Why did Australian founders move to Silicon Valley?

“Yeah, I think, I do think, you know, the Australian startup economy is on the right track. I think a lot of things had to shift to allow it to even exist beyond the things I described. If you think about the progression of technology waves that people can try to ride, the foundational waves around designing computer chip and creating what became Silicon Valley, that's a very different game than building a Canva or an Atlassian. You need hundreds of people that are trained in semiconductor physics and computer design in certain key fields. And they kind of in that era had to be in one place. And so I think in that era what would happen is people with that kind of skill or talent or knowledge would leave wherever they were and move to California to go build these computer chips because that's the only place you could do that. And then as that wave kind of matured and then you could build computer products and communication systems like routers and switches and hubs and then build internet, That also was largely a heavy team, heavy capital business model that existed pretty much in Silicon Valley. And then I think once that infrastructure was built out and you could access it from anywhere through a browser, then the game changed. So when I was talking about, you know, kind of funding any kid in a dorm room, Mark Zuckerberg was evidence of that. While he did pick up to move to California, he didn't necessarily have to. It was better for him because it was easier to scale a business in California than other places. But I think the startup part of getting a business off the ground became frictionless and abstracted once the World Wide Web got built out for that kind of business. It's still likely the case that it's quicker to scale a company in California because there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people that had already done what you want them to do at companies like Yahoo and Google and Facebook and you name it. Those kinds of ecosystems for scaling are not yet super mature in other countries. But I think getting them off the ground and growing them at lower cost structures in nice environments like Australia has proven to work. You know, the cultures and cost structures at Atlassian Canada are great and very sticky. Now, it might take a little bi”

“It has been the case, I think, that Silicon Valley got its momentum because there was a very egalitarian system stemming back to, I think, the '70s, where the management teams of companies that were starting would set aside pretty good amounts of their share capital structure to give to employees that would join them. And I think because those companies worked and a lot of people did well financially, it sort of became part of the culture, ethos, and expectations of people from all over the country moving to Silicon Valley that they would have their shot at making a fortune by following their dreams by coming to California and joining companies led by young founders that were willing to share rather than going to gigantic older corporations where any ownership they could get was kind of a drop in the bucket.”