Hey Geoff, wondering if you have ever read Building High Tech Clusters
(Bresnahan et al) or maybe From Underdogs to Tigers (Arora, Gambardella)?
There is a chapter in the first one by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore of
Intel which you might find interesting given your background and
experiences.
It's not like all of the points you raise in your post have been thought
about and considered by hundreds of other really smart people working on
this for decades or anything! (Hey I actually kind of enjoy this whole
sarcasm thing. It's a hell of a lot less stressful than doing any actual
real research on the topic.).
One of the key historical lessons is starting a cluster is qualitatively
different from continuing a successful cluster.
Enjoy the reading ;)
Peter
On Thursday, 15 May 2014 09:21:18 UTC+10, Geoff Langdale wrote:
>
> Maybe when they're cashing out, we can ask them whether they would agree
> that what Australia's tech sector really needs is lower salaries, like
> Peter seems to think.
>
> By now everyone knows the story of Atlassian - how two talented MBA
> students from UNSW hired cheap overseas technical labor to build an idea
> they had from their business school professor. I shudder to think what
> would have happened if Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar had been lured into
> computer science ("tech skills") by the amazingly high salaries that
> Australians pay to individual tech contributors; so much higher than what
> their peers in banking, finance or law scrape by on.
>
> I await with some excitement the "low-salary tech skill" startup
> ecosystem. I think once our salaries get down to the low levels seen in
> Silicon Valley, we can really start to accomplish things. I simply can't
> wait to tell a whole generation of future tech co-founders that amazing
> opportunities await them in this new world just as soon as their skills are
> valued even lower than they are now. I'm sure that their excitement over
> the fact that they will be able to scale their businesses by hiring a bunch
> of $40K new grads like themselves will be almost unbounded. The conveyor
> belts taking tech talent to SF and into finance will go into reverse, and a
> New Dawn of startups will appear in Sydney.
>
> Sarcasm aside, there are problems with the talent pool in Sydney - there
> are (or have been historically) too many different lucrative things pulling
> talented tech people away from the startup world (Google Sydney, up until
> recently Silverbrook, the financials, emigration, etc). I am still not
> convinced that pumping a great big supply of cheap labour into the tech
> world is going to be much of a fix for what ails startups.
>
> Also: I'm aware that not all start-ups require innovation on the *tech *side,
> and that if your innovations are elsewhere - i.e. in the business model -
> you might be quite happy to have a big supply of $A30-40K p/a new graduate
> chimpanzees pounding on your code. If y'all think you can get by on just
> these type of startups, feel free to chirp about the low-wage tech future,
> but don't turn around and analogize to Google, Atlassian, etc. - or any
> other startup that either was a pure tech startup or needed a hell of a lot
> of first-rate tech innovation to find its feet.
>
> Geoff.
>
> On Wednesday, 14 May 2014 21:41:07 UTC+10, Rayn Ong wrote:
>>
>> In response to Peter's point about Aussie unicorn, not exactly an exit
>> but a good start.
>>
>> Like the company’s previous funding from Accel Partners in 2010,
>> *Atlassian’s
>>> employees will cash out of some shares* at a valuation of $3.3 billion,
>>> according to a person familiar with the transaction. In the tender offer,
>>> T. Rowe Price and Dragoneer Investment Capital will purchase up to $150
>>> million from existing shareholders.
>>>
>>
>> via
>> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/08/atlassian-valued-at-3-3-billion-selling-business-software-sans-salespeople/
>>
>>
>> I agree with @pc0's point about transparency, and I agree with Geoff M's
>> point about founders being time poor. Checks and balances are important and
>> discussion thread like this is very healthy, it certainly helps me see the
>> big picture more clearly.
>>
>>
>>
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