We are in a new, golden era of Aussie entrepreneurialism, and this will affect your role and your company.
But first, let’s celebrate. A wonderful report released by Dealroom/Side Stage Ventures a week ago beautifully illustrates the Australian venture and startup situation.
Capital is flowing for AI companies and they command funding premiums. However, more Australian seed funds will – and need to – emerge.
- Currently nearly 40% of early-stage capital is imported from overseas.
- Maybe a Sportsbet Startup Market could be a quick solution here?
If our nation’s punters knew what Ben Grabiner of Side Stage Ventures does, things might look a lot different – that “Australia has invested ~$30B in Australian tech over 25 years and created $360B in value. That’s a 10x return”
The ex-Aussie-Unicorn Mafia is expanding.
Australia is ranked #5 globally for creating Decacorn’s; that’s a company with a valuation of over $10 billion.
Hundreds of great, local candidates have ‘paid their Decacorn dues’ with their stocks now fully vested after 4 years of devout service.
What do they do next? Start a company of course. They have the network, scars, trophies and capital from being inside a hyper-scale company. And VCs will, very rightfully, throw money at a powerpoint presentation if the two standing in front of it did their time at Canva or Dovetail.
The thing I love most about what I do is meeting new founders who are building next-generation companies.
We have recently welcomed 7 new (and incredible) VC backed companies with founders under the age of 30 to the Real Time ecosystem. And there are some very strong trends in the founders of Australia’s Soonicorns;
They’re better at leading – There is a new set of rules when it comes to leadership and the playbook is built on positivity, honesty and decisiveness.
They can actually define their culture – Getting a day off on your birthday or Friday drinks is not culture. They are thinking deeply about what it means to work at their company and what drives them to work hard. They can deliver this in a 10 second pitch, and that is very attractive to good candidates.
They don’t want to build a 100 person company – Great humans are placed where humans are needed. AI-first doesn’t mean ‘replacing workforce’ – it means optimizing workflows and having exceptionally performant people execute them.
They move faster than today’s companies – Momentum over perfection. Speed over accuracy. If an employee doesn’t work this way, the employee is exited; quickly.
They hire differently and they hire better – They don’t care about CVs as much. They meet more candidates, are upfront with feedback and interview with authenticity over scrutiny.
They are hiring the rising stars – they recognize the best users of AI are young, curious graduates who are actually testing AI in whatever their field is. Not ‘proven’ candidates who have been forced to use CoPilot at work and are now an “AI expert.”
Finally, they’re not waiting for permission – to get a feel for this, listen to (one of my favourite podcasts) Adam & Sachin of Kindling interview Liam Millward, age 21, CEO & Founder of Instant, a company at $100mio valuation.
As I’ve previously mentioned, graduate hiring has been slashed globally by 50%. Meaning these good, young candidates have struggled getting hired by incumbent companies, still practicing stale recruitment methods.
So they’re starting their own companies instead. And they are taking advantage of this golden environment at speed; leveraging the perfect conditions for scale.
For example, they know that the US Brain Drain (detailed in Tattersall’s AFR front pager) is bringing new talent and ideas ashore. And they want our help connecting with these exact candidates.
Fantastic news! Now, what does that mean for everyone else?
Answer = More competition.
Faster, hungrier, unapologetic competition.
A lot of these Soonicorn’s are laser focused on soft targets. Where problems that a few incumbents are doing a fair job of solving (often within the vertical that they’re trying to be everything to), competing with other incumbents with similar products, prices, services, talent.
Being everything to everyone makes you mediocre at everything. In company-speak, that also means bigger headcount, diluted visions, fluid customers… slow moving targets.
As I mentioned above, they are also soaking up the next-generation talent. This isn’t necessarily just hot-shot grads or reclusive tinkerers – many of the people we’ve placed at these companies have ‘mature experience’ – though the hallmarks for what next generation companies require. Speed, flexibility, curiosity, “strong opinions weakly held.”
They are learning to become fluent in the language of tomorrow’s best talent.
As Alvin Toffler said “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn“.
