How did Australian startups attract technical talent?

“If you wanted to be a big IT vendor selling into Australian government, you had to commit to doing some R&D here in Australia. You had to spend a bunch of money on a computer lab, employ a bunch of computer engineers. You'd usually import some senior talent from your headquarters overseas to come and sort of get things started here. You might work with Australian Computer Society, which is kind of the trade union of programmers in Australia, to come up with a scholarship system. And you'd start recruiting talent at universities and you'd try and influence the way that universities were teaching their computer science students so that they were more familiar with, you know, because the ecosystem was very, very siloed back then.”

“No, I don't think we really got a startup ecosystem in Australia until circa 2012. We had, and we do have today, some amazing examples of technology companies that were founded in Australia that have gone on to be global success stories. And you look in Queensland at Technology One, for example, publicly listed, worth around $2 billion, been going for 30 years. And they were one example. There was Technology One, there was Mincom, there were a bunch of other companies at the same time. So Australia has this history in building really innovative companies. But they didn't do it so much as part of a startup ecosystem. I think the language around startups and that kind of born global, you know, raise venture capital, that kind of, those attributes and characteristics really came into flavour, I guess, you know, in Australia from 2010. There, obviously there were some great examples prior to that. And you think about WhatIf as an example. There were definitely innovative companies that took advantage of the first tech bubble. And I would say that From 2010 to 2015, the startup movement really took shape in Australia. And then from 2015 onwards, it's just continued to accelerate and get bigger and, you know, have more energy about it.”