How did Australian universities contribute to the startup ecosystem?

“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.”

“So offices had them. And corporate campuses and maybe universities, but almost nowhere else, right? So if you and 3 friends were thinking about getting started and doing your own startup, almost though, like the first thing you had to figure out was like, where are we gonna collaborate on this from? You know, you couldn't just go and sit in a coworking space. You couldn't have a coworking space. You couldn't afford to put in enough internet ports in the space unless, you know, you were a corporation and, you know, you were paying a big property manager serious money every year to lease a corporate headquarters. And so when we started Yahoo Australia and New Zealand, we actually, we got a favor from APN, the media company, and we kind of sublet one of their meeting rooms. Now from memory, you know, for probably maybe almost a year, we were all working from this little meeting room with a limited number of Ethernet ports and cable snaking away from the one meeting room table where we all sat. You had to be careful, you know, coming and leaving because you could trip over somebody's Ethernet cable. Yeah. Bugger up what they were doing.”