Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business
fourlightyears.blogspot.com
fourlightyears.blogspot.com
I have a very different perspective on this. Australia has had more than just one Atlassian. They've also got Campaign Monitor, BigCommerce, Canva, Where 2 (became Google Maps), Envato. Australia is also growing Freelancer (I don't believe it was initially built here), and I'm sure many others.
Now, let's look at the comment regarding the newly announced innovation strategy does provide lots (probably too much) money to incubators, but so has every country. The incubator thing is just not successful outside a the few outliers YC, TechStars and maybe 1 or 2 others.
However, one of the large components of the plan is tax incentives to early stage investors. There are also bankruptcy law reform. There is also a new Entrepreneur Visa.
Now, Silicon Valley will almost always have an advantage to the history and network there. But that doesn't mean that Australia is "a crappy place" for tech business.
I find Australia a refreshing change from North America. There is a realistic view on revenue models, less money is 'wasted' on poorly thought out businesses. Australians are bright resourceful people.
I think this is a great place to be in tech. It punches above it's weight on the world stage.
If you look at regions with major technology successes, what do you end up with? A bunch in the US, a few in China, a few in India, a few in Canada, a few in Germany, a few in the UK. Where would Australia end up on a list of population vs. influence? I think pretty high.
Turnbull destroyed the fibre to the home NBN and I can't see high speed ubiquitous Internet access coming any time soon.
Imagine if 95% of Australian home - including ones in the country areas - had super high speed Internet - what that would do for the ability of Australians to live and work away from the cities and how good that would be for regional communities. Turnbull and Abbott tossed that out.
I'm cynical about Government support for technology because it usually is very indirect. More often than not any money is funnelled into an "ecosystem of helpers" rather than to the developers. So venture capitalists and incubators get the money which essentially is then substantially dedicated to paying for the salaries and offices of the incubators and venture capitalists rather than going to entrepreneurs. As the blog post points out - there are thousands of developers sitting in their kitchen coding - they do not want a desk and chair as provided by an incubator and - like Atlassian - they do not want to even talk to venture capitalists, let alone waste time and money trying to get funding from them - an extremely unlikely event because the VCs are so risk averse. If I built something that got traction - which is what the VC's want to see - and I really needed VC then I damn sure wouldn't go to Australian VCs for it - that's the path to failure - if you must have money and you have traction, go straight to Silicon Valley first.
I've worked for small tech companies in Australia my entire (not so long) career, and access to high internet speeds has never ever really been a problem. When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really?
Yes, regional areas should be upgraded from dialup/slow sattelite to at least 10mbps. What kind of impact will that have wrt the OP?
As someone who sorely wishes that a tech scene would actually take off here, issues that I believe dwarf the NBN are: small companies can't actually afford to fund hacking/R&D, risk aversion, a culture that is generally dismissive of [the] tech [scene], lack of encouragement in school education, and tax system (also the Australian Consumer Law) that will punish you for trying.
I worked from a co-working "hacker space" for a couple of years and, uh, well, there was not a lot of hacking going on. I've recently gotten into this for myself, and while mildly successful, all our customers are overseas shrug.
Edit: all good points made below. Quality of life will improve for us, still skeptical as to the degree to which it will address fundamental problems with the tech economy here though.
From personal experience as an Australian freelance developer who works mostly remotely, the difference is screencasts and video calls where the other party's screen is fuzzy and sometimes unreadable, with frequent call (or at least video) dropouts/stuttering, vs crystal clear clarity and no dropouts/stuttering.
It's also useful if you are dealing with clients that have medium-large datasets (> 1GB) for you to use. It's the difference between a few minutes transfer or a few hours. I've had cases where the client was local and it was faster for me to catch public transport in to the city and back to pick up a USB with the data rather than transfer it online. That's the lucky case when the client was local - good luck if they're based overseas.
I'm currently in Taiwan and have a 100mbps connection - the difference in doing these things vs doing it in Australia on a 10mbps connection is night and day.
Killing the FTTH NBN was an incredibly short sighted decision.
There's a pretty long list actually. If you've got 10 people in a office sharing a 10mbit pipe then the internet is straight up prohibitively slow. On top of that, if your users are on slow internet then they are less likely to interact with whatever you are building, especially if it involves rich media interaction like uploading photos/videos (and upload speeds are even slower here). Then there are workflow collaboration tools like teleconferencing, dispatching of large files over networks that can take hours. It makes it harder to work remotely and adds a fairly large extra cost for small tech businesses to absorb in getting decent internet set up. And this is all going to get worse as the rest of the world speeds past us and starts creating content for gigabit internet while we are sitting here trying to get by on our promised 25megabits.
Now if your work is rather unusual, OR you have to upload lots of stuff and that goes 100 KB/s max, that's another topic. This is not typical for most devs.
Teleconferencing - for most devs, what is the above value over classic conf call (an honest question)? I see little, it's still far from having people sitting behind same desk and brainstorming.
One office the ADSL worked fine for the first week and then dropped out for a week. It did this every time it rained heavily, the Telstra techs informed us that the copper for the whole street was rotten. We had to run local servers to ensure everyone could continue working if the internet dropped out. Telstra never actually properly fixed it in our two years there.
Another office took 3 months to get connected due to the age of the building, we had to pay two office rents for over 4 months. Then once the company grew to fit the office it outgrew the internet connection, but took another couple of months to get dual band in. All the SaaS services everyone relied on to do their jobs were barely usable, even after a `no streaming media` honor policy was put in place.
This is amplified if you rely on your internet connection for VoIP to communicate with teams around Australia and the world. Important meeting with a client? Keep a 4G modem handy guys.
All these things create risk and frustration for everyone, slowing down your and distracting from getting stuff done.
Also, it's not just the speed, it's reliability. I'm in the Adelaide hills, with old copper, and I'd say I have momentary drop-outs on a regular basis, and drop-outs of a few hours or more once a month. Very annoying when you want an 'always on' connection. I've found my tethered mobile phone is faster to use for uploading than my ADSL2 connection.
Finally - I've also worked remotely based in Estonia, and the reliability, affordability and speed of the connection there eats my local Adelaide connection for breakfast; you don't even really think about, the quality of the connection starts tending towards that of a LAN connection.
Where X is any number of internet reliant service
Hah! This so much. Sorry <client>, we can't have our scheduled video call meeting now because it's raining and my Internet isn't working.
This has actually happened to me. If it wasn't so embarrassingly awful, it'd probably be funny.
The real issue is the cost - around $8/GB. Things are a lot better in cities, but costs are still higher than elsewhere and caps are still prevalent.
It gets even more ridiculous that just down the valley (a 30 minute drive down winding dirt roads, but as the bird flies not too far, and it's the origin of the 3G signal they get now) there's an LTE signal where I got 100 MBit/s on speedtest. At that speed you're spending $8 every 10 seconds!
Fast, reliable Internet is going to be the beating heart of any modern tech economy.
Fix all the other problems you mentioned (tax, education, risk aversion etc) and it will all be for naught if companies and freelancers are stuck on a 10mbps connection that drops out when it rains, because they won't be able to have meaningful and reliable collaboration with anyone outside their own physical location.
You can't have a flourishing tech scene with that limitation. It's not just 'improved quality of life' for techies, it's about being able to conduct business or not in reliable and productive manner.
I live in Canberra though, so it's not like high speed broadband is going to come near me in the next decade.
Bandwidth requirements are increasi year over year, simply because once people can actually use slick media-rich sites, they actually do use them. Once people can VPN in to the Windows-centric workplace, they will. Once office based managers can successfully video-conference their teams, they will.
Without high speed broadband, what hope is there for innovation?
I'd imagine you'd be less nonchalant about it if you were transferring gigabytes of data from a backup in an emergency.
>Yes, regional areas should be upgraded from dialup/slow sattelite to at least 10mbps. What kind of impact will that have wrt the OP?
If you could also include my place, 5km away from Brisbane's CBD, to be upgraded past 5Mbit that'd be pretty sweet too. And to achieve that I have to deal with slightly unreliable internet - rock solid is probably closer to 4-4.5Mbit.
(You greatly overestimate the ubiquity of high-speed internet even in capital cities. It's not just the outback that has terrible internet.)
While you asked about programming, I think it is the non-work stuff that matters, namely entertainment. If you play video games and/or watch Netflix, then a greater than 10mbps might make those things easier and thus more enjoyable, afaik.
I presently have a 1Mbps connection, which is consumed mostly by YouTube videos. All my other internet usage could be satiated with 1/3 of my present bandwidth.
If I cared to watch Netflix or played video games, then I would be unhappy unless I had a substantially better connection, perhaps >10mbps.
On latency, the round-trip time for a packet between Sydney and LA is about 2-3x slower than one would realisticly expect from the transmission medium. Why? It's the routing hops that introduce the additional latency. So it stands to reason that FTTH == fewer routing/repeating hops == lower latency. This is in contrast to 'fibre to the node', which requires additional routing hops, more resending and error correction, and, if you want to use fancy technologies like VDSL 'vectoring', more active processing of communications in transit (to calculate the correct cross-talk cancelling noise to push down all lines). In addition, wave-division multiplexing with latency at 99.7 per cent the speed of light in a vacuum has been achieved on fibre (admittedly in a lab/academic setting) over a distance of 310 metres (source: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.45).
Why is lower latency desirable, from a national economic perspective? Because it creates larger scope for distributed computation of non-parallel processing and higher IO for geographically distributed storage. So data-centres can be located on cheaper land, further away from the CBD. Perhaps in future it also means someone in Darwin could utilise the idling processor, or spare hard disk space, of someone in Sydney via something like Etherium. All of this becomes harder and less efficienct as latency creeps up. For general background, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Comp...
On future upgradability, I'd argue we're reaching the upper bandwidth limits of what copper can provide (as a real world, fixed line infrastructure). This seems to be around 100-150mbit non-symmetric under the most ideal conditions, using some pretty fancy tech (on both the carrier and consumer ends), although the hypothetical maximum is supposedly around 10Gbits (achievable in LANs, unlikely to be achievable in WANs with current copper assets). How long until this is not 'enough'? In contrast, for single strand fibre, NEC have achieved 101Tbit/s over 165km, and NTT 69.1 Tbit/s over 240km.
Cisco projects the volume of global IP traffic to grow at a compounding annualised growth rate of 23% between 2014 and 2019; in other words global IP traffic volume will triple in 5 years (source: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-pr...). Keep in mind this is strictly global IP traffic. Alcatel-lucent and Bell Labs, factoring in 'metro' (non-backbone) traffic (e.g. office to datacentre, consumer to CDN), forecast a quadrupling of bandwidth volume between 2015 and 2020, with an apparently exponential growth rate (source: https://mc-11560-1882305812.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/site...).
By opting to 'destroy' the original NBN, our government has knee-capped Australia's future economic prospects. Perhaps Lee Kuan Yew was right and Australia is destined to be the 'poor white-trash of Asia'.
Whether or not governments should be supportive of technology, is another complex debate with intelligent and articulate contenders on both sides of the argument.
The bigger problem for Australia is the relentless anti-intellectualism that pervades the local culture.
It is unfortunate that the NBN was one of the key points of the campaign, we all know how it's turning out... It will probably ended up costing about the same, yet without the advantages FTTH brings.
I do hope NBN will come to my area soon (within the next 24 months?), I live about 30 mins away from the CBD, but 4G connection is patchy and I only managed to get 2.5 Mbps on `Broadband`.
Hilariously, I was in Bolivia last year. They were ahead of Australia in rolling out proper 4G.
Govts here are terrified of spending money on infrastructure because perceived 'irresponsible spending' is so politically damaging.
(BTW I'm reading 'Keating' at the moment. What a difference in outlook between then and now)
It's on the "business" side where they are difficult to work with, potentially to the point of killing the venture. For a government organisation, who you might think would be on "your" side, they are as hostile as any competitor. You typically end up bound by a one sided contract, as CSIRO have enough lawyers to out lawyer any small company. You have to be careful sharing information with them, as they tend to patent their research before revealing it to their partners, and after the fact you find out that the stuff you were collaboratively discussing and contributing to is now "theirs" to be licensed back to you. There is also potential for them to do a "spin out", in competition with your existing collaboration, and then it is a bun fight to get the organisation to see the potential for conflict.
I think it can be traced back to the government's push for CSIRO to pay its own way, and past successes. Since the WiFi patent bonanza, CSIRO/Data61 has "gold fever" and every industry interaction is locked down tight, to ensure that CSIRO gets a pound of flesh. Frankly, I don't think the WiFi bonanza would have happened with today's environment, as the lawyers would have smothered the life out of the project with up-front demands. As it was, the commercialisation was done largely independently of CSIRO, by partners whose names are not on the patent, and CSIRO got their cut after the event.
I'd guess, data61 is a good source of support if you're inside the organisation and spinning out. For those external to the organisation, my guess is that the costs outweigh the benefits, so better to go it alone. I'd love to hear of other people's experiences here.
Incidentally, the word I'm getting is that most of the "new" money is old money relabeled, but that's just the way Australian politics works.
Clearly that is shortsighted, but there is such momentum (in the form of established procedures etc) that it can be hard to argue against.
But hey - were are close to the worst in the OECD at commercializing research, so something has to change.
(I work for an Australian CRC, but don't speak for them)
Partnerships is not my domain (I'm a developer/PM), so I can't speak to the legal and IP issues.
Massacring the NBN and generally not giving a shit about technology really highlights how out of touch the Australian Government is with the general population. We are among the highest adoption rates for technology (smartphones etc.) worldwide and give a huge amount of money to US companies getting a hold of the latest tech.
Our government is ready to completely ream us once more by signing the TPP - despite the fact the US has clauses for things like "fair use" nothing of that nature exists in Australian law. We'll just adopt the shitty parts of US law and none of the (partially) redeeming parts.
July 17, 2015 - "For the foreseeable future coal is the foundation of prosperity"
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/17/for-tony-...
That just about sums up the amount of vision in Australian politics.
So, pending catastrophic climate change, I'm going to guess Tony will turn out to be right.
And besides, politicians aren't selected for their 'vision', they're selected for some other set of characteristics, whoever knows what. P.J. O'Rourke has plenty to say on this subject.
I take that to mean 'Coal will provide the prosperity that takes Australia forward', rather than 'Coal will continue to provide our electricity'.
i.e. We should invest in Coal, train our children to mine for it, research new ways of producing it, at the expense of other fields like high tech.
The mininig industry has very deep pockets and huge influence on policy, so in turn other industries miss out.
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-13/coal-is-good-for-human...
1. You can already move / live / work here without any immigration hassle.
2. We have an actual UFB fibre to the home network rolling out now that actually works.
3. Local and central government is pretty keen to support the technology scene - from government grants (refer Callaghan Innovation) to local tech hubs. AND help to connect in SF (http://kiwilandingpad.com/)
4. Activity from successful early founders/employees from Xero and others.
5. We build for a global audience -- NZ is just too small to be your only market.
6. Simpler tax system.
7. Better coffee.
I found it incredibly hard to find a new job opening when I wanted one, let alone get hired for them. Flew to London and have had jobs thrown at me nearly every day since. I suspect hiring has the same issues.
The population is just so small. There's a joke that when you say from New Zealand, somebody will ask "Do you know Karl?". Which quite often, happens to be true.
How about VC / Angel / funding scene? Is it pretty vibrant there?
PS. The only downside to your offer is the weather, I like my weather 20-30*C :) I've been to Auckland and Wellington before and I struggle with the cold even during summer.
Also: the wildlife isn't venomous, the trees are not explosive and the sharks don't bite. Met with a friend from Sydney yesterday - she was enjoying the low 20s here after baking in 30+ in Sydney for the last few days. TBH it's a few degrees difference that you acclimatise too - you're not going to need a new wardrobe.
Wine too ;)
Maybe some sort of trickle down effect from the money that goes into Amazon, intel, MS & IBM.
Not sure every home in the US is getting the claimed 10gig internet pipes neither.
The government - university partnerships have been a massive boon to the US tech industry.
They have billions in business grants that you can apply for, covering just about everything you can think of going on in the economy. That includes advanced science and engineering grants, projects at the most cutting edge.
Every home is definitely not getting 10gbps pipes, yet. The US deserves a lot of flack for its poor broadband deployment the prior decade. However it is now undergoing an accelerating broadband boom (as in 100mbps+), probably mostly thanks to Google.
- There is a lot of good CS talent coming out of Australian universities. Lots goes to the Bay Area, some work at Google, Atlassian, Canva (in Sydney at least).
- As others have commented, it seems that there's less useless stuff with unrealistic projections that gets built in Australia. I'm not sure if it's because Australian culture has a strong dose of cynicism (which also probably contributes to some of the remarks in this blog) or because the landscape is indeed bad enough that only the really good startups can survive.
- There are some Australian policies that work pretty well in favour of getting individual startups off the ground. Policies that help startups get off the ground include study assistance (~AUD 200 week from government whilst studying, means tested), a similar unemployment support program, and subsidised universities. These only contribute to the success of individuals, however, they're not good for building an ecosystem.
- I've heard of a number of Australians travelling SE Asia and trying to get their v1 built from there. The internet is much better and your burn rate is much lower. Plus, the breadth of experience is probably good if you're trying to start something with international longevity.
It really kind of annoys me that "foreigners" fall to this victim type mentality and then rather than pushing their own local governments to change, they advocate leaving and only exacerbating the problem by draining the local talent and interest group, while piling on to the concentration of people in the tech centers like the Valley.
I would love to know what the total damage the USA does to source societies and countries by luring and essentially poaching talent and expertise away. I know that India is really kind of struggling with that issue. On one hand they see it as a source of remittances, but on the on the other hand even in a huge population like India they are really starting to feel the sting of the "brain drain" in the tech sector.
I can't really blame them, but it'd be nice if some of the brighter ones stayed around.
I'm looking in Melbourne but the market down there seems like a mess right now.
Couple that with the falling Australian dollar and moving to the US and getting paid in USD doesn't sound so bad.
Personally, I don't like the start-up culture, and I happen to work at a place that does interesting things already, so I'm quite happy staying in Canberra.
Plus, the weather and traffic in Canberra is way better than Melbourne. (Longing for the weather to remain constant for more than 20 minutes...)
And you're right about the traffic - Canberra is very nice in that regard.
NYC's tech scene is bigger than all of Australia's scenes added up.
The Bay Area is bigger than all of Australia's scenes multiplied.
To answer your question, we still do interesting things :)
The NBN was a great idea to be sure, but the Labor government that proposed it proceeded to sabotage itself over the next two terms due to extremely damaging and petty political infighting. In the end Tony Abbott had to just sit quietly while Labour burned itself to the ground, delivering us a conservative prime minister and policies that nobody really wanted. The NBN became a political point. If none of this had happened and Malcolm Turnbull was now in power trying to push the innovation agenda, who knows, maybe he would be proposing something similar to the original NBN.
Bad leaders with good ideas are as helpful as good leaders with bad ideas, as it happens. Good leaders with good ideas don't seem to exist in the current climate. And if you're just unpopular it doesn't matter what your ideas are (eg Bill Shorten).
> Australia sucks at technology; rather than help make it suck less, you should
> leave your home and ensure that the U.S.A continues not to suck at
> technology.
Atlassian would have failed in Silicon Valley as well.
It is kind of strange where the author mentions how Atlassian bootstrapped its way to an IPO after many years and then tells entrepreneurs to head to "boom or bust" Silicon Valley.
The truth is that an Atlassian-style business can be built from just about anywhere.
You will need to market appropriately, but if your product is great, it will eventually get to a point where it will market itself quite a bit too.
I know it mentioned "state of the art", but the vast majority of Americans would be lucky to get 100 megabits without breaking the bank every month. Many (most?) don't even have the option of such speeds.
When the new NBN is rolled out, most will have the option for 25 Mbps. This plan is due to be completed by 2020.
We can get 100mbit fibre for $1000/mo, plus cost of installing the fibre.
We can get 12/12 DSL for $300/mo.
As an app developer, I am often unable to upload anything to iTunes Connect without saturating the link and it timing out. The only feasible option is paying a premium for 4G/LTE speeds on Telstra.
It is continually dropping out (I get an average about 1 hour a week of downtime), my upload speed tops out at 35mbit (using iiNet's own tools) and for a lot of things like YouTube, videos can be sketchy, even on the more popular ones.
Australian's really aren't missing out on much if this was supposed to be the standard.
Well, technically you can get AT&T "high speed" internet for $50+ per month, at a whopping 18mbps max.
This is the capital of Califoria, so, yeah.
At the moment the highest grade connection attainable for most residents of Australia is ADSL2+, with a max speed of 24Mbps (realistically you're lucky to see 10). This usually comes with a bandwidth cap that varies based on the price you pay (e.g. [0]) as well as a contract. For a moderately high usage household (streaming video, YouTube, downloading video games), you'll usually have to pay ~$90 for one of the better performing providers (such as Telstra) or ~$80 for one of the lesser providers without a cap (e.g. TPG and the like which often offer unlimited but have plenty of congestion issues). Further, if you're not in a metropolitan area, usually you pay an extra $20-$30 monthly premium.
Compare that to the US, where most (or many) [1] households have access to 50-100Mbps cable for a reasonable (I pay ~$75/month for 150Mbps in a Comcast monopoly area) price.
America isn't great compared to what could be but it's a whole lot better than Australia.
For example, if there is existing coaxial cable infrastructure in an area, it may be far less expensive to deploy higher-speed DOCSIS than it is to roll out entirely new fibre for the same amount of bandwidth. DOCSIS is easily capable of gigabit speeds, the main issues are sharing QAMs with existing cable television and the ratio of customers per headend.
Plus, Labor should have done a better job communicating the value of (FTTH) NBN. The average people in Australia think NBN is just to watch YouTube in HD.
I like to play "stupid or liar" when it comes to things like this, but I can't figure out which it is when it comes to the NBN decision making.
http://www.nbnco.com.au/blog/singapores-gigabit-dream-arrive...
Or to put it another way: our bad solution is superior because it's slower.
Almost all of the successful Australian companies you hear about have bootstrapped themselves from nothing and succeeded against astronomical odds. It seems that the few companies that do get funded rarely go anywhere.
A big problem with Australian investors is that they're extremely hesitant to invest in projects which are not within their immediate area of expertise - And this is generally limited to simple B2C companies which are basically rip-offs of successful startups in the US. Investors don't care much about potential - They care about numbers.
High-tech projects like NoSQL databases, backend-as-a-service platforms, machine learning platforms, etc... These things generally don't get funded in Australia.
It's basically welfare for those starting their own company. You get paid the normal welfare rates (~$225AU per week in QLD) to start your company. You have to provide a basic business plan and meet up with a mentor once a month to ensure you're actually working on it, but other than that it's a free income stream.
http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/10/09/the_median_rent_for...
It's at a point where people that aren't earning 6 figure salaries can't live in the city anymore.
I know the costs of living in Sydney and Melbourne is high, but SF is next level.
We won the Australian Internet awards for best software - nobody cared - so we moved to Silicon Valley. Problem fixed!