How did Australian startups attract technical talent?

“If you spoke with bureaucrats back then, they really had precious few ideas about what a tech startup was. So we needed to change that and make sure that Treasury and other departments were on board and supporting tech startups with good policies. I definitely think the work that Startup Oz did on the policy side helped get the settings right for startups, made it easy for startups to essentially reward their employees with incentive stock options, Think about a startup. Startups, you know, in the early days, they're really competing for talent. They can't compete with salary, so they really need other ways of incentivizing their early employees, and that's why incentive stock options and such are so, so important for startups. I'm very proud of the work we did with Immigration 2 and the new entrepreneurship visas, which made it a lot easier for startups to bring in the talent they needed. In the early days, even though there was no shortage of engineers in Australia, it seems like Australia has always produced strong engineers ever since engineers existed, or even before we called engineers engineers. So there was no shortage of smart software engineers, computer science graduates. What we lacked were those other vital roles, you know, the user experience, user interface, the product managers. Those were job descriptions that weren't even considered real job descriptions back in 2013, so we worked hard to make sure that those jobs were known to immigration and were then fast-tracked because startups were crying out for that kind of talent.”

“If you wanted to be a big IT vendor selling into Australian government, you had to commit to doing some R&D here in Australia. You had to spend a bunch of money on a computer lab, employ a bunch of computer engineers. You'd usually import some senior talent from your headquarters overseas to come and sort of get things started here. You might work with Australian Computer Society, which is kind of the trade union of programmers in Australia, to come up with a scholarship system. And you'd start recruiting talent at universities and you'd try and influence the way that universities were teaching their computer science students so that they were more familiar with, you know, because the ecosystem was very, very siloed back then.”

“No, I don't think we really got a startup ecosystem in Australia until circa 2012. We had, and we do have today, some amazing examples of technology companies that were founded in Australia that have gone on to be global success stories. And you look in Queensland at Technology One, for example, publicly listed, worth around $2 billion, been going for 30 years. And they were one example. There was Technology One, there was Mincom, there were a bunch of other companies at the same time. So Australia has this history in building really innovative companies. But they didn't do it so much as part of a startup ecosystem. I think the language around startups and that kind of born global, you know, raise venture capital, that kind of, those attributes and characteristics really came into flavour, I guess, you know, in Australia from 2010. There, obviously there were some great examples prior to that. And you think about WhatIf as an example. There were definitely innovative companies that took advantage of the first tech bubble. And I would say that From 2010 to 2015, the startup movement really took shape in Australia. And then from 2015 onwards, it's just continued to accelerate and get bigger and, you know, have more energy about it.”