What was it like to start a technology company in Australia in the 1990s?

“The first tech company that I was involved with was a company called Future Technology Resources. Or For the Record. And that was in the early '90s. And we financed that ourselves and ultimately we backed it into a public listed company. But the most significant company was, of course, Aussie Mail, which Shaun Howard founded with the support of myself and Trevor Kennedy. And that was in '94. And at that time, there was no money available for tech at all. In fact, we showed Ozemail to a bunch of people and the internet was just getting going. And they turned it down. We had a very memorable meeting with Kerry Packer in which he dismissed the idea and said the internet— he wasn't impressed with the internet. It would only be used for gambling and porn. And I must say, when we got out of the meeting, We looked at each other and said, "Well, you know, even if he's right, it's still going to be a pretty big thing, isn't it?" Turnbull purchased a stake in the internet service provider Aussie Mail in 1994 for $500,000.”

“I started my career in the Patents Office in Canberra in 1990 and very quickly moved from there to UNSW and worked in technology commercialisation there, and part of that role was on startups, as we called it then, but it was probably different terminology in that time, more around deeper technology, heavy infrastructure types of startups. So medical technology startups were some of the things that I was involved in at that point. It was a different time, it was pre-Google and pre-some of the web platforms and pre-app platforms that we have available today. Mm-hmm. And so to start a company was a, was a different proposition. You really needed access to infrastructure. And so universities were doing it, but it was probably more on a smaller scale than you're certainly seeing today.”