
Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business - andrewstuart
http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com/2015/12/atlassians-success-illustrates-what.html
======
pedalpete
Disclosure, I work for data61, a major recipient of the gov't new innovation
strategy. I'm also Canadian and have worked in technology in SF, LA, NYC,
Vancouver and Santiago Chile.

I have a very different perspective on this. Australia has had more than just
one Atlassian. They've also got Campaign Monitor, BigCommerce, Canva, Where 2
(became Google Maps), Envato. Australia is also growing Freelancer (I don't
believe it was initially built here), and I'm sure many others.

Now, let's look at the comment regarding the newly announced innovation
strategy does provide lots (probably too much) money to incubators, but so has
every country. The incubator thing is just not successful outside a the few
outliers YC, TechStars and maybe 1 or 2 others.

However, one of the large components of the plan is tax incentives to early
stage investors. There are also bankruptcy law reform. There is also a new
Entrepreneur Visa.

Now, Silicon Valley will almost always have an advantage to the history and
network there. But that doesn't mean that Australia is "a crappy place" for
tech business.

I find Australia a refreshing change from North America. There is a realistic
view on revenue models, less money is 'wasted' on poorly thought out
businesses. Australians are bright resourceful people.

I think this is a great place to be in tech. It punches above it's weight on
the world stage.

If you look at regions with major technology successes, what do you end up
with? A bunch in the US, a few in China, a few in India, a few in Canada, a
few in Germany, a few in the UK. Where would Australia end up on a list of
population vs. influence? I think pretty high.

~~~
andrewstuart
The key point of the blog post is that any tech company that succeeds in
Australia does so purely on its own two feet and that governments are at best
mildly supportive of technology and at worst actively hostile.

Turnbull destroyed the fibre to the home NBN and I can't see high speed
ubiquitous Internet access coming any time soon.

Imagine if 95% of Australian home - including ones in the country areas - had
super high speed Internet - what that would do for the ability of Australians
to live and work away from the cities and how good that would be for regional
communities. Turnbull and Abbott tossed that out.

I'm cynical about Government support for technology because it usually is very
indirect. More often than not any money is funnelled into an "ecosystem of
helpers" rather than to the developers. So venture capitalists and incubators
get the money which essentially is then substantially dedicated to paying for
the salaries and offices of the incubators and venture capitalists rather than
going to entrepreneurs. As the blog post points out - there are thousands of
developers sitting in their kitchen coding - they do not want a desk and chair
as provided by an incubator and - like Atlassian - they do not want to even
talk to venture capitalists, let alone waste time and money trying to get
funding from them - an extremely unlikely event because the VCs are so risk
averse. If I built something that got traction - which is what the VC's want
to see - and I really needed VC then I damn sure wouldn't go to Australian VCs
for it - that's the path to failure - if you must have money and you have
traction, go straight to Silicon Valley first.

~~~
regecks
I really don't understand the NBN meme.

I've worked for small tech companies in Australia my entire (not so long)
career, and access to high internet speeds has never ever really been a
problem. When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between
10 and 100mbps, really?

Yes, regional areas should be upgraded from dialup/slow sattelite to at least
10mbps. What kind of impact will that have wrt the OP?

As someone who sorely wishes that a tech scene would actually take off here,
issues that I believe dwarf the NBN are: small companies can't actually afford
to fund hacking/R&D, risk aversion, a culture that is generally dismissive of
[the] tech [scene], lack of encouragement in school education, and tax system
(also the Australian Consumer Law) that will punish you for trying.

I worked from a co-working "hacker space" for a couple of years and, uh, well,
there was not a lot of hacking going on. I've recently gotten into this for
myself, and while mildly successful, all our customers are overseas _shrug_.

Edit: all good points made below. Quality of life will improve for us, still
skeptical as to the degree to which it will address fundamental problems with
the tech economy here though.

~~~
gelatocar
> When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and
> 100mbps, really?

There's a pretty long list actually. If you've got 10 people in a office
sharing a 10mbit pipe then the internet is straight up prohibitively slow. On
top of that, if your users are on slow internet then they are less likely to
interact with whatever you are building, especially if it involves rich media
interaction like uploading photos/videos (and upload speeds are even slower
here). Then there are workflow collaboration tools like teleconferencing,
dispatching of large files over networks that can take hours. It makes it
harder to work remotely and adds a fairly large extra cost for small tech
businesses to absorb in getting decent internet set up. And this is all going
to get worse as the rest of the world speeds past us and starts creating
content for gigabit internet while we are sitting here trying to get by on our
promised 25megabits.

~~~
saiya-jin
I think he meant a single person working remotely from home, for which, like
it or not, a true 10 MBit/s connection is more than needed. Yes, 3.5 GB file
download will take 1 hour, but I haven't met a single dev in past 11 years in
+- 7 companies that would claim it prevents them from doing their work.

Now if your work is rather unusual, OR you have to upload lots of stuff and
that goes 100 KB/s max, that's another topic. This is not typical for most
devs.

Teleconferencing - for most devs, what is the above value over classic conf
call (an honest question)? I see little, it's still far from having people
sitting behind same desk and brainstorming.

~~~
StavrosK
As a remote developer, I agree. I need low latency for calls and meetings, but
I don't care much about file transfer speeds. I'm perfectly fine on 4 Mbit.

------
Benjamin_Dobell
R&D Tax Incentives are pretty much the only thing the Australian Government
offers - [http://www.business.gov.au/grants-and-
assistance/innovation-...](http://www.business.gov.au/grants-and-
assistance/innovation-rd/RD-TaxIncentive/Pages/default.aspx)

Massacring the NBN and generally not giving a shit about technology really
highlights how out of touch the Australian Government is with the general
population. We are among the highest adoption rates for technology
(smartphones etc.) worldwide and give a _huge_ amount of money to US companies
getting a hold of the latest tech.

Our government is ready to completely ream us once more by signing the TPP -
despite the fact the US has clauses for things like "fair use" nothing of that
nature exists in Australian law. We'll just adopt the shitty parts of US law
and none of the (partially) redeeming parts.

~~~
d_t_w
Didn't you hear? Coal is the future, get digging.

~~~
d_t_w
FYI non-Australians, I give you (former) PM of Australia, Tony Abbott:

July 17, 2015 - "For the foreseeable future coal is the foundation of
prosperity"

[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/17/for-
tony-...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/17/for-tony-abbott-
its-full-steam-ahead-on-coal-the-foundation-of-prosperity)

That just about sums up the amount of vision in Australian politics.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
To be fair, he's probably right. Australia has no new hydro planned (we can
thank The Wilderness Society for that), and no plans, that I'm aware of, to
shutdown any coal fired power stations.

So, pending catastrophic climate change, I'm going to guess Tony will turn out
to be right.

And besides, politicians aren't selected for their 'vision', they're selected
for some other set of characteristics, whoever knows what. P.J. O'Rourke has
plenty to say on this subject.

~~~
d_t_w
"For the foreseeable future coal is the foundation of prosperity"

I take that to mean 'Coal will provide the prosperity that takes Australia
forward', rather than 'Coal will continue to provide our electricity'.

i.e. We should invest in Coal, train our children to mine for it, research new
ways of producing it, at the expense of other fields like high tech.

------
polemic
Hey Australia, why not consider moving to NZ?

1\. You can already move / live / work here without any immigration hassle.

2\. We have an actual UFB fibre to the home network rolling out now that
actually works.

3\. Local and central government is pretty keen to support the technology
scene - from government grants (refer Callaghan Innovation) to local tech
hubs. AND help to connect in SF
([http://kiwilandingpad.com/](http://kiwilandingpad.com/))

4\. Activity from successful early founders/employees from Xero and others.

5\. We build for a global audience -- NZ is just too small to be your only
market.

6\. Simpler tax system.

7\. Better coffee.

~~~
l33tbro
Better coffee? That's a pretty huge claim ...

~~~
jsmeaton
Melbourne would like a word..

~~~
polemic
Challenge accepted. Seriously.

------
adamseabrook
There is always more the government can do but there are two major government
assistance programs I was not aware of till I founded a startup here.
[https://www.austrade.gov.au/Australian/Export/Export-
Grants/...](https://www.austrade.gov.au/Australian/Export/Export-Grants/What-
is-EMDG) will reimburse 50% of your sales and marketing costs. So you can go
spend $100k on Google Adwords and get $50k back effectively meaning you can
outbid all your competitors for the same keywords.
[https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/Research-and-development-
tax...](https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/Research-and-development-tax-
incentive/) is more well known. What is less well known is that if you make a
loss in the year you make the R&D claim they will credit the offset into your
bank account vs carrying the offset forward to next year. I am not sure what
the equivalent of these two grants is in the US but I know Singapore is even
more generous with tax holidays and 500%? of R&D spend grants. Edit - forgot
to add there are R&D consultants who will even advance you a percentage of
your claim amount in advance to help with cashflow so you don't have to wait
12 months to get the money back.

~~~
throwawayaway
Am I wrong in thinking there's a fat chance that the US govt. is funneling
money to tech startups? I doubt there are grants for this stuff in Silicon
Valley.

Maybe some sort of trickle down effect from the money that goes into Amazon,
intel, MS & IBM.

Not sure every home in the US is getting the claimed 10gig internet pipes
neither.

~~~
adventured
Yeah you're wrong. The US Government has a $146 billion R&D budget. That kind
of spending has directly contributed to the US success in tech.

The government - university partnerships have been a massive boon to the US
tech industry.

They have billions in business grants that you can apply for, covering just
about everything you can think of going on in the economy. That includes
advanced science and engineering grants, projects at the most cutting edge.

Every home is definitely not getting 10gbps pipes, yet. The US deserves a lot
of flack for its poor broadband deployment the prior decade. However it is now
undergoing an accelerating broadband boom (as in 100mbps+), probably mostly
thanks to Google.

------
capnfabs
Also an Australian, working in tech.

\- There is a lot of good CS talent coming out of Australian universities.
Lots goes to the Bay Area, some work at Google, Atlassian, Canva (in Sydney at
least).

\- As others have commented, it seems that there's less useless stuff with
unrealistic projections that gets built in Australia. I'm not sure if it's
because Australian culture has a strong dose of cynicism (which also probably
contributes to some of the remarks in this blog) or because the landscape is
indeed bad enough that only the really good startups can survive.

\- There are some Australian policies that work pretty well in favour of
getting individual startups off the ground. Policies that help startups get
off the ground include study assistance (~AUD 200 week from government whilst
studying, means tested), a similar unemployment support program, and
subsidised universities. These only contribute to the success of individuals,
however, they're not good for building an ecosystem.

\- I've heard of a number of Australians travelling SE Asia and trying to get
their v1 built from there. The internet is much better and your burn rate is
much lower. Plus, the breadth of experience is probably good if you're trying
to start something with international longevity.

------
wahsd
The weird thing about these kinds of posts is that it only contributes to
places like Australia, in this case, lagging behind other places like the USA.
All this is is another one of those whiny posts that sets a mindset that you
have to leave Australia and head to the Valley if you want to make it when
what the post really should have been about is " We (Australia) really have
some work to do. Here is what we need to do and how we push the government to
support our industry".

It really kind of annoys me that "foreigners" fall to this victim type
mentality and then rather than pushing their own local governments to change,
they advocate leaving and only exacerbating the problem by draining the local
talent and interest group, while piling on to the concentration of people in
the tech centers like the Valley.

I would love to know what the total damage the USA does to source societies
and countries by luring and essentially poaching talent and expertise away. I
know that India is really kind of struggling with that issue. On one hand they
see it as a source of remittances, but on the on the other hand even in a huge
population like India they are really starting to feel the sting of the "brain
drain" in the tech sector.

~~~
ajdlinux
As an Australian, it saddens me every time I hear of a friend leaving for the
States. I can count at least six or seven people off the top of my head who
went through my uni's computer science program - a relatively small
department, I should add - at the same time as myself, and have since moved to
the Bay Area.

I can't really blame them, but it'd be nice if some of the brighter ones
stayed around.

~~~
voltagex_
Moving to Sydney for a job could be almost as expensive as moving to the
States.

I'm looking in Melbourne but the market down there seems like a mess right
now.

Couple that with the falling Australian dollar and moving to the US and
getting paid in USD doesn't sound so bad.

~~~
ajdlinux
The primary motivation for those I know who have moved to the Bay Area isn't
the pay (although that certainly is part of it), it's finding more interesting
work and being in the SF/SV culture.

Personally, I don't like the start-up culture, and I happen to work at a place
that does interesting things already, so I'm quite happy staying in Canberra.

~~~
wycx
I would like to point out to those unfamiliar with Canberra, that if you live
in one of the older suburbs with overhead powerlines (and not even on the
radar for NBN), you can get Transact, which will supply dead stable 60 mbit
VDSL2 fibre connection for ~AUD150/month on a business plan i.e. static IP.

Plus, the weather and traffic in Canberra is way better than Melbourne.
(Longing for the weather to remain constant for more than 20 minutes...)

~~~
ajdlinux
I'm seriously considering upgrading my home link from ADSL2+ to VDSL2 now that
I've discovered it's available in my area. It's not a sustainable long-term
national infrastructure plan, but for my personal needs it'll serve me for at
least a few more years.

And you're right about the traffic - Canberra is very nice in that regard.

------
Gatsky
Well this is all true, it could be much better. I think the point is though
that relying on Australian Governments to make serious long term commitments
to technology infrastructure is going to result in disappointment. The thesis
that 'Labour was going to save us, and then the Liberal's ruined everything'
is kind of an oversimplification.

The NBN was a great idea to be sure, but the Labor government that proposed it
proceeded to sabotage itself over the next two terms due to extremely damaging
and petty political infighting. In the end Tony Abbott had to just sit quietly
while Labour burned itself to the ground, delivering us a conservative prime
minister and policies that nobody really wanted. The NBN became a political
point. If none of this had happened and Malcolm Turnbull was now in power
trying to push the innovation agenda, who knows, maybe he would be proposing
something similar to the original NBN.

Bad leaders with good ideas are as helpful as good leaders with bad ideas, as
it happens. Good leaders with good ideas don't seem to exist in the current
climate. And if you're just unpopular it doesn't matter what your ideas are
(eg Bill Shorten).

------
__tmg

      > Australia sucks at technology; rather than help make it suck less, you should
      > leave your home and ensure that the U.S.A continues not to suck at
      > technology.
    

Does it make me a cynic if I could only read this as a propaganda piece for
The Valley?

------
phantom_oracle
Just as a side-point to some of the authors (valid) points:

Atlassian would have failed in Silicon Valley as well.

It is kind of strange where the author mentions how Atlassian bootstrapped its
way to an IPO after many years and then tells entrepreneurs to head to "boom
or bust" Silicon Valley.

The truth is that an Atlassian-style business can be built from just about
anywhere.

You will need to market appropriately, but if your product is great, it will
eventually get to a point where it will market itself quite a bit too.

------
theandrewbailey
> In an age where the state of the art broadband to the home in the U.S.A. is
> 10 gigabits, Australia is currently building (it claims) a National
> Broadband Network at great expense that promises a blistering 12 to 100
> megabits per second at the top end

I know it mentioned "state of the art", but the vast majority of Americans
would be lucky to get 100 megabits without breaking the bank every month. Many
(most?) don't even have the option of such speeds.

~~~
qzervaas
Many (most) of Australians don't even have the option of 10 mbit.

When the new NBN is rolled out, most will have the option for 25 Mbps. This
plan is due to be completed by 2020.

~~~
xxpor
Part of the issue is that getting transit out of Australia is EXTREMELY
expensive. Telstra still has a stranglehold on the country, and the amount of
cables out of the country hasn't kept up with demand.

~~~
qzervaas
Not to say your point isn't true, but that has nothing to do with successive
governments shitting on each other's plans when it comes to installing
infrastructure to houses (or choosing the right infrastructure to install).

~~~
xxpor
Sure. I think they are two separate, but related problems. Even if the NBN
were perfect and brought gigabit internet access to the entire country,
without more intl transit it wouldn't help as much as people would hope.

~~~
kalleboo
It would still make a huge difference on the things that matter the most
bandwidth-wise, such a video services and software distribution - all things
that are on geographically distributed CDNs with local nodes in Australia

------
qzervaas
This is a propaganda piece from NBNco (the company installing Australia's new
broadband network). It basically says Internet that is too fast is bad:

[http://www.nbnco.com.au/blog/singapores-gigabit-dream-
arrive...](http://www.nbnco.com.au/blog/singapores-gigabit-dream-arrives-but-
with-a-catch.html)

Or to put it another way: our bad solution is superior because it's slower.

~~~
voltagex_
As an Australian the only reaction I can have to stuff like this is an
overwhelming desire to leave the country. We're screwed in the near-to-medium
term, and in the long term if we don't improve both our technical capability
and the level of political discourse.

------
jondubois
I think that so far Australia has been a pretty bad place to start a tech
company. The startup community is quite small (even in Sydney). And in spite
of it being small, it's really hard to raise funding.

Almost all of the successful Australian companies you hear about have
bootstrapped themselves from nothing and succeeded against astronomical odds.
It seems that the few companies that do get funded rarely go anywhere.

A big problem with Australian investors is that they're extremely hesitant to
invest in projects which are not within their immediate area of expertise -
And this is generally limited to simple B2C companies which are basically rip-
offs of successful startups in the US. Investors don't care much about
potential - They care about numbers.

High-tech projects like NoSQL databases, backend-as-a-service platforms,
machine learning platforms, etc... These things generally don't get funded in
Australia.

~~~
nailer
Last time I was in Australia (around a decade ago) the country's most well
known new entrepreneur was someone who opened a Jamba Juice clone.

------
TimJRobinson
There is a actually a really nice program for startup founders the Australian
government runs called NEIS ([https://www.employment.gov.au/self-employment-
new-enterprise...](https://www.employment.gov.au/self-employment-new-
enterprise-incentive-scheme-neis)), but very few people know about it.

It's basically welfare for those starting their own company. You get paid the
normal welfare rates (~$225AU per week in QLD) to start your company. You have
to provide a basic business plan and meet up with a mentor once a month to
ensure you're actually working on it, but other than that it's a free income
stream.

------
voltagex_
Advising anyone to move countries to go to Silicon Valley (or SFO) seems
irresponsible with the out of control property market and all the social
issues that come with it.

[http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/10/09/the_median_rent_for...](http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/10/09/the_median_rent_for_an_sf_twobedroom_hits_5000month.php)

~~~
nl
Telling anyone from Sydney about an "out of control property market" seems...
ill-advised.

~~~
brad0
Aussie expat in the US here. A studio apartment in SF costs 35k US$ a year to
rent. That's almost 50k AUD$

It's at a point where people that aren't earning 6 figure salaries can't live
in the city anymore.

I know the costs of living in Sydney and Melbourne is high, but SF is next
level.

------
LCDninja
In my experience, back in 1997 it was no different.

We won the Australian Internet awards for best software - nobody cared - so we
moved to Silicon Valley. Problem fixed!

------
noir_lord
As someone who went from flaky 3meg at home to rock stable 150meg fiber it
makes a huge difference to how you work.

------
dhruvsuyam
Guys. A lot of successful companies are getting created in Australia. Cliniko
is one among them. Time and again, it's proven that 'perseverance' is the key.

