I’m passionate about learning more about the start up industry in Australia.

Is there more to learning about the early steps in any successful collaboration. Can this help all types of associations be more effective, promote diversity, be more creative, snap open new ideas, solve real world problems, deal with competition, resolve disputes, build friendships, get more done and save money.

I admire those crazy people who attempt a start up. I’ve done it before and learnt a lot. It’s a steep learning curve.

// Wake up. Design a solution. Build a startup. Harvest the rewards. Go home.

The more I think about my every day work, the more I realise, every project I work on would be more effective if the team operated like a startup.

I work for many different types of organisations. Banks. Governments. Social initiatives. Agricultural schemes. I do many different things but the end goal is always the same.

I seem to be the only person who thinks that every technology business is a start up business. That every line of code is a start up process. That software development is fundamentally a process of reorganising “thinking” and starting something new.

Just to clarify. Startup thinking is not agile thinking. Startups revolve around doing more with less and ownership. Agile thinking revolves around collaboration, iteration and continuous delivery. Start up thinkers are agile.

There is a lot to learn here. This space seems to ramble. I wonder, would it be worth doing a research project on this? To spend some time delving into what drives Sydney start ups. To meet with a new business every week and do a survey. To dissect mission statements. To explore the inner works and lessons of start ups. Report on roles and responsibilities. Explore bizarre values. Get to know customers. Understand the fine process of eeking out fine margins in unknown markets. Summaries group size theory. Detail mistakes. Learn about decision making habits. Understand work life balance. Detail hack job technical implementations.

Did you know:

  • Fewer than 5% of Australian startups are scaling into sustainable, global businesses
  • U.S. companies are raising 4.8 times more capital in the early stages and 100 times more when they are ready to scale their operations
  • Sydney is the largest Australian startup hub – 55% larger than Melbourne, six times larger than Brisbane and eight times larger than Perth
  • Australian entrepreneurs are less ambitious than those in Silicon Valley and New York, and tend to tackle much smaller markets. They tackle niche markets 14% more often than entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley
  • There are very few female founders starting companies, accounting for just 4.3% of those included in the study
  • Silicon Valley startups create 2.6 times more jobs than Australian startups in the early stages of development
  • Sydney entrepreneurs are 86% less likely to want to get rich, 45% less likely to want to change the world, and 37% more likely to want to build a great product, than their counterparts in Silicon Valley.

I’m curious. Are the lessons learnt by successful and failing start ups a key to friendship, family, happiness, the universe and everything else? What would a report on this look like?