How did Australian startups raise money before venture capital existed?

“There were probably worse than people I knew that were internet users, but very few, and I wasn't really in a techie circle, if you like. And so, you know, when Evan first rang me to say he was setting up an internet company, I didn't really know what the internet was, and quickly got on the internet and learnt a little bit about it. You had a few venture capital funds that did emerge in the sort of mid to late '90s, '90s. None of them are still around, and so that probably reflects the fact that they struggled to back amazing businesses. You know, candidly, if you look at most of the successful businesses that emerged through that period in the late '90s, and Seek was a bit of an exception, most of those successful companies either bootstrapped or had quite unusual sources of funding. RealEstate.com.au, News Corp bought the controlling stake there. They had Ray White, the real estate agents, back them. Car Sales was sort of seeded out of the Australian Reynolds Reynolds by Wal Pashoda and Greg Robach, and Greg became CEO and built an amazing business. But they had their own funding, they had some angel investors, they had car dealers, etc. What If, Graham Wood, I think was backed by his accountant and a few of his accountant's clients. So you didn't really have regular sources of funding that could both back companies right through their life cycle, but also provide them with the putting advice of people who have these experiences themselves.”

“So increasing startups is one. The second one is increasing access to particularly that first money in the seed Series A capital, early-stage funding is a real problem. And it's again, across Australia, we see venture capital grow year on year, but what we're seeing is that it's actually growing late-stage capital, not early-stage capital. And certainly in Victoria, which we follow very closely, but I suspect More broadly in Australia, we've actually seen a stagnation of early-stage capital for many years. Certainly since we've been tracking it at Launch Vic, it's never peaked above $100 million early-stage capital in Victoria, despite the fact that late-stage capital's on an exponential growth. And so if we've not got enough early-stage capital in market, it means we can do everything we can to encourage startups to create, but if there's no capital to pick them up and help them grow, we're actually doing a disservice to the community. So we've got to increase start-up capital commensurate with increasing start-up creation, and they're two things that Launchspace is very focused on.”

“Bill Ferris. So Bill Ferris had pioneered venture capital in Australia and he had his own fund. But really, up until the dot-com crash, every single major technology company that started in Australia had been missed by the Australian venture capitalists.”