Entrepreneurs lift lid on start-up success

SOME of Australia’s most successful entrepreneurs will lift the lid on how they turned their digital start-ups into major technology companies.

SOME of Australia’s most successful entrepreneurs, including Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes and Freelancer’s Matt Barrie, will lift the lid on how they turned their digital start-ups into some of Australia’s best-known technology companies at a new conference in Sydney this week.

The conference, called The Sunrise, is organised by venture capital firm Blackbird Ventures and start-up accelerator StartMate in conjunction with major sponsors including Google, Amazon Web Services and Optus Innov8.

The Sunrise will not only chronicle the early years of some of the nation’s most iconic technology start-ups, but will also reveal how some of these companies clocked up recurring revenue, and how they acquired early customers.

“The aim of the conference is ultimately to help start-ups succeed by sharing the learnings of our most successful companies. Each session will go into micro detail on the decisions they all made to get started and how they won their first customers. So a very deep snapshot of the early moments that mattered in their growth,” said Niki Scevak, co-founder of Blackbird Ventures and Startmate.

Aside from Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes and Freelancer’s Matt Barrie, the event has also secured Bevan Clark, co-founder of RetailMeNot and Collis Ta’eed, co-founder of Envato to speak at the event.

“I think more broadly it is also a celebration of how many awesome technology success stories we do have,” Mr Scevak said.

“Envato for instance, would probably be a billion dollar company if it ever did a financing event. SpringSource was founded by an Australian and was sold to VMWare for hundreds of millions that no one really knows about. RedBubble will soon do hundreds of millions of marketplace revenue and is one of the largest design communities on the web. And so on.”

The event, which is taking place on Friday at the Australian Technology Park in Eveleigh Sydney, has almost sold out with over 700 tickets already snapped up by aspiring entrepreneurs.

Mr Scevak said he would like the event to turn into an annual one where founders of successful companies could come back and lend their knowledge and expertise to the next generation of tech hopefuls.

“The speakers are helping to create a better ecosystem that they themselves wished they had when they were starting,” he said.

“There are plenty of flow on benefits, in that the audience will have greater respect for them as companies and potentially join them as employees and a fair portion of the speakers are investors themselves.”