Some notes in response to the recent crunchbase 2021 unicorn data.

🏖️ Australia is a career limiting move if you want to work in innovative growth tech. We don’t have the funding needed to drive new ideas to production and scale. If you want to cruise in a “small well establish” business, there are some opportunities. This is not a “learning” industry.

Having recently moved back from NYC, this has been interesting to observe.

“If you have labour to offer and you want to learning, then Australia is going to be stifling. There are some lifestyle perks tho, and it is generally a safer place to let your kids run around town. It’s just not intellectually stimulating.”

What changes do you envision over the next decade? Asia? More US? Is the world going to stop using Amazon and start using Alibaba?

“For as long as the US remains the geopolitical aggressor companies like Amazon will continue to remain the leader. Venture capitol money in APAC is too conservative.”

China will get bigger tech but also be majority government owned. US, given its free market, will have more and better tech opportunities

What sort of tech work do you find in Australia?

I’m finding lots of teams that are working on small-scale work. 300k users, not 10 million users.

Remote life revolves around active time zones. Innovation and agile collaboration require teams to wake up, eat and sleep around the same time. Juniors and Seniors. Onboarding new hires. Collective learning.

This leaves Australia with a limited pool of teams in south east asia. Not India or China given they come online too late in the day.

What about Atlassian and Canva?

Atlassian has more engineering teams in the US than they do in Australia. And the Austalia teams are in maintenance mode. Primarily working to keep legacy systems alive. Atlassian HQ is essentially in the United States, it’s stock ticker is on the NASDAQ.

Canva is a rapidly growing visual design tooling platform with many uncertainties, yet to go public. IMHO they will need to seriously consider their engineering team growth strategy if they are to attract talent. Currently at 2000 employees.

These two companies are still, in total, slim pickings.

What about small / medium size companies?

This is where is much worse in Australia. VC’s are far less likely to take a small / medium bet in Australia. It’s much harder to roll out and land a new product in this market. It’s difficult for product teams to build a relationship with their primary audience and develop the empathy necessary to release new software at scale (millions).

If you’re B2B or B2C, your primary customer is most likely not in this timezone.