Talent, distance and global ambition: building Australian startups from here

Distance began as both a constraint and a belief

Canva announced the launch of its online design platform from Sydney on 26 August 2013. That date supplies a narrow chronology anchor for Lars Rasmussen's recollection of the period: he remembers people repeatedly questioning whether a company like Canva could be built here because of Australia's size and distance from the rest of the world. The launch record shows that Canva began from Sydney; it does not establish that geographic friction disappeared. Rasmussen's account is most useful as evidence of the doubt he encountered, rather than as a measurement of how widely that doubt was held.

“And I think the single thing that came up again and again and again was, was people questioning whether it's possible to do things like Canva in a place like Australia simply because of its size and its distance from the rest of the world and so on.”

Talent questions changed the way teams were built

The talent question was not only about finding more people. It was also about changing how capability was recognised. Applied currently describes its platform as anonymising applications and using skills-based assessments. Rachel Yang similarly describes moving away from CVs and previous experience towards blind review and testing for skills. These sources support the design and intent of that hiring approach. They do not establish that anonymisation eliminates bias or guarantees a more diverse workforce. The historical point is narrower: Yang describes one practical attempt to identify talent without treating conventional credentials as the only signal.

“It's a recruitment platform that aims to remove unconscious bias from the process. So it is moving away from CVs and previous experience and moving towards skills-based testing and reviewing blind.”

Global markets had to become part of the operating field

Austrade describes its Landing Pads program as helping export-ready Australian technology businesses assess international expansion, validate market-entry plans and connect with customers, partners and funding. Its remit reflects the practical work involved in moving from domestic familiarity to overseas markets, but it does not prove that every company should expand or that the program guarantees success. Zrinka Tokic supplies the human version of that outward turn. She describes overseas travel as a reminder of how many connections exist beyond a familiar local network, and argues for branching out. Her account is an invitation to widen the field of view, not a universal timetable for internationalisation.

“And as soon as I go overseas or to our other locations, I realise there's a massive world out there and there are so many new connections that we can make. And sometimes we do kind of stick very close to home, and I think it's time to really branch out as much as we possibly can.”

Returning home could change the comparison

Startmate dates its founding to 2010, when Niki Scevak and other successful founders pooled money into a micro-fund for early-stage companies. That first-party history supports Startmate's chronology, not a verdict on the national talent market. Scevak's own comparison is personal and more revealing when left that way. After time in New York and the Bay Area, he says the people he met after returning to Australia were at least as capable as the strongest people he had encountered in the United States. The significance is not that one country can be objectively ranked above another, but that overseas experience could sharpen a returner's appreciation of capability already present at home.

“And really what struck me was all of the people that I'd met in the Bay Area, all of the people that I'd met in New York, compared to the people I'd met in Australia, the people in Australia were better or at least as good as all of the best people I'd met in America.”

Experience travelled through capital and mentoring networks

Peter Tippett remembers an early Australian market drawing on connections into Silicon Valley, capital from Canada and mentoring through a local entrepreneurial network. He contrasts that period's lack of structure and experience with what he calls a third cycle today. This remains Tippett's retrospective framing: it is not an independently verified count of ecosystem cycles, nor proof that any one network caused later maturity. In his account, relationships, investment experience and mentoring practice travelled across borders and contributed to capability in Australia.

“The market was only just starting here and we had connections into Silicon Valley. But a lot of money actually came out of Canada because it was the TV executives and the TV investors that were backing us at that point, basically. And I was part of TiE as well in Australia, which is an entrepreneurial network. And we were doing mentoring and helping other startups. In those early days, it was young. There was no structure yet. And there wasn't the level of experience. What we see today is we're basically on that third cycle.”

Regional access remained uneven

The Australian Government's Regional Connectivity Program funds place-based telecommunications infrastructure intended to improve digital connectivity across regional, rural and remote Australia. Its existence establishes a public-policy response to uneven connectivity, not that equal access has been achieved. A dated ABS comparison reinforces the need for care: on Census day in August 2021, one in four employed people living in capital cities worked from home, compared with one in eight outside capital cities. Those figures were collected during pandemic restrictions and are not startup-specific. Wayne Gerard's argument belongs beside, rather than inside, those statistics. He says broadband, coworking spaces and public coordination matter to whether regional founders can access opportunities comparable with those in metropolitan centres.

“In a state like Queensland where we are so large and so geographically dispersed, there's a really important role for government to play in ensuring that regional Queensland has the same kind of opportunities as the southeast corner does or the major metropolitan areas do. And so investing in infrastructure, whether that's broadband infrastructure or coworking spaces, there is definitely opportunities for government to play a role.”

Distributed work changed what could be tested

The ABS reported that 40.6 per cent of employed people regularly worked from home in August 2021, compared with 32.2 per cent in August 2019. This is a historical whole-workforce comparison shaped by pandemic conditions, not a current measure of startup employment. Darren Winterford offers a more specific company-level account. He describes growing acceptance of employees using their own devices and a client with a large remote sales team as the setting in which his company tested a training product. The example shows how distributed work could create a concrete product-development opportunity. It does not show that remote work removes distance, improves every team or distributes opportunity evenly.

“We began to see that that could really have application in business around the time that the bring-your-own-device movement really started to take on, and you saw more and more organisations being happy for people to use their own devices at work. And we simply tested the idea with an existing client who did have a very large remote sales team.”

Local traction and global ambition could pull in different directions

Joshua Flannery introduces a tension between local traction and global ambition. He warns that early Australian revenue can feel like validation while distracting founders from testing whether the underlying problem exists in larger international markets. That is his strategic view, not proof that domestic traction is a mistake. His question is narrower and more useful: does the problem travel? Building from Australia and building for the world are not opposites, but in Flannery's account they are not automatically the same task.

“We can be distracted by early traction of revenue without really digging into, you know, how global is this problem that I'm solving. And if I want to make the next Atlassian or the next, you know, Canva, do people outside of my little ecosystem and my country have the same issue?”