How did venture capital get started in Australia?

“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.”

“How do we attract more capital? And pre-NISA, there was about $200 million invested in venture capital in Australia. You know, today, you know, in a quarter, there's several billion dollars that are now invested. So that was a big change.”

“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.”