There are some serious problem with the immigration laws in Australia that would make such ecosystem very fragile.
For example, we tried to hire a remote friend to move inland and work with us - and he is over qualified - yet because he's over 30, his chances of making it after 2 years of struggle with immigration are next to none.
So as long as this happen, startups will be dead in the water. Australia has a lot of smart people, but that's not enough. The US west coast attracts all the smarts and doesn't block them in.
As someone who's just on the cusp of 30 and is actively planning a move down under, do you mind expounding a little further on what happened? I'd love to avoid the same pitfall if possible.
For example, you get points for age. Applicants who are 25-32 years old get 30 points. As you get older, you get fewer points. Applicants who are older than 45 get 0 points.
Since you need at least 65 points for a visa, it seems difficult once you are over the age of 45.
That's right, and unless someone uses a ridiculously strict determination for some of the criteria (e.g. how fluent am I in English?), I should have plenty of points. I'm more worried about some additional gotcha.
Can you describe the problems you've seen? Wife and I were over 30 when we moved to AU from the US. Certainly quite a bit of paperwork, but wasn't all that tough in reality.
It took me 12 months from start of my residency application, 4 years total to get permanent residency in Australia. I was working for an Australian company for those 4 years.
I have a MSc in Software Engineering (on the critical skill list), experience on 4 continents and it was nothing short of a nightmare.
The immigration process over here is in a state of change at the moment for residency, hopefully this means it will be a much better process than what I experienced.
As someone else noted, 3-4 years for perm residency is rather common. And just so you know, I was annoyed by that as well hoping it would be faster, but it isn't. And, yes, I do think the paperwork and runaround can be crazy in AU. My wife is a GP and I'm a MS in Comp. Sci.. There was no way for us to "hurry along" the process. To get perm residency, we needed to live in the country for 2 years before we could apply. 2 more years for citizenship. Even so, 4 years to citizenship isn't a bad deal.
I hear there is reform coming around July 2012 to expedite certain skills shortage list candidates, so hopefully that helps.
The crazier thing is the amount of paperwork my wife needed to do to prove that she was competent to practice medicine in the country. In the US, she went to a great med school, had MCATS off the charts, went to one of the best residency programs in the country and worked for the best hospital in the world for 5 years. In that regard, it was frustrating.
3-4 years for permanent residency is pretty common when you're moving into a country on a work visa. It's the same for the 3 commonwealth countries I've lived in and I believe the US as well.
Trouble immigrating or getting work visas when over 30 is rife across Europe, and as for migrating to the US, we're all pretty well aware of just how difficult it is, skills or otherwise. It's really not all that different here to other western nations, though you do have a point about the 'critical mass' of Silicon Valley.
"[No] Australians are much more risk adverse"
I think they mean averse in this phrase
its not that Australians are more risk averse, its that we have a culture of "tall poppy syndrome", which means that people that tend to become outliers, especially highly successful, tend to get "taken down a peg". It's ironic because we have quite a high work ethic.
I lived in Northern California for a few months and saw a massive difference in the way that people believe that anything is possible and look up to innovators (as a society).
99designs did well from early investment from Atlassian, but their big recent VC dollaridoos came from ... Silicon Valley.
Continuing the Australia/99 theme, we might observe that 99dresses was almost thumped into oblivion (due partially to lack of investment) before it enjoyed the expertise of YC and the attentions of the YC coterie.
Given geographic inevitabilities and the lack of local investment it is hard to be optimistic about the Aussie startup scene, even given Fairfax media's recent (and beguiling) attempts to toot the local talent's horn.
If you're interested in the startup scene in Australia there are some great groups. e.g. Silicon Beach. The Jelly events are great too. You tend to find the same people at the occasional hack-a-thon and unconference-style events.
I'd also recommend getting over to some co-working spaces. Events are great, but I've found them a better way to connect to a broader audience. In Melbourne I'd recommend Inspire9, but there are others (The Hub, OpenHub). There are similar counterparts in Sydney.
I don't entirely trust these particular Google Trends figures as they show a minuscule amount of USA-based traffic.
Regardless, though, of the particular instance, or indeed the reality -- the problem for any would-be head-to-head of this type is not generally which startup would "win in a fair fight", but rather which startup any potential investors believe would win. The problem for such Australian startups may be just that the question of "which is going to win?" is being asked at all.
They didnt mention that a lot of Australians go overseas to work for companies, which could be a boon for us if an ecosystem blooms here, as I know a lot of entrepreneurs would love to move back to australia for the lifestyle.
They did: "...influx of quality talent into the Australia ecosystem. These talents comes from the successful Australian engineers and designers who have left or will soon leave their careers at huge tech companies such as Facebook or Google to join or start new ventures back at home."
I think he is vastly overestimating the number of Australians over here.
I'm one of those Australians who moved to the US to work at Google, and then left to join a startup, Puppet Labs.
There are a lot of Australians in tech in the Bay Area, particularly working in operations, and a regular topic of conversation is "what would I do if I moved back to Australia?"
I'd still probably try to start a new tech company in the US, but I feel much less strongly about that than I did a couple of years ago, and hopefully that trend continues.
Relatively high. Also from east coast AU latency is better to west coast US than much of Asia in my experience. We just got AWS cloudfront in Aus which might serve as a decent barometer for the relative cost of bandwidth: http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/cloudfront/
The left-learning government is not supportive of startup business. And the economic indicators are not good.
Notable issues include
High income earners cannot offset business losses, thus deterring entrepreneurs.
IR protections intrude on flexible working.
Border protections make labour import difficult, despite the lack of a critical mass for skills.
Government spending is high (although less than in the US), at 34% of GDP, leaving less on the table for investors to slosh around. This is set to grow as the population age pyramid inverts.
Productivity is low. The only thing keeping growth competitive is the resources sector. This is probably an economic time bomb.
Banks are massively risk averse and unwilling to lend, although the problem is not as severe as in the UK.
Business failure is perceived by many as personal failure rather than a learning experience.
The current government is essentially the political branch of the unions. They'd much rather prop up the dying manufacturing sector. Unfortunately there is no credible alternative party.
If Australia is really unlucky then the ticking productivity bomb will explode along with the demographic inversion, causing a welfare crisis, a debt catastrophe, and probably a major recession.
> Business failure is perceived by many as personal failure rather than a learning experience.
I'd content that Australians' bias isn't against failure, but against making other people wear the cost of your failure.
The reason some failed businesses are held against owners, is because the owners didn't make sure there was enough in company to pay the workers their entitlements (salary, leave and superannuation) when the doors shut. While the typically still wealthy owners hide behind the limited liability of their company, the workers pay a cost they can ill afford. A failed company that meets its obligations to its employees will be admired for "giving it a go".
a) Australia has one of the strongest economies on the planet right now. The IMF predicted that Australia would be the best performing major advanced economy in the world over the next two years.
b) Australia is on track to deliver a budget surplus which many countries would be envious of. It has one of the lowest GDP to debt ratios out of all major economies and there is no way Australia is at risk of defaulting.
c) Australia has by far the most stable, capitalised and sensibly regulated banking systems in the world. The banks are probably doing TOO well.
d) Australia has been planning for population ageing for decades and we could easily ramp up immigration. The problem is community attitudes and state infrastructure.
e) The problem with startups in Australia isn't the government or banks. It is the VCs and incubators who have this ridiculous notion that the "team is 100x more important than the idea". So we have lots of startups with great teams working on truly pointless products.
I can recall a case where Govt interference killed off an entire startup scene - datacasting. When Australia announced its move to a digital spectrum back around 2000 there were a bunch of us that started developing product for it, when the Gov't finally announced what content could be broadcast (childrens programmes) we closed up shop the next day. So we lasted 12 months, had major backing from the Ten Network and had working product demos.
I think to a large degree the Govt at the time adopted Kerry Packers stance to keep the status quo.
This is all reflected in what we have today, slightly better resolution and an EPG? Absolutely zero innovation is happening in this space as a result of the Govt.
