while we do have the beginnings of a
startup scene it's not quite as vibrant as that of Sydney or Melbourne (at
least w.r.t. VC and presence of big software companies).

I'm going down there in December and possibly studying there next year, would
you advise checking out Atlassian's meetup first?

~~~
mahmud
Change the location to Sydney and see what comes up:

[http://www.meetup.com/find/tech/](http://www.meetup.com/find/tech/)

I get: Big Data

CSS

R

Scala

Ruby on Rails

SalesForce

AWS

TDD

Wordpress

DevOps

Micro services

Startup Founders 101

Agile & Scrum

Product

Internet of Things

Golang

Docker

Health tech

Python

Women who code

Android

JVM

Meteor

BI

Mobile dev

All Things API

Node.ninjas

Cassandra

Online marketing

MongoDB

PHP

Puppet

Drupal

Mobile.NET

OpenStack

Web Analytics

Continuous Delivery

Linux

PHP

MongoDB

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justincormack
"A few years later, Crowley got a call from the U.K. Prime Minister's office.
It was early 2010, and London had found out they'd be hosting the 2012
Olympics. They decided to hold it in the O2 Arena in Shoreditch, an area that
happened to have a tech coworking space and the beginnings of a community.
They'd just started hosting nightly events but hadn't jumped on the hashtag
train, though they knew that branding was needed. The Prime Minister created a
task force, and they looked around the world to see which startup scenes were
catching fire. That’s when they noticed Silicon Beach."

This is a total load of utter shite.

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asanwal
So this guy is single-handedly taking credit for establishing LA's tech scene
aka Silicon Beach? I wonder what others in LA think.

We work with a lot of economic dev groups and a hashtag has never come up in
the top 100 things of importance. Not sure how access to capital isn't part of
the equation?

Nice simple and seemingly incomplete formula for building startup hubs. Prob
does sell a lot of consulting however as frameworks like this make hard
problems sound easy to solve which is always alluring.

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xerophyte12932
So how important is the presence of VC's in the area? From what I understand,
VC's know that if they invest in 10 startups, only 1 of them would result in a
high return but that would make up for the other nine ones. This way, 10 start
ups got their shot. Now if all the potential investors in the area are highly
risk-averse, and insist that they would only invest if you are already making
a huge profit, then that kinda adversely affects that startup scene, no?

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thinkingkong
I think the single best way you can build a tech community is to just focus on
building a great company. So many people worry about an ecosystem but the only
way to make that flourish without a constant influx of foreign capital is to
build something sustainable.

