Adam Spencer: Hi, I'm Adam Spencer and welcome to day one, the podcast that spotlights Australian startups, founders, and the organizations that empower Australian entrepreneurship. We go back to the beginning to tell the story of Australia's most inspiring founders and how they built their companies. You're listening to a special interview series as part of a documentary W2D1 is producing about the history of the Australian startup ecosystem.

Adam Spencer: On the episode today, we have.

Phil Morle: Hi, I'm Phil Moore. I'm a partner at Main Sequence Ventures, which is an Australian venture capital firm founded by Australia's National Science Agency, the CSIRO, investing in early stage technology companies with science at their core.

Adam Spencer: When did you first get involved? You know, before maybe the vocabulary was even there, but when, when did you first get involved? Well, I

Phil Morle: think when I first started in the technology business, which would have been, Well, even the beginning of the nineties. So at the beginning of the nineties, believe it or not, I was a theater director and I did that for most of the nineties and, um, theater direction, of course, doesn't make much money.

Phil Morle: And so I had this side hustle. Which was this sort of emerging new practice of building websites on top of this mosaic browser that was starting to catch people's attention throughout the nineties. As we got to the end of the nineties, I got very busy doing this and I realized I needed to get on the train or watch it go off into the sunset.

Phil Morle: And I decided I was going to get on the train and I, I moved to Sydney. And a career in, in technology began, uh, building websites for people. I work for a big Sydney company called Brilliant Digital Entertainment. And I wouldn't really describe that as a startup by today's standards, but it, it probably was as close as you get to a startup, um, back then in that it was, you know, fat, it was a private business, um, founded by a couple of people.

Phil Morle: It had about a hundred. And it was, it was leaning into this whole new world of digital entertainment as the company name said, but this wasn't a world of raising venture capital. Um, you know, starting off in a garage, working in a, uh, co working space, uh, building a business on Amazon web services off your, off your laptop.

Phil Morle: This was. This was a classic Sydney startup in that it was, it had raised money from high net worth families that were known to the founders. And from my perspective, I was. Almost entirely unaware of that. I was just an employee in the company. I had a small amount of share options and I did my job as the, um, uh, VP of web development at the time.

Phil Morle: Um, then we. Created the website for this little company in the Netherlands called Kazaa and that company very quickly exploded because it was an alternative to a very popular piece of software at the time called Napster, which was one of the file sharing applications. And that, that company Napster was being sued by the entertainment industry and all the consumers.

Phil Morle: Moved very quickly over to Kazaa and Kazaa moved very quickly to Australia. And before I knew it, I was the chief technology officer of Kazaa and Kazaa really became one of the first high growth startups, uh, in Australia's history and in my reading of this, because it was, it was an early stage. Internet company, um, it was growing like the clappers.

Phil Morle: At one stage, it was 80 percent of the world's internet traffic, because these are the days before YouTube and high bandwidth internet websites, and, and Kazaa was really how you shared videos of your party at the weekend and things like that. And that business became enormous, not by today's standards, but by stand by the, by the standards of those days, you know, having millions of users on it at any one time, tens of millions of customers all together.

Phil Morle: It was my first taste of, of operating a digital business at scale. And that's where I met Mick Labinskas, who was also working at Kazaa. And we kind of, We, we found our mojo, um, him on the marketing side and me on the technology side, building this massively growing company. Uh, and that was, that was a real rollercoaster.

Phil Morle: And that all happened out of military road in Cremorne in Sydney. Um, no one would know you would drive past it every day, but it's just opposite the, uh, the cinema in Cremorne and millions of, of, of users. Each day we're going through that. That office. And so, yeah, I think once you've had that experience, um, first of all, you know, a lot, uh, we learned so much about building businesses and technology, um, and yeah, on a world stage.

Phil Morle: Uh, and we also learn. About the bad things that happened because we were sued by all the big movie studios and all the record companies. Uh, and so there were lots of challenging times there as well, but we came out knowing a lot, um, uh, and feeling excited about the digital universe that was. unfolding.

Phil Morle: And Mick and I wanted to do that again. And so now what, so where are we up to now? Let's see on the, on the timeline. Um, Kazar, our time at Kazar began in around 2000. Uh, and we were done by about, uh, 2006 or something like that. Mick and I, Did some consulting for various people, but we, you know, we were hunting for a startup to join.

Phil Morle: That's what we had really enjoyed, wanted to do again. And, and from our perspective at the time, there weren't any, and there was a real trend at the time. I mean, Australian founders were starting companies just like brilliant digital. They were generally. Raising capital from families that are known to them, and then they were very quickly going offshore to the United States, largely, and not really, uh, building the value here in.

Phil Morle: In Australia, Atlassian was really the first company to start that trend of, you know, putting, putting the roots down and starting things here. But at this stage, Atlassian, I don't think had even been founded. And we, um, you know, looked around for startups, couldn't find any, uh, and decided we'd, uh, we'd make our own.

Phil Morle: And, um, uh, At the time everyone was trying to, sorry everyone, there were a number of people in Australia trying to create Australia's version of Y Combinator, which had started recently in Silicon Valley. And Mick and I said, well, why don't we, why don't we do that? And let's not wait to raise money. Let's just get started.

Phil Morle: Let's bootstrap. Let's, let's, let's offer what we know, what we learned at Kazaa to people. You offer the marketing, I'll offer the technology and we'll get people going quickly. And over time, we'll raise a little bit of money and we can start investing in companies like Y Combinator does. And that's when the whole pollinizer.

Phil Morle: Things started and, and, and really it was around that time that the startup ecosystem that we know today really started to get into its stride. What year would you say that was?

Adam Spencer: 2010? So that would have been 2008. Just side note. I've got a few side notes here, actually, but one curious about the name Polonizer.

Adam Spencer: How did you come up with that?

Phil Morle: Well, when we finished at Kazaa. I mean, one of the things I was doing was just thinking of lots of different ideas for companies to start back then. Yeah. You could have a stab at grabbing domain names and get interesting ones. So I had this little list of actually quite a big list of domain names and Mick and I sort of shortlisted off that.

Phil Morle: And we came up with some other ones as well. I mean, I remember one of the, one of the, one of the alternative names was red kangaroo or something. Uh, which is kind of. But I think Qantas would have sued us if that's what we've done, but it was, um, but we didn't go that way. I think I, I, but I, I did have the domain name for pollinizer.

Phil Morle: com. And I remember just in the years leading up to that, if I remember correctly, I was doing a whole bunch of work with Chris Saad up in Brisbane at the time who had this whole idea of data portability, which, um, of course is. You know, um, yeah, data portability is, is part of the, the backbone of the internet these days and becoming increasingly so with web three and so forth.

Phil Morle: But, but back then it was really a one way internet and Chris started talking about this idea of what if we could sort of encapsulate data into, into a sort of formal markup so that it can be. Things like addresses and biographies and, and, and things like that could be embedded into websites and be portable across the, the internet.

Phil Morle: And, um, and I started thinking of business ideas around that. And I sort of got this whole idea of bees pollinating things and started coming up with a whole bunch of random words around that and pollinizer was one of them. And we thought, well, that could work. Cause you know, we're gonna, we're going to connect people.

Phil Morle: We're going to create a kind of. You know, a froth of creativity and, and technical accomplishment and, um, polonizer kind of describes it. So let's do that. And that's, that's where it came from.

Adam Spencer: And before you keep moving forward through the timeline, I want to go back to your time in theater quickly with a side note here, what was the biggest lesson you think you took from, you know, teaching theater that you brought across into the tech world?

Phil Morle: I'd say actually everything. I'd say, I'd say every startup entrepreneur should go to drama school and, and then, and then try and run a theater company for 10 years. And by the time you've done that, it's, um, you've learned everything that you need to know. And I'll, I'll sort of, I'll break that down briefly.

Phil Morle: If in theater, first of all, you can't pay people with money. Some money comes in from ticket sales and Australia Council grants and things like that, but it's very, very little. I think in my final year in theatre, I, as the head of the company, had, I had the top tier Frequent flyer status, but my taxable income was 7, 000.

Phil Morle: So that kind of gives you an idea. And so we had a team of people, a theater company who, uh, who had worked consistently together for about 10 years and had done it under those conditions. So what that means is you have to. Convince people to join you, join the mission if you like, without money being the reason to do that.

Phil Morle: You have to gather around an idea and everyone has to be excited about making that idea. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, the process of putting a play on is usually a process in which you have very little in the way of resources. And you have, uh, a year to kind of think about it and put it together, but at the beginning of that year, you have to make all the advertising collateral that goes in the arts festival programs and things like that.

Phil Morle: So, putting those two things together, what you've got is you've got a ragtag bunch of people, practically no resources. A big idea that's got a whole bunch of people excited. You then describe that idea. You describe what you think you can build over the next year and you write about it and you make some imagery about it that goes, that gets published.

Phil Morle: And a year later, you've got to make that real and you've got no alternative, but to do that because a lot is resting on it. Um, including everyone's reputation, which, you know, I've learned is a very important currency and startups as well. And so this is a, this is a kind of a set of skills, the same skills that allow you to do that allows you to actually have the confidence to have an idea, which isn't a play now, it's actually.

Phil Morle: Uh, it's a, it's a company. It's, it's another entity which is going to create impact in a different way, but the process is actually just the same. So it gives you the, the strength, it gives you the, the ways of working with people and having empathy for the, for their struggle during a process. And it teaches you how to.

Phil Morle: Tell a story as your first product and then materialize that product and bring it to life. And that's, that's the skill I think that you, you powerfully learn in theater. That's so valuable for startups.

Adam Spencer: Can you tell me about the concept or thinking behind your title that you, at Polonizer, Startup Scientist and bringing, uh, what was it?

Adam Spencer: What did you guys call it? Um, bringing Well, we, we had

Phil Morle: this, uh, the journey of that was, well, it's quite prophetic to where I've ended up today, I guess, but, um, the, the journey through Polonizer was began at the beginning with us really just intuitively doing what we do. Without really knowing what we were doing, if that makes sense.

Phil Morle: So we had an instinct about what to do, and we just did that. We interacted with people, we helped them. We rolled up our sleeves and got involved. And then as we scaled the team, we realized that we needed to actually stand outside of ourselves. And understand what it was we were doing. And the way we talked about it at the time is we needed to wrap the science around the art, right?

Phil Morle: It's not just intuitively showing up and letting the magic happen. You actually have to try and encode that. And you have to sort of find the recurring patterns and the ways of measuring progress. And at the time as well, the whole Lean Startup idea was emerging, which we became very proficient at and it became very helpful in our work.

Phil Morle: And at the heart of that is this whole idea of a sort of scientific Method if you like to creating a company. So having a hypothesis about what's valuable or what's going to work Testing it with a consumer or customer knowing what success looks like in the in what you measure and then Moving forward as a company around that.

Phil Morle: So we sort of started describing what we were doing as startup science. And, um, and then we started giving each other names around that idea. So I was chief startup scientist, I think, at the time. But as it turned out, it was a very, uh, Powerful way of working. We designed a number of accelerator programs and startup programs around that.

Phil Morle: Not just our own. Um, the last one being the CSIRO's National Science Accelerator on. And, you know, a lot of that work. Still exists today. You know, you see it in, in sort of in the workbooks and, uh, and the playbooks that people give out in accelerator programs and things that we certainly didn't invent at all, a lot of it was, uh, a brilliant sort of Riff that was happening across what was then a, you know, it still is a global ecosystem of people just rabidly learning from each other and then building upon each ideas and finding other ways to do it.

Phil Morle: But that was, that was what we were calling startup science at the

Adam Spencer: time. Looking at the whole time timeline of the Australian startup ecosystem and how it's grown. Why do you think people look at pollinizer as such an important part of that, that timeline?

Phil Morle: Well, I. I think it's because nothing existed beforehand that I know of.

Phil Morle: Um, I mean, it was just a crazy idea to start it. It was very hard, and I will say it never had a business model that worked. I mean, it was a love project for, for the nine years that it existed. And, um, uh, but it was really the first entity of its kind that was helping other people make startups. And of course.

Phil Morle: our ecosystem today is abundant with those. Um, and it was, you know, people often ask me, you know, why didn't you carry on with Polonizer? And I think that the reason that I consistently give is that I think it's served its purpose. And I often describe it as, a booster rocket on Saturn five or on a, you know, on a, uh, SpaceX rocket.

Phil Morle: It's a, it's required. It was required. It was at one of the required pieces to get our ecosystem into orbit. But once the ecosystem was in orbit with its own momentum, it wasn't needed anymore. It could fall back to earth and, and. One way of describing Polonizer sort of less, um, romantically is it was a general purpose, uh, incubator that helped all kinds of people wanting to start all kinds of companies.

Phil Morle: And it, it, it worked with them with a certain methodology, this sort of startup science approach, consistent way of bringing people together and working. But again, it was general purpose. It wasn't helping AI startups, or it wasn't helping people with disabilities, or it wasn't doing something particular for the Melbourne ecosystem.

Phil Morle: It was a general purpose for everyone in Australia that was crazy enough to want to start a startup at a time when there was no venture capital and practically no other support, but now that there's a lot. And, um, and we don't need a polliniser anymore. I think there's so much of what the generation one accelerators and incubators did is now table stakes and baked into what the army of people who are creating companies today just, just know it's, it's part of our vernacular and our, our, our core skillset of, as

Adam Spencer: Australian entrepreneurs today.

Adam Spencer: I know there's a lot happened between a polliniser and an incubator. I think a lot happened that we're going to skip over between pollinizer and main sequence. But why, why did you start main sequence? And where did that come from? Oh, sorry, not start. Why did you start main sequence?

Phil Morle: No, but I was a, I was a founding partner.

Phil Morle: It was very fortunate actually. So we definitely, we chose to end Polonizer, um, because it was the right thing to do, not because something else was coming up and I can, you know, I can tell you some, some stories around that, but I was doing, um, at the time Polonizer, Polonizer's last customer, if you like, was the CSIRO and, um, It was the job of designing and running the on accelerator program, and that's where we applied what we had learned over the last nine years to a group of people who were very inexperienced with entrepreneurship, which was the nation's scientists and and realized there was just phenomenal value.

Phil Morle: It was just a huge. I mean, it's those, it's that great feeling that you have when, when you're working in a certain space and you do what you do and you just kind of see the magic happen. When I remember when we did the first on accelerator workshop, there were about a hundred people in the room. And not only did I not understand what they were trying to communicate, but I think the other people in the other scientists in the room didn't really understand it because they were still operating.

Phil Morle: As scientists describing precisely as a scientist to peers in that area, how that innovation works, as opposed to how entrepreneurs sort of tell their story and help people understand, you know, what could happen. Um, In a world that had this startup in it, you know, by the time we'd finished that program, that there was just an incredible capability that sort of wrapped around these incredible inventions, a way of describing those inventions to people, a way of thinking about raising capital, a way of building a business.

Phil Morle: Business with people around it and a way of being in essence, entrepreneurial. And so that was a, that was a wonderful feeling, but I thought, you know, when we ended polonizer that that would also end as well. And, you know, I was literally out of polonizer looking for a job. And, um, and I'll tell you the story about how it ended.

Phil Morle: Cause I think that's interesting because we, we ended polonizer with Two experiments. So we ran startup science on our own company. We did it very openly with the whole team and we ran two experiments. One was at the time, uh, Qantas was, um, putting out to tender the Avro accelerator program, which it ran for a few years and the team had designed what they wanted to do with that terrifically well, and we were excited by that.

Phil Morle: And we said to ourselves. If we bid for that deal and we get it and we do it high integrity, we design the perfect program, which we have a high conviction it's going to work, you know, then that's a, that's a past experiment. That's a win. And that's a reason to carry on with pollinizer. So we designed an amazing program.

Phil Morle: We spent months on it with everything that we knew. We costed it at what it costs to do it properly as a proper business, and we put that in to the Qantas team. The other thing we did, and I'll tell you what happened in a minute, but the other thing that we did was we were running the on accelerator program for CSIRO.

Phil Morle: A lot, all the universities started reaching out to us saying, can you do something similar? For us as well. And, and we thought, well, that's interesting. So we, how about this for an experiment? We, we go to CSIRO with this idea that together we build a business to roll this out at scale, uh, across the whole country.

Phil Morle: Um, and we went to David Burt, who was running, um, Uh, on accelerator at the time, he's now, um, director of entrepreneurship at UNSW and, um, and I said, so what do you think? How about, how about we, we basically go into business together and do this. And again, I thought that was a, that was a win. That would be proof that there was a market that was ready to, um, properly sustain a pollinizer.

Phil Morle: And so here's what happened in the case of David very openly. And for all the right reasons, he said. I have a strong belief that all this material that's made needs to be free. It shouldn't be part of a business and we should just give it out so that all researchers are Are you using it and benefiting from it and changing what they do for the better.

Phil Morle: And, you know, of course I was a bit grumpy about that at the time, but actually, you know, he's right, uh, that the impact of, of doing that is, is very powerful, but it was a, it was a failed experiment in terms of polonizers. Um, uh, uh, proof of life, if you like. And then on the Qantas deal, we didn't get the deal because we were too expensive.

Phil Morle: And again, you know, it was, there's no sort of, um, judgment on Qantas's decision there in any way. It's just that that's what it costs. That's what it would have cost us to deliver such a program. So it just wasn't going to work. So we realized that there was no sustainable business model. Ironically, you know, that the startup science that we disposed to everybody was.

Phil Morle: How to find as rapidly as possible a sustainable, repeatable business model. And after nine years, we had failed to do that ourselves. We had a business model that, that functioned, kept the lights on. But it was certainly not going to grow. And there was no make money while you sleep business there. So, so we moved on.

Phil Morle: So that, that was all finished. And then as luck for me would have it, um, Bill Barty, who I knew well, had been recently tasked with, with forming, uh, the venture capital fund in CSIRO that later became known as main sequence. Uh, Bill. Asked me to come along and join the gang, you know, just felt like the luckiest person in the world because um, Everything in my life up to that point had led me to that door and here I am today

Adam Spencer: Could you have done anything differently before you even began pollinizer?

Adam Spencer: Like have you ever thought back and thought about what could we have done differently?

Phil Morle: Uh, to make pollinizers successful or

Adam Spencer: yeah,

Phil Morle: well, we tried so many business models. I mean, it's a problem, frankly, that endures today. The people that are the service workers, if you like, of the startup ecosystem, I think are unvalued in the, In the system, they find themselves going from gig to gig, you know, helping, for example, a big company started startup program, which lasts for about three years.

Phil Morle: And then the whole thing collapses and they're out of a job or they have to become a scrum master or something, you know, more justifiable in a software company or something, you know, big programs. Like on happened, but on was a five year government funded program, which ended after five years. And there was just such an amazing army, frankly, of incredibly talented startup coaches.

Phil Morle: You might call them who were all suddenly out of work. And I think the problem there is that it's a very, it's, it's a job which takes a long time to really get an instinct for. And each time these systems collapse, these people. Yeah, we're out of work and we lose some of them or they lose a little bit more hope and, and I think that's disappointing.

Phil Morle: I think that's one of the things, you know, I hope we'll get right over time. One of the good things that's happening is many of. Us, I suppose I could say, are ending up in venture capital. And that is a model that works. You know, now we're in a world of capital, there's enough capital to get enough management fees to do the work we do.

Phil Morle: And it all works in a sustainable way, uh, in a reasonable sized way. Venture capital firm. And I think that's also good because we've all got skin in the game and we're all trying to do the same thing, which is making tremendously valuable companies. When you don't have that kind of business model, you do things like Polonizer needed to do, which is, so for example, the beginning of Polonizer, we, we had two concurrent business models.

Phil Morle: We worked as a software agency and we charged clients. Professional rates. So for example, we worked on the BBC iPlayer platform and in parallel to that, we helped startups and that we did that for a very low rate, sometimes free and for equity in the, in the company. And we realized that didn't work because we were basically doing a bad job.

Phil Morle: Uh, both, you know, we were billing the BBC like they were a startup and doing all this work for free. 'cause we cared a lot, but that wasn't making us enough money. And for the startups we're saying, Hey, it's Wednesday and that's not your day 'cause we're on the BBC today, so we can't work for you. So, which of course is, is just no good for a startup.

Phil Morle: You have to do everything you can every day. And, and so we tipped into, that was the first time we actually. Raised some money into pollinizer, which is a very small amount. I think the first amount we raised was 500, 000 and we use that to to fund our first generation of companies. But frankly, there was a little bit.

Phil Morle: It wasn't a perfect business model because we were having to use some of that money to sort of pass back to pollinizer and pay some of the teams. Instead of having to hire those people directly into the company. Um, so it was that kind of startup studio model, but you've got a kind of, whether you like it or not, you have a, uh, a conflict then, because you're on one hand, an owner of the company trying to give it as much runway as possible, as much chance of success.

Phil Morle: And on the other hand, You know, that company is paying for some of your team with your other hat on and it becomes very difficult and we can see these, you can see these business models happening across a number of different organizations that rose out of the startup ecosystem. But the summary of it is it's very, very hard to make money.

Phil Morle: Startups are not great customers because they don't have much in the way of funds and they need to work at a breakneck pace. And, um, uh, generally not great for, for, for services businesses. So, um, yeah, it was always a struggle, but very worthwhile doing. And I think we're seeing business models emerge now, which

Phil Morle: are a little bit more sustainable.

Phil Morle: What are some of the biggest gaps you see

Adam Spencer: still in the Australian startup ecosystem today? I'll begin my answer

Phil Morle: to that question. With the observation that one benefit I have is that I started very deliberately building an ecosystem with other people in 2008. When we started that journey, there were no accelerators, no incubators, no angel investors.

Phil Morle: The venture capital pool of the country I think was about, was smaller than the main sequence venture fund today. And If we look at what we have today, it is phenomenal. I mean, I think. There is a entrepreneurial playbook that so many people understand and have a basic skillset in, you know, we start teaching it in schools.

Phil Morle: Now universities have very sophisticated tiered textured startup programs with all sorts of services, which are offered, um, the coworking centers, the startup centers that exist. Uh, the extent to which big companies actually know what to do with startups now, um, I think is, you know, is, is also valuable government knowing what to do with things, uh, having things like R and D tax concessions.

Phil Morle: It's an amazing time to be starting a company and, uh, and it's hugely supported. Um, and, you know, I think that the startup ecosystem. If it has a weakness, it doesn't celebrate itself enough and it complains a lot. Um, and you know, I think the ecosystem that we've created together with thousands of people is incredibly productive and it's exponentially getting better every day.

Phil Morle: And so most of the things that, you know, we don't have, which we'd like to have, I think will come with time as the layers of the. Jungle, you know, start to get laid out and the ecosystem can grow out of those different layers. I think one of the areas that I'm spending a lot of time on at the moment is building out the connective tissue between parts of the innovation system, which are too siloed or have been too siloed historically.

Phil Morle: When startups and organizations and people start working together and they do that. Prolifically great things happen and we've become greater than the sum of our parts. One of the areas I'm working in today is in the world of quantum computing. Now you could, you can pretty much draw a direct parallel back to the early days of Silicon Valley when companies like Hewlett Packard were making calculators and look at What we have in Australia today in terms of quantum technology now for what one reason or another But a lot of it just around the people.

Phil Morle: We have an extremely world class quantum technology talent base here in Australia. You know, 20 years ago, a professor came to UNSW and started talking to people about this crazy theory of quantum physics. And people have gathered around that, that person initially, and then that group, and then Different universities pick it up and we have, you know, one of the top five talent communities building quantum technology today in Australia.

Phil Morle: But to my point, it's siloed, or at least it has been siloed. There's a lot happening to make that better, but it takes time. But it's been siloed inside university labs. There's been very little going on in the entrepreneurial world. There's been very little going on in the large enterprises and companies that can become customers of these quantum technology businesses.

Phil Morle: And I think what we're looking at now is the possibility of a quantum, technology revolution rising out of Australia in the same way that, that digital computers rose out of Silicon Valley. And, um, that's only going to happen if we prolifically communicate the Build bridges, smash down the silo walls at every opportunity.

Phil Morle: Yeah. We make our habit telling everyone about what we're doing. We still have a little bit in Australia of people keeping it a secret, wanting it to be proprietary. You know, I still get people as an investor wanting me to sign an NDA before they've done it. Even told me any details about their company and it's, it's, you know, in my mind, it's the wrong posture, which doesn't lead to success.

Phil Morle: The companies that are successful that I've observed have been companies that are just telling everybody about what they're doing and getting them excited and looking for every opportunity to. Hire the great people work with the great partners Get investment from the the right investors. It's just a silo smashing bridge building You know requirement which we're still not as good at as we need to be but we're getting better

Adam Spencer: This is the the advice question that I ask everybody.

Adam Spencer: Um, if a brand new founder came to you tomorrow What one thing would you tell them to help them not fail?

Phil Morle: I would tell them to, uh, be very, very clear about what their story is. And that sounds quite shallow. I know it's not a reflection on the need for founders to, you know, tell a fib or weave a tale about their company.

Phil Morle: It's more a reflection on too many great companies. Are invisible to the people that can help them be their investors, customers, people that might work for them because the founders are failing to communicate why that's valuable to those people. And I find that say a skill and a habit which is very powerful when it happens from the very first day and you can probably see the connection here back to my.

Phil Morle: My theater days and how I've arrived at this. But even, even if you haven't got anything to show yet, even if you've got two years, Of building to do, even if you've got 18 months in the lab to prove what you're trying to get done. There is a story you can tell about what you intend to do as a founder.

Phil Morle: And as soon as you start making that statement and you start having that conversation and you start engaging with people about what they think about that idea, the idea becomes stronger. The company becomes richer, more people want to help you. And the world comes to you rather than the founder needing to feel like they've got to do the big sell and, um, and push hard to actually get people to support this company.

Phil Morle: And I find if that happens from the very first day, everything from that moment becomes easier.

Adam Spencer: So as you know, what I'm trying to do here is tell the whole story of the Australian startup ecosystem. We want people from all corners of the ecosystem to hear this story. Founders, investors, academics, policy makers.

Adam Spencer: With that in mind, this last question isn't really a question. It's just a, I want to give you a few minutes to, what do these people need to hear?

Phil Morle: Yeah, I, I think what we've unlocked in our people is an incredible power to make the world better. And what is happening in the world right now is that power is starting to become synchronized with global capital markets being able to fuel this and with massive problems on planet earth that we need to solve.

Phil Morle: And those problems can be solved, I believe, with the conviction of an entrepreneur. and the inventiveness and creativity of the research community, industry, government, and we've started to understand how we can mobilize ourselves. And we've really put that to the test during COVID, especially last year.

Phil Morle: It was fantastic just seeing how when the moment comes, people. Do what they need to do to push the boat out, do extraordinary things and fix problems in a dramatic way. I feel like that is happening massively now on a global stage. And certainly here in Australia, it's, it's a very important time in history that we're ready for as an ecosystem.

Phil Morle: And I think we've just got to get our heads down, build companies, fix problems. And take Australia to the world with solutions to the problems that it has. And now's the time.

Phil Morle: I hope you enjoyed that

Adam Spencer: interview. More interviews are on the way. Follow the podcast wherever you're listening right now. Stay tuned for more interviews with many, many more amazing people from the Australian startup ecosystem. Thanks for listening and see you next time.