How Australian Tech Companies Can Think About Silicon Valley
One of the strange things about Australia&#x27;s startup scene over the last decade or so is the sheer number of what I like to call &quot;meta-entrepreneurs&quot; - people who help other people become entrepreneurs, and present themselves as experts on technology, business, Silicon Valley etc, but have declined to actually do the hard work of setting up a business, let alone growing it to success.<p>So when Australians give advice about &quot;how to start a tech company&quot;, the first question to ask is &quot;How many have you personally started? And how did they go?&quot;.<p>One of the things that I&#x27;ve come to understand about Australia since leaving (I&#x27;ve live in Berlin now, before that I was in London) is that the average level of professional work is quite mediocre by global standards - this is not just in tech, but across all industries. Australians have had it very easy for about 2 decades now, getting rich through a property boom and a mining boom, but most have never had to really compete on a global level. An awful lot of people cruise in their jobs, doing something that&#x27;s good enough for the Australian market, and they&#x27;ve had a comfortable career doing it. So why change?<p>The problem is, that if you do achieve PMF in an economy that operates primarily at this level, you&#x27;re not going to have PMF in an economy that operates at a higher level of sophistication and competence. That&#x27;s why I think the strategy of &quot;start local, grow global&quot; is a fool&#x27;s errand, and risks turning into &quot;start local, burn some cash trying to go global, stay local&quot;.<p>I also dispute that there is an advantage to keeping a tech team in Australia. The salaries are still quite high (particularly in Sydney) but the talent is again, not that good. This is both in tech and tech management, however there ARE exceptions[1], and the situation is improving - Atlassian have produced a lot of people who know what it takes to run a global, successful tech business, and now we are starting to see a second generation of top-notch people being developed in fast-growing Australian startups like Canva and SafetyCulture[2].<p>There are plenty of companies who have sold into the US market from day 1 from outside the US. HotJar from Malta. My current employer, ChartMogul. Travis CI, also from here in Berlin. There are hundreds more, but those are the ones that just jumped to mind.<p>If you want to be a global company, then think like a global company from day one. This is as true in Australia as anywhere else, but it&#x27;s taken a long time to sink in there.<p>[1] Of course, the exceptional people generally know it, and command matching salaries. As an aside (to this aside), I&#x27;m currently reading Camille Fournier&#x27;s excellent &quot;The Manager&#x27;s Path&quot;, which is like a museum of management practises that I&#x27;ve never seen in Australia.<p>[2] SafetyCulture is an exception to my &quot;start global&quot; thesis. They did start locally, then grow. I think this is because of two main things: In health and safety things, Australia does generally lead the world, or come close to it. I used to work in construction in Australia, and am continually shocked at the practises I see in the EU and the US when I visit. The other thing is that I&#x27;ve seen SafetyCulture hire a lot of very good people, which is never a bad thing for a business to do.