Meet the million dollar start-up gurus Malcolm Turnbull wants back in Australia

SOCIALLY and culturally progressive and likely to show up at Burning Man Festival, these are the innovators Australia needs back for the “ideas boom”.

The start-up gurus Turnbull wants back

SOCIALLY and culturally progressive, pro choice, and more likely to show up at Burning Man Festival than a nightclub with a 12 o’clock curfew, these are the innovators that Prime Minister Turnbull wants to lure back to Australia to head our “ideas boom”.

At 30, Kate Kendall, who is originally from Melbourne, is riding the wave of global innovation with the best of them.

Based in San Francisco — the new home of Silicon Valley where the original dotcom boom took place — she is the founder and CEO of CloudPeeps.com, an online marketplace that matches companies with 1400 of the top marketing freelancers to grow their businesses.

Her day begins with a walk near the Golden Gate Bridge, after which she’ll either work “remotely” from home or in one the many co-working spaces she rents alongside thousands of other tech workers in San Francisco.

“There’s a good amount of variation in your typical work week,” she begins.

In any given week she will release new website features with her team of six, attend forums comprised of “hand selected” angel investors (who bankroll start-ups), speak on panels at conferences, or chat with other Aussies in tech on groups like ‘Aussie Mafia’ — a FB page for the thousands of Aussie expat tech workers in San Francisco.

A couple of days before we spoke she’d pitched her company over burgers at well-known investor Jason Calacanis’s (founder of Launch Festival and This Week in Startups) home in Pacific Heights as part of the Open Angel Forum.

Australia is getting there but we still have a way to go, she says.

“There is a lot of excitement around the industry and what needs to be done in order to become the innovation hub but there’s also a lot of naivety,” says Kate.

“Australia, for a long-time, has been promoted as a destination for investment in mining and primary industries. We’re seeing that industry fall down in recent months and people are asking what is the next thing?”

The biggest challenge facing Australia’s start-up industry, as she sees it, is access to capital.

“Five years ago, there were only a couple of angel investors and founders who had exited tech companies in Melbourne. That’s why I headed to the States. It’s much more active now but it will take time to get closer to what it’s like in the Valley,” she says, going on to list a raft of much-needed tweaks to legislation that would help incubate a thriving start-up scene in Australia.

“There’s a lot of things being proposed. The restructuring of how company share structures work needs to happen. Working at a start-up as an employee is tough — there’s lots of risk, often little perks and never-ending change. Having equity can make or break that experience. It’s harder to issue equity in Australia, so it can be difficult to attract and retain talent,” she says.

There’s a lot working in our favour, too. One of the biggest appeals of Silicon Valley are the vast natural riches that surround it. Many tech workers spend their weekends hiking in Yosemite National Park, surfing the waves of Santa Cruz, or skiing in Lake Tahoe.

“One of the things I love about San Francisco is you have the epicentre of tech positioned right next to so much nature. I think it keeps people grounded,” she says.

“Sydney and Melbourne are consistently ranked as two of the most liveable cities in the world so Australia can position itself as the best place to do a start-up in terms of environment and lifestyle, and attract entrepreneurs this way,” she says.

There’s also our proximity to Asia which has the potential to lure investors and founders wanting to build businesses in that region.

“You see a lot of large US companies launching first in Australia due to it being a similar market to home and English-speaking. It’s great as we’ve become a gateway to Asia and should capitalise more on this.” she says.

When Tim Noakesmith picks up the phone he’s doing Prime Minister Turnbull proud back here in Australia — he’s catching a public bus on his way to a locally grown start-up in Walsh Bay, Sydney. Having worked in the tech industry at home and abroad, he believes any lifestyle positives afforded by Australia are currently being outweighed by anachronistic social and cultural attitudes.

“He (Turnbull) has to walk the walk and support things that foster cultural change and forward thinking. If you want to foster an environment for progressive thinking, that’s a prerequisite. Simple things like same-sex marriage, stomping out base Australian racism, gender equality, the big issues of the past three decades that other cities are so far ahead on, Australia needs to catch up to,” he says.

If you want to understand what makes the tech industry tick, Tim says it helps to imagine it as a global community existing above and beyond the bounds of any one nation. It is an industry that will not be dictated to. You either play their game, or they’ll take their business, and their talent, elsewhere.

“The most interesting thing about my industry on a global perspective is this consciousness shift, this paradigm shift of consciousness. There is an air of spirituality surrounding the idea of making money, where making money in itself is simply futile and there is more to life than that. We’ve moved away from this past system of social manipulation to achieve profits. We see that today genuine value can be provided to people and the global economy through honest means,” he says.

The avants garde Californian desert festival Burning Man is now rammed with tech workers each year.

Brisbane-born, New York City start-up worker, Alan Stormon’s boss is one of them. Stormon agrees the tech industry tends to attract a certain type of person and believes many would jump at the opportunity to live and work in Australia.

“Apart from an amazing lifestyle, mixing a start-up job and tech scene in the Sydney/Melbourne way of life would be incredible. Being able to ride out to the beach after work for a swim is insane and I miss that the most,”he says.

“It would almost be a utopian life, creating cool products, with appropriate funding, living in an amazing city, great coffee, beaches and beautiful women. That would be amazing.

Sadly we’re punching well below our weight when it comes to social and cultural prerequisites.

“Sydney is killing its night-life with the lockout laws, and killing any chance of change in place of serving older demographics in society, that’s never gonna help. The start-up scene is for young successful people having a crack and they want to live in a city that will support them and help them facilitate change, you know, like you can’t serve wine from a bottle shop after 10pm in Sydney. What the f*** is that?” he says.

Originally published as Meet the million dollar start-up gurus Malcolm Turnbull wants back in Australia