Startups face up to the competition

Tech innovators, investors and entrepreneurs descended on Perth during the past fortnight for a series of startup events that sparked wide-ranging discussions about how to strengthen the local ecosystem and compete on the world stage.

Industry groups Techboard, Startup Muster and StartupAus spoke at an event led by Startup WA, finding consensus that the first step was to publicise success stories as loudly as possible, ideally through mainstream media.

Startup promotion platform Techboard’s co-founder, Peter Van Bruchem, said very little money outside public markets was available in Perth, with venture capitalists in short supply relative to other states, meaning Western Australian players needed to work harder to attract investor attention.

He said there was a lack of transparency in WA around who invests, as exemplified by the relatively low representation of investors across startup event panellists in Perth.

WA-based entrepreneurs looking for investment in excess of $500,000 generally needed to look towards the public market or at investors outside of the state, Mr Van Bruchem said. 

Capturing and communicating data was one thing the startup community in WA needed to take seriously, said the panellists, who all recently released data reports.

“Greater visibility on what is actually happening encourages and enables people to do stuff that they wouldn’t otherwise achieve,” Mr Van Bruchem said.

Chief executive of Advocacy group StartupAus, Alex McCauley, said attracting global talent and preventing a brain drain was an opportunity that Australia should seize.

“Australia needs to be able to draw from a global pool of really skilled, technical talent and startup talent if they’re going to compete with companies around the world for global market share,” he said.

“There’s a really big opportunity at the moment with the US shutting down skilled immigration, and the UK also doing the same thing, for Australia to hoover up lots of the world’s best talent.”

While Australia has also tightened its stance on immigration, revising the 457-visa system, Mr McCauley said he believed the changes could create space for new visas, such as UX and UI designers, which had not previously been available.

Mr McCauley said Australia, and WA in particular, needed to invest in the startup sector as it was a major avenue for new employment and future prosperity, given the reliance on the resources industries to propel national growth in recent years.

“We have to start adding some value to some of the exports we’ve got, we can’t just rely on digging things out of the ground,” he said.

Harvard University has ranked Australia 65th for ‘export complexity’, a measure of a country’s adaptability to market change based on the complexity and variability of exports (e.g. aeroplane parts as opposed to raw metals). This places it below countries such as Kazakhstan and Chile.

Tech talk

Also held in Perth this month was the week-long West Tech Fest, which included a host of panel discussions, presentations, and a startup challenge. (See Technology, page 34.)

Go Capital chairman Geoff Pritchard told one such panel forum that traditional mining companies needed to innovate.

“I don’t think the tech bubble is going to burst, I think it’s going to change … tech is across every single industry,” he said.

BHP Billiton head of low-emissions technology, Kirsten Rose, said making BHP more penetrable by the tech ecosystem was something she was working on.

“We’re a mining company but we’re becoming a technology company, and that’s not an easy transition, but the tech boom, I think, will change the clock,” she said.

While Mr Pritchard said he had seen the quality of startup ideas grow significantly, HealthEngine chief executive Marcus Tan said it would take about 20 years to cultivate a strong ecosystem, and WA was approximately six years into its version.

“You need to raise money from other sources other than founders and funnel that money back into the ecosystem,” Dr Tan said.

Techboard 2017 WA awards

Techboard’s annual awards serve to recognise startups’ success and encourage them to take the next step in the market. This year, Techboard announced Power Ledger as WA’s highest trending company, and Credi as the highest trending up and coming company.

A leading blockchain-powered peer-to-peer renewable energy marketplace, Power Ledger was co-founded by Perth Deputy Lord Mayor, Jemma Green.

Techboard said the awards capped a particularly successful year for Power Ledger, which welcomed prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bill Tai as a board adviser, and completed a successful token sale (generating and selling a new cryptocurrency), which raised $34 million from over 15,000 buyers.

Launched this year, online platform for managing loan agreements, Credi, has managed more than $50 million in loans and generated substantial media attention, Techboard said.

On the back of this success, the company has completed an oversubscribed $500,000 first round raising, and has launched in New Zealand with a planned release to a further 67 countries this month.