SA needs a mindset switch to welcome risk and mistakes, says David Rohrsheim, a tech geek with $50m to invest
Former Uber boss David Rohrsheim wants South Australians to see failure as a learning experience, and not constanly try to minimise mistakes, if we’re going to continue to become a city for entrepeneurs.
SA News
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South Australians need to rethink their attitude to risk and embrace failure in order to tap into the entrepreneurial culture that drives global business success, says the Adelaide “tech geek” who brought Uber to Australia.
David Rohrsheim, who has $50 million to invest in SA entrepreneurs as manager of the state government’s venture capital fund, said making mistakes helped people learn.
He said one of the big lessons he’d taken from working in the California tech hub Silicon Valley was the need to be “more comfortable with mistakes and failure as an acceptable thing to do, and in fact, even desirable.”
But in SA the focus was on minimising mistakes, starting with the education system, where the push was for a perfect score at school and university to secure a great job.
“The first mindset shift that needs to happen is at high school – this idea you get a perfect score, you get to the top of the class, then you get the first chance for the good jobs,” he said.
“There needs to be a safer space to make mistakes.”
In California, there was an idea “that if you try and fail it’s okay, as opposed to ‘I told you so’, or ‘you should have waited your turn’, or ‘why didn’t you just join a law firm or become a doctor’. So that was just a different mindset.”
Another key difference was that Californian internet entrepreneurs viewed the world as their market from day one – a lesson for South Australians to think big.
As well, alternative thinking needed encouragement, he said.
“If you are going to be a successful entrepreneur you need to be doing something that almost nobody else is,” he tells SAWeekend in an extensive interview.
“You need to be swimming against the tide. So you’ve got to be comfortable going somewhere where people are going laugh at you on the way because you’re doing something that is different and, by definition, the rest of the world disagrees with you, otherwise they’d all be doing it.
“So everyone has got to be comfortable going out into that scary place where people are going to say, ‘That’s not going to work’. And, unfortunately in Adelaide, there are plenty of people who will tell you that – starting with friends and family.”
Mr Rohrsheim, who is now on the council of governors at top private school St Peter’s College, said he was keen to explore the issues within the school.
Targeting a high ATAR score could mean students did not pursue their interests for fear of scoring lower marks – yet passion was a key ingredient in successful entrepreneurs.
He said at Stanford University, where he did his MBA, all students agreed to never disclose their marks – a decision that allowed them to choose subjects on the basis of interests, rather than what they did well. They also had no disincentives from helping each other.