How do Australian startups expand into the United States?

“That's amazing. I've been to so many panels and heard so many conversations around founders talking or giving advice on how to expand to the US. And there's so many stories around how to do it. And so like, there's just so many tidbits of you should do this, you shouldn't do that, or think about it this way. Um, you managed to do what some startups never achieved to do in the matter of weeks. What would be like, if you could summarize 2 or 3 tips for any Australian founder looking to capture that massive market, how would you distill it down?”

“Just to be like devil's advocate though, like Australia has 3+ companies that are worth like $30 billion plus. Canva, Atlassian. Airwallex. Like these are companies that built from Australia, never actually moved, like the founders ever moved to the US, particularly not in the early days. Like now they've expanded. But they certainly took that approach of like, cop, you know, grow here, um, and then land and expand in other countries. And like, UK doesn't have that. I don't know many other countries outside of the US that have, you know, more than 3 $30 billion companies. So like, could Australia be the outlier?”

“Yeah, it's a very good question. It slowly crept up. There were more founders that were interested in creating a startup. There was a Campaign Monitor was building and lots of other companies. They were partly getting funding from Australian companies, but also from the US. In 2006, it was impossible to get a US company to invest in you in Australia. By that time, and I do think it's probably partly because of the Atlassian success, by that time, companies in the US, investors in the US were looking to also invest in Australian companies. So money was flowing in. I believe the setup of the super funds were starting to actually look towards investing into startups. And so there was money coming to the VCs through super funds. That was starting to happen. There were a number of, in what I would call, experienced startup founders. So people that had gone during the dot-com to the US and maybe after that and had experience in the US, had built companies in the US and then came to Australia. And became investors in Australia. And that also started changing things. There were people starting to build co-working spaces. It just all seemed to start to happen. And all of these pieces started to come together to really make it a vibrant ecosystem.”