#protip – never rent a ZipCar unless you know exactly where it is located. As in you’ve eyeballed the spot and the car yourself BEFORE you book it.

Am spending the day down in Palo Alto today, and had a gap between meetings. I’m meeting up with a mate down here for an Advance event at 6pm, and he’s going to give me a ride back to the city, so I thought, sweet, I’ll catch the Caltrain down.

Then a friend at Google messaged me and suggested I come over there for lunch, meet some people in the field, hang out – perfect. The cabs here in Silicon Valley are really expensive and hard to find, so I thought, sweet, I’ll get a Zipcar from Mountain View, duck over to Google, have lunch, do the meeting with the lawyers at 3pm, then drop the car back at Mountain View, train it a couple of stops to the 6pm event, and get a ride home.

FAIL.

The first unfortunate thing is that Zipcar’s Mountain View location isn’t actually in Mountain View. Doh. Get off the train in the wrong place, and have to head back one stop to San Antonio. One stop in these rip off dirty stinky taxis – $14 please. My mistake; booked the Zipcar in a hurry at a cafe in Palo Alto and was on the train when looking up the address, and was too slow.

Then I get dropped off right where Google Maps says the Zipcar will be – 175 S San Antonio Road. Turns out, though that Google Maps on the mobile is wrong. Wrong by miles. Would have taken 45 mins to walk between where it said the location was, and where the car actually was.

Of course, I didn’t realize this until I’d been looking – on foot, in the sun – for the car through the large parking lots around the Safeway, or the business park, or even in the underground garage next to the Caltrain. I inspected every Prius, hoping for it to be a Zipcar. FAIL.

So, after 45 mins, I call Zipcar, and we have an entertaining chat about the nearest cross streets. Then I realized Google was way off, and decided more than an hour after getting off the train in Mountain View to give up on the whole plan entirely.

So, relying on technology for location, and Zipcar to actually have the car in Mountain View where they say it is on the listing, not Los Altos where it actually is located, ended up with a whole day of fail. Perhaps I’ll have to buy a car to survive here after all.

I checked in on the headlines this morning and got a big shock, one I didn’t really see coming. Google has acquired Motorola for $12.5B and gaining another 20K employees in the process.

Some pretty interesting thoughts already emerging, even though as John Lilly says, the structure of the deal and what will happen with the business going forward is by no means certain.

The main ones I’m seeing are:

1. This is all about getting an integrated hardware/software solution to compete with the much superior iPhone experience.
2. This is all about getting the patent portfolio of Motorola so Google isn’t standing there with a knife – or a ukulele playing kumbaya – in the patent gun fight.

The Integrated Stack Hypothesis

I don’t really buy the first argument. Samsung, HTC and Motorola are all creating great handsets and fantastic user experiences. The Samsung Galaxy II is in my experience a much better user experience than the iPhone. Sure, then there’ll be the iPhone 5 and the competition will continue, but this mindset that iPhone is so clearly superior is a very Silicon Valley thing; Android is already out-selling the iPhone, and Apple continue to limit their innovations to their own platform (most recent examples being their messenger product, and before that, Facetime). We’ve seen this story before.

While Motorola is the only one of these three big companies to make the Android-only bet, and thus is most ready for acquisition in that respect, and Samsung is too big, diversified and successful to be a target either – do you know they make earthmoving equipment? – the reality is that Google doesn’t need to develop the “integrated hardware and software stack” to make Android a success – Android is already a success, and that is why it is being hit so hard in IP fights.

The IP Hypothesis

The second reason that is certainly true and real – Larry admitted it in black and white on their blog post announcing the deal – is the IP protection consideration. To give themselves a defensive warchest – which they can cross-licence to HTC and Samsung and the rest, thereby giving them a bigger shield than they’ve enjoyed thus far – Google have just gone out and bought a hardware manufacturing and distribution business, acquired the obligations that come with having another 20,000 staff, and god-knows-what-else-is-hiding-in-an-80+-year-old-company. They surely haven’t had time to do due dilligence: no-one saw this coming. They’re making a pretty big bet, and all that just a month after they lost at Nortel bid in what MG described as a replay of the staking game from Casino Royale.

Now, not all patent portfolios are created equal, but Google recently passed up the opportunity to acquire all of the Nortel Patents for $4.5B. That is almost a third as much as they’ve just spent on buying Motorola. So, either there’s something amazing in the operating Motorola business compared to the defunct Nortel business that justifies spending an extra $8B when Google said the reason they backed out of the Nortel auction was because the price was too steep, or someone from Google on the Nortel team doesn’t get their Christmas bonus this year.

The Market Hypothesis

There’s a third, and I think really important reason, why doing this deal might make sense in the long run for Google, and I haven’t seen it spoken about yet in this debate. A year ago MG @ Techcrunch was railing about how the Carriers here in the US were using the ‘open’ nature of Android to continue their vice-like grip of the user experience for their customers. Buy a Sprint phone, and you get it jammed full of crapware like bogan Nascar apps and the like. Same with Verizon, and with the Galaxy II in Australia, you’d get the bullshit Optus apps and Samsung’s rubbish app store just confusing users.

There is another potential in the mix here. Apparently, when Google were first thinking about how to take Android to market, they wanted to have a $100 phone which wasn’t tied to a carrier. The carriers apparently vetoed this scenario, and Google realized without a cell network of its own the idea was DOA.

That was before the success of Android, but they’d still really struggle to do it without a serious hardware capability; a hardware manufacturer that tried to break the cartel would probably be blacklisted by the cartel, and they wouldn’t be able to handle the heat.

Google, on the other hand, can. Now that Android is entrenched, they could try and disrupt this market. They could provide a phone, an O/S and give users freedom and portability. They could go down market into the land still owned by feature phone manufacturers like Nokia and go after the long tail of users who are still more likely to click on ads (remember, that’s how they make money). And while the carriers would absolutely be pissed off by this, Android has grown large and entrenched enough now to get away with it.

Will they do it? I don’t know. In the short term it might piss off HTC and Samsung for Google to use Motorola in this way, as it would be so disruptive and would require the phone to be sold as a loss leader. But, if this is a section of the market that HTC and Samsung weren’t able to access anyway, and if is allowed people to buy the best phone and take it where they wanted, then perhaps it would be a win in the medium term for everyone. Except for the US carriers. And that would be a great result for the rest of us.

TL;DR version: the Chromebook is already 10 times more useful than my tablet, and the fact it is only running a very fast browser allows this thing to be fast and useful like a fully loaded laptop, but with the battery life, lighter weight and low cost profile of a netbook.

A week ago I fired up the Google Chromebook that I got as an attendee at GoogleIO back in May. When I first heard about the Chromebook project, I was pretty skeptical; I already had a Netbook and a tablet, and to be honest neither device has been that revolutionary in terms of my work.

While the tablet is awesome for consuming media and being entertained, I don’t really get enough downtime to be entertained. With the response to the iPad by technology pundits being so overwhelming – revolutionary, game changing, a breakthrough new computing experience – I figured Google was just allowing some of their engineers to indulge in a bit of a geekery because they can afford to, much like the self driving car project.

However, I have been very very very pleasantly surprised – this Chromebook has already become an integral part of my technology toolbox.

My primary machine is a 15″ Dell Latitude Laptop, which comes packed with 8GB of RAM and is able to run a complete stack of our application. It isn’t so big that it would be considered a desktop replacement, but it is pretty heavy and having to walk around the streets of San Francisco with it on my shoulder starts to get old after a while.

Portability

What I’ve been doing for most nights over the last week is leaving my laptop in the office, and working on the bus and at home on the Chomebook. It is ideal because it is light weight, it is fast to use, and it lets me do most of the things I need to do these days, since I live in the browser. Keeping on top of email, keeping organised with my calendar, using AffinityLive for clients and work – it is all there.

Why can’t I do this with a tablet, you might be wondering? Well, I almost can. But the problem is the lack of a keyboard. Tablets are sexy and portable and trendy – I really really wanted to get on the bandwagon. I spent a Sunday afternoon getting my week organised and scheduled into my calendar a few weeks ago, and tried to use the tablet; just typing in the titles of meetings, and selecting start and end times was painful and horribly slow compared to the experience with the Chromebook. Win.

Power

When you’re a road warrior, you really care about battery life. While San Francisco is much more supportive of the cafe office setup, with a lot more power jacks around, the need to plug in to get stuff done is at the very least an inconvenience.

With the Chromebook, I can get almost a day’s use out a single charge. Of course, I’m not using it as my primary machine, so I never use it for a full day; instead, it gets used on the bus ride to and from the office, on the couch when I need to reply to a few emails quickly or just check out the latest headlines on Techmeme, or anything else online. I’ve only needed to charge it once all week – not a bad effort at all.

Performance

Comparing to my experience with the Netbook – which is also super portable and runs a long time on a charge – the big advantage of the Chromebook is that it isn’t a pain in the arse. I don’t feel like I’ve gone back 15 years in technology, struggling to load pages, update textfield and go forbid use a website with modern technology like AJAX.

Instead, the Chromebook is super quick. It boots like lightening. It goes between tabs and processes super fast, and loads up even complicated web pages with lots of moving parts effortlessly. There are some times when I can tell it is more computationally challenged than my main laptop, but these times are few and far between, and generally speaking I’m probably taking the piss a little; dozens of tabs open, including some hard core things like Gmail and Google Calendar spread across close to half a dozen accounts.

Price

This unit from Samsung was free as being part of the GooogleIO conference this year, but even so the promised pricing of these things is well below tablet land, and is very comparable with netbooks. So, you get the portability, power and price benefits of a netbook, but with much much higher performance and build quality.

And the build quality aspect is a big deal. The screen is one of the higher quality screens I’ve ever used; the fonts are crisp, the resolution is fantastic, and they keyboard – while missing a page up/down and home/end keys – is responsive, easy to use and of good quality too. Only the trackpad  lets it down, but with a USB port for a mouse if you want one, and the ability to turn on tap-to-click as well as using multi-finger gestures, it is still pretty good.

It Just Works

The last point is probably the most important. As a device, it needs to be online to be useful, but at least here in the US you can get 100MB of free 3G data with Verizon for two years. If you want to get another 1G of data per month – which is plenty unless you decide to use the cellular network for Pandora or YouTube – you’re only looking at $20. The signup process all happens inside the browser, and the device is smart enough to maintain both WiFi and 3G connections and to automatically pass traffic to the 3G network only when the WiFi isn’t available. For my Aussie friends, the good news is that there’s also a SIM card slot; I’m not 100% sure whether this model has both GSM and CDMA radios installed, but my guess is that it does.

And then there’s the user experience. I’ve been typing this blog post on the Chromebook on a bus, in a bar, and in a cafe. I’ve worked on it a bit more one my laptop. Every time I enter a few words, it auto-saves to the cloud. I pick up another machine, log in, and I’m off and running – it doesn’t matter the machine, the time or the place; it all just works. It is so refreshing and exciting to see.

So, in conclusion, I’d have to say I’m much more bullish and excited about what the Chromebook means for my work as a tool than I’ve been about a tablet. Sure, the tablets are sexy, and while I think they’ll probably make a much bigger impact on the industry than the Chromebook, I know personally that this device is much more relevant and valuable for me.

I’ve been an entrepreneur for over a decade, and I’ve been working in tech that entire time. But just this last week, I made the move. I now live in Silicon Valley.

Why do it, what does it mean for my life, my businesses and my team in Australia, and does it make me a traitor or a sellout to my pretty public ambitions to build the Aussie startup tech scene in general, and the scene in my home town of Wollongong in particular?

Why move, why now?

So, the first question is probably – why move? The answer is actually very simple and very rational – because I needed to.

Hiive Systems, the startup that I spun out of Internetrix a couple of years ago, needs the money, and this is where I’ve got the best chance of getting it. For the last couple of years, my co-founders and I have been developing and improving our product, AffinityLive, and over the last 6 months we’ve had it in public beta. We’ve been getting a lot of interest in the product, but so far we haven’t tried to market it at all. On startup parlance, we’ve been an engineering focused startup – of the 6 full time staff currently in Hiive Systems, 4.5 of them are developers.

But now it is time for us to take the product to market, and while it is a business product that our clients will pay real money for (and in some cases already do), we need to ramp up our costs to hire people who will be dedicated to sales and marketing and partner development and other non-engineering things. Oh, and as my team will tell you, we could certainly do with some more developers too!

Raising up to a million dollars in Australia for a high risk tech venture – and remember, they’re all high risk – is very hard work. I was at an excellent event called Funding Connect run by I&I and Slattery IT, and I was flabergasted that there were Australian angel investors there explaining that they funded Angel rounds for equity for $200K. Doing a round for equity – going through the negotiation around valuations, issuing stock, dealing with all the lawyer related costs – isn’t just time consuming; it also costs serious lawyer money, perhaps as much as 20% of the round.

Conversely, I’ve got friends who’ve raised over a million dollars in a week or two from angels without dealing with valuation or lawyer equity issues – they’ve used a form of debt called a convertible note, much more appropriate for early stage sub million dollar deals. Sure, they’re rockstars with exits and Y-Combinator cache, and I’m under no illusions that things will be quick or easy with what I’m doing – thanks very much, crazy world markets – but I know for sure my chances here are a lot better than back in Australia.

So, with the combination of a product coming out of public beta, increased capital requirements in the business and the reality being that the market here in Silicon Valley hasn’t been this favourable for raising money in a decade have all come together to make now the right time.

What does this mean?

Moving countries isn’t trivial. I mean, it is a lot easier in these days of broadband internet, Skype videoconferencing, smartphones and the rest of the technology that I’m into up to my eyeballs, but it still has some serious challenges.

On a personal level there’s the taking 10 steps back issue. In Wollongong I had a really nice house, I finally had it kitted out with all the stuff I needed, and Charlie Horse Dog and I had a good routine and things going on. Now I’m living out of a suitcase. I don’t know where I’ll be living next week, or next month. I don’t have an office yet either, so I’m now once again a digital nomad without much at all to his name other than a bag full of geekery and a stack of AffinityLive t-shirts.

On a professional note, it is also creating some challenges, but I’m lucky to have an absolutely awesome team in both Internetrix and Hiive Systems. My teammates are incredibly resourceful, show a lot of initiative and have a can do attitude that management consultants would give their right arm to bottle.

The Internetrix business has been more or less autonomous for a couple of years now under the leadership of Dan and Mike, and frankly when I get involved in client projects as anything more than a technical pinch hitter, things tend to end up the worse for it! Things are in great hands.

In the Hiive Systems business, there’s a real sense that this is our chance to do something on the world stage, and everyone is working hard to do their thing. Eamonn and Hugh are stepping up on the product direction front, Glenn is even more the head geek and code monkey than ever, Chris, even while travelling on a rare holiday with her family has been getting up at 3am to do code pushes before going fishing with the family. Another awesome highlight has been Crespo, who’s embrace of everything bold and Aussie is awesome and unparalleled – in his own words, he’s been up for “having a crack” at anything, and doing well at it.

So, what I’m hoping it means is that I can raise some money, hire a team for sales and marketing here in the US so our Aussie team doesn’t have to get up so damn early all the time (and I can get some more help for them on the engineering front back in Wollongong), and that I can throw some resources at growing the AffinityLive without continually raiding the retained profits of Internetrix (which has its own capital investing opportunities in Australia and mainland China).

Playing the long game

So what of selling out? Doesn’t packing up and moving to San Francisco to build the business mean I’ve given up on Australia as a great place to build a startup? Does turning my back on my home town make me a hypocrite, who tries to build a startup culture and evangelizes to get support from the most important institutions in the city, just to leg it just as it gets going?

My answer to all of that is: absolutely no f*cking way.

There are some massive advantages to building a technology startups in Australia, and even more in my home town of Wollongong. While Silicon Valley has a lot of advantages – you can meet someone at a party who can do a deal that makes your startup as a strategic partner, or get introduced to someone at a conference invests millions into your company – it has some serious disadvantages.

Silicon Valley is currently experiencing a massive technology skills shortage; even in the shadow of the dot com crash, the hunger for talent and ability to turn innovative ideas into fortunes was still present. Hiring an engineer/developer here is almost impossible, even more so now. Even in bad times when people aren’t in such demand, the amount of ‘bed hopping’ that goes on in this city is incredible; if you’re not moonlighting – which is kinda harmless and it is great to see smart people testing their hand and learning what works and what doesn’t – there’s a much bigger pressure in the Valley to keep on moving from gig to gig, up one small rung at a time.

While this can be great for people trying to get a start, or moving from a terrible graduate role to something personally fulfilling, it creates a massive problem for entrepreneurs. You’re trying to build a company, and often this means applying the lessons you’re learning in a cumulative fashion, particularly early on. You learn things, you make mistakes, and you keep making things better with each iteration, one improvement after another. Unfortunately, losing valuable talented staff every 6 weeks because Twitter is having a tough time to find someone to manage their spam queue – and your soon to be ex staff member thinks “‘hell having Twitter on your resume is da bomb” – makes it really hard to build, I don’t know, the next Twitter.

Thankfully, these sorts of problems are much less of an issue in Australia. We have a higher level of respect, loyalty and commitment on both “sides” of the employment relationship. And while I think generally that social construct is a bit bullshit and industrial revolution anyway, perpetuated by parasites who earn their living being confrontational for its own sake; in technology, the reality is that you really all are part of a team, and the meritocracy is alive and well, especially in a land with such healthy disrespect for authority.

In my home town of Wollongong, you’ve got some added adventures. I walked to the office today in 12 degrees Celsius winds, blowing at about 20 knots from the arctic, with fog and cloud rolling over the city down to about 200 feet. The sun didn’t come out until 3pm, and even then, Wollongong in winter, beside the sea with the golden beaches and beautiful green escarpment, has it all over this place. Our costs of living are much lower – I was paying $275 a week for a three bedroom house in Wollongong, and I’m about to start paying $650 a week for a single room in a three bedroom house here. Yep, you read that right.

When you’re a startup, and cash is king these lower costs are a real advantage. And while those of us in startup land unashamedly live to work, we also work to live – the ability to clear your head with a dip in the Pacific or a walk in the trees makes a real difference to your sanity.

So, in summary, there are massive advantages in doing a startup in Australia in general, and Wollongong in particular. Lower costs, better and more long term/meaningful teamwork with amazingly talented people, mean collectively that if you’ve got a good idea, good leadership and a lot of luck, you can build something world beating.

But, to really take on the world, you need to take on the best in the world. And sometimes that means being in Silicon Valley. And sometimes it just means taking it to them.

What does this mean for Australian entrepreneurship? I think that is the sweetest part. We’re not the cheapest place in the world. We’re certainly not close to big markets. We’re an ideal starting ground, proving ground, the place where ideas are hatched and great, world class companies can be built. Sure, while capital markets are immature, and distribution platforms mean you need to be near your customers/partners/acquiriers in most industries, the Valley will continue to act as a massive magnet. But I’m hoping – and I believe – that the secret to actually making a difference in the Aussie tech scene isn’t some protectionist, fence the place off mentality, but instead is to embrace the global market, global talent and global capital, and to provide the kinds of experiences, financial benefits and more to your founding team Down Under, so if it all works out they have the confidence to do it all again with their own venture, and if it doesn’t work out, odds are they’ll have been bitten by the bug, have learned the lessons from being close to the failure, and will try their own hand anyway.

This is what I mean by playing the long game. This is a multi-decade plan, which will only succeed with engagement, successes, exits and doing it all again. One startup, one entrepreneur, one great team at a time.

And that, more than any other reason is why I’ve moved to Silicon Valley. I can’t wait to see you all here, or in Australia, or somewhere else on this amazing, abundant and opportunity filled planet again. Soon.

The Silicon Beach Wollongong Mascot - he'll be in the middle of the table at our meetups

Just a quick note to let you know that we’re kicking off a regular Silicon Beach Drinks here in Wollongong. After kick-starting the tech entrepreneur scene three years ago, and playing a massive part in bringing together a really strong community, we thought we’d have our own regular drinks here in Wollongong.

Key details:

• Thursday nights at Hotel Illawarra, the corner of Keira and Market Streets Wollongong.
• Kicks off at 5:30pm, we’ll probably be there until 8pm, and sometimes roll on for dinner, so if you’re one of our poor long suffering commuters who only gets back into town on a 6:30 or 7pm train, don’t be afraid to swing by!
• If you’re new and don’t know what our regulars (Nathan, Tristan, Louis, etc) look like, just have a look for our cute mascot, who’ll be sitting in the middle of the table where we are – don’t be shy to come and introduce yourself!

While our Melbourne friends have beaten us to the punch, the fact Wollongong is the third city in the country to kick them off really says something about the amount of startup and tech activity going on around here (no small thanks to the Uni of Wollongong  graduating 1 in 7 IT students in the country).

Feel free to come on by and say hello – whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur, working in or on a startup, or a wantrepreneur who’s looking to find a great cofounder/idea/opportunity, you’re more than welcome.

Aside from my work as an entrepreneur with Internetrix and Hiive Systems, I’m also pretty active in my community as a board member of Regional Development Australia (Illawarra).

The Board of our RDA is made up of some pretty impressive people from lots of walks of life, leaders and achievers with very diverse and interesting perspectives. For a range of reasons, I’ve generally focused my efforts around projects related to technology, entrepreneurship and to a lesser extent youth issues (I’m the youngest face around the table, but at 31 I’m not what you would call representative of youth anymore unfortunately).

Anyway, I’ve been invited to speak at a few things around the traps recently as a bit of a champion of the sector, and often people want to know a bit about the shape of the sector. While the team at IRIS have great statistics, the perspective they’re looking for from me often relates to how they can help, work with or engage with the sector – they’re more interested in colour, experiences and challenges than numbers. Over the course of doing a few of these lately, I’ve come up with the following way to explain the 5 Pillars of Tech from my perspective, at least as they apply to a regional setting like here in the Illawarra.

1. The Smiths
2. The Firemen
3. The Suits
4. The Scientists
5. The Startups

The Smiths

The Smiths, as in “Blacksmith”, are generally speaking services companies. They are labour intensive, are based in the region, are privately held and your classic example of an SME. They derive the majority of their revenue from the area, and they range from one-man-bands through to more established local players like AVC, Unitech and Accent. They sell to businesses (because B2C is largely uneconomic in a professional services context today).

Because the barriers to entry of setting up an IT business are laughably low – you just need to know more about technology than whoever your intended client is – this sector often has difficulty playing nice together. It isn’t at all uncommon for a company to start out doing anything someone will pay for – websites, cabling, networks, custom application development, training, you get the drift – which creates problems because in a small market that has a reputation for being frugal, companies in this category are almost always fighting for scraps. The big money – what there is of it – usually goes to the Suits, or is kept in house to feed the Firemen (who often aren’t that capable at obtuse tasks, but the desire for job security and information asymmetry with management means this often doesn’t matter, or isn’t known until too late, if at all).

So, what can we do to help the Smiths develop their businesses and their contribution to the economy are? There’s lots of things, but the two that stand out are:

1. Connecting with potential clients – particularly the ones with budgets and an investment mentality that value advice – to get to know them a little better and to give them a look in on the projects they’re doing.
2. Fighting the hate – the fact so many of these businesses are fighting for crumbs and depend on new projects and clients to feed their families next month makes them very competitive. This is natural in markets, but the problem with IT (as opposed to other professions, like legal, financial, medical) is that there aren’t really anything that makes it clear you’re complimentary, not competitive. Also, since people are desperate and hungry when they’re getting started, the first time you find out about a new player is often when they’ve nabbed one of your clients (and then proceed often to screw up the project), or even worse, a loyal client shares the stories the new player has been telling to try and steal the business. This has happened to me a lot over the years, and with a first impression like that, it is often hard not to write someone off.

The Smiths play a really important part in the ecosystem, particularly in the Illawarra, in that they provide a great way for people to get started. Often businesses you’d class as a Startup are actually running off the profits or at very least revenue earned by the founders being part time Smiths, part time Startups.

The Firemen

The firemen are technology professionals who work on a full time basis inside companies large enough to have IT departments. As with all larger organisations, there’s a fair degree of difference between the awesome world class experts on one side, and the plodders who’re just there for a paycheck on the other.

One of the unfortunate things for the Firemen is that in almost all cases, they’re seen as a cost centre in the company, someone who works hard to keep the lights on and the business running, but they don’t get showered in praise for corporate performance, they’re rarely seen as strategically critical to the business and if things break or stop, everyone looks at them like they’ve screwed up. In this sense, they’re more like the firemen on a train than the ones on a big red truck (but they’re often racing around the organisation putting out fires – Lulzsec anyone?)

How can we help the firemen contribute to the value our sector provides to the economic base? It is a bit tricky, since they’re not driving the trains they work on, but there are probably two things that can make a difference:

1. Skills/knowledge development – if you’re part of a small team – or all by yourself – in a larger business who doesn’t really care about IT until it all goes wrong, then you tend to be pretty professionally isolated. Technology moves really fast, and even if your business doesn’t, staying sharp and current can only be good for your organisation, as well as your career prospects. Regular lunch style events, especially where you get exposed on a professional and social level with the other parts of the industry can help reduce the isolation and will hopefully spawn new ideas that add value to the company.
2. Helping the best ones become startups – there are some people who’s skills and talents are that could, that potentially world class, that keeping them shovelling coal in the cab of the steam engine isn’t the best result for the industry and the region. Things like Startup Weekends (where the top quality folks can have a taste of what startups are all about without having to burn their boats), and encouraging participation while they’re Wantrepreneurs at things like Silicon Beach drinks will be critical.

While the plight of the Fireman isn’t very glamorous, firemen, scientists and to an extent suits have all been critical to the development of world class, high performing technology sectors. Boulder Colorado has lots of firemen working in their aerospace, health and education sectors, many of whom spin out and join things like TechStars to build their own startups.

The Suits

The Suits have a lot in common with the Firemen, but have the distinction that they are working in technology focused businesses who’s clients are mostly (all) based outside the region. This sector contributes a lot of grow the economic base of the region – because they’re bringing in income by exporting expertise of their local staff – and most of the time, these sorts of businesses are imported, not built. Local examples include CSC (who now earn >50% of their income from clients other than the BlueScope and OneSteel operations here) and the new Mphasis operation that the University of Wollongong has worked so hard to bring to the Innovation Campus.

When asking how we can help the Suits to grow the economic base of the region, the answer is simple (since we have so few of them): we need to attract more of them. In this sense, there’s probably three different things that can be done:

1. Hunting them – this is where the University of Wollongong, the Council and Industry and Investment, and the efforts that they make on an ongoing basis at great expense (is Craig Peden in the country? Probably not – he’s out hunting in the subcontinent).
2. Welcoming them – if one hunters (who we should now think of as suitors, since they will never close a deal without bringing them here to “meet the family”) brings home a new date, we should make sure the city and its industry is in a position to roll out the red carpet. Focus on the positives. Tell the good stories. Don’t take them to Bellambi. All the basics. And whatever we do, we need to make sure we never whinge, bitch and moan about our own lots in life when we’re trying to help one of our brothers impress a girl with how cool the new (potential) family is.
3. Evangelising the city – in our own work and our own technology circles, we should do what we can to evangelise the city. One of our big advantages is our beautiful natural environment. Take photos and try and make people jealous. Beat the drum for the city when appropriate (my Silicon Beach friends are groaning right now at mentioning this. Again). We live in a beautiful city. You can walk to work, and if you commute, it will almost certainly take you less than 30 minutes. Our staff turnover in this city is 10 times less than Sydney. Our University turns out one in 7 technology graduates in the country. We’ve got a lot of be proud of and legitimately evangelize. Get out there and spread the word.

The biggest problem with the suits, unfortunately, is that we’re not the only ones hunting them. The competition is fierce, and as a country we’re suffering a nasty bout of Dutch disease. While the amazing efforts by our hunters need to be applauded, to assume that we’ll be able to have Suits alone transition our city from a coal and steel town to a high tech powerhouse would be very very dangerous and naive.

The Scientists

The Scientists are a particularly interesting group. We’ve got some incredible researchers at the University of Wollongong, and if you look at places like Waterloo in Canada, a lot of their strength and growth has come through commercialising, if not pure research, then by smart research minded folks going out and becoming The Startups. In our region, I can only really only think of one example – iTree Software – who you’d consider as being in this category so far.

The path to commercialisation for a university is a very very very tough one. The reasons that someone chooses a career in research – and the way they’re rewarded and recognised, by sharing rather than protecting knowledge – create some very strong tensions and limit the ability for a lot of scientific endeavour to be able to make a difference to the economic base of a region in the short or medium term. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t try – we definitely should, and it is fundamental research that led to the initial successes of Silicon Valley, the birth of Cochlear here in Australia, etc – but this is more of a long term play where better research, and perhaps even a spin-out company that commercialises it and employs lots of people can happen, but like the Suits, it is a bit out of our control the speed that this happens with.

The Startups

The last pillar of the tech industry as I see it is the Startup. While the Startup could look to an outsider to be the same as one of the Smiths – and often they moonlight as a Smith to pay the bills – a Startup is a very different creature.

Unlike the “services” focused nature of a Smith, a Startup is product focused. They’re often developing software (although hardware is still possibly, it is at least an order of magnitude harder to do, and requires a lot more capital than you can usually find in Australia.

The Startup is globally oriented – they might not be selling internationally, and their first 4 clients might be companies who share the same building as them, but generally speaking, your startup is trying to solve a niche problem in a new way.

By being product focused, often software-based with a zero marginal cost of production, a Startup is also highly scalable. With more than a billion people online now, and the growth in smartphones and their associate app marketplaces, distribution has never been easier or less tied to your geographic location. In this sense, being a city of a quarter of a million, in country with only 22 million (which makes us a flea on the back of a Chihuahua riding on an Frigate) doesn’t have to be a critical disadvantage.

The region actually has a reasonable track record of producing Startups. Infocomp, a true startup that developed and licenced software to some of the biggest names in global finance is just one example. They managed to live through the incredibly long sales cycles and risk aversion of their target market, selling a very very important software platform to conservative companies, all from Wollongong. Another example is the team from Oasis Asset Management, who built an incredible tech focused business, also for the financial services sector, all from here in Wollongong. While they’ve had to move to the US to raise funds, Stuart and Anthony, UOW alumni started Grabble and are kicking goals and showing that a couple of local lads can stand tall amongst the best in the world in Silicon Valley. I’m working on my own startup, and things are coming along well with our product, AffinityLive.

When it comes to the role that Startups can play in contributing to the economy of the region, the best thing about them is that they’re easy to start, they harness the things we have – smart people, lowish costs of living – and their development and cultivation is within our control.

They’re also great job creators – 20 companies with 10 staff creates the same opportunities of one Suit that the hunters bring in – and even if the companies fail, the experiences, lessons and skills developed by getting out there and doing it are incredibly valuable, whether the founders choose to do another startup, or join the ranks of the Firemen, Suits, Scientists or even switch back to be a Smith while they come up with their next idea.

What sorts of Startups should we be encouraging here in the region? My criteria/list for the ideal startup to be cultivating is as follows:

• Globally oriented – we’re in a small market. We can use our local region, or our proximity to Sydney to help in the early stages of validating an idea and set of business hypotheses, but unless your Startup has a globally oriented mindset – you want to be the best in the world, and see the world as flat – you’re just not doing it right.
• Highly scalable – as they say in The Social Network, “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars“. If we’re trying to really move the needle, we should be aiming high. The Startups we cultivate should be highly scalable.
• Capital efficient – one thing that the region – and in fact the entire country – suffers compared to other places to build a startup is our access to capital. Raising seed or early stage money in a nation where our wealthy investor types know a lot about rocks, retailing and residential development means high-risk, early stage technology struggles to attract much investor interest. So, whatever Startups we cultivate, we need to accept that they will need to live in a capital constrained world.

So, what do we need to do to help this sector to grow and contribute to the economic base of the region? There’s a few things:

1. Evangelising the opportunity to potential entrepreneurs – what did you want to be when you grew up? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an entrepreneur. If I had a dollar for every time some guy in his mid 40’s looked at me, sighed, and said “I wish I’d started my own company when I was in my early 20’s, when I didn’t have financial responsibilities of kids, when I had more energy and youthful ignorance”, I’d be rich by now. Our education system, because of its roots in an industrial-age economy, is designed around creating employees. This is fine – because entrepreneurs are a small subset of the people who need to come together to make something happen – but the problem is that is almost never talked about or evanglised to our best and brightest. This needs to change. We need to get this story out in front of our best and brightest, show them how others just like them have done it, and then we’ll increase the number of people starting out on this journey.
2. Supporting the early phases of startups – much like an infant child, and new Startup is a very very fragile. They are also very fast learning. They need advice, nurturing, and in some cases protection. If the barriers to starting include entering into a 5 year commercial lease, signing complex licencing agreements and spending thousands on professional advice and company registrations, you’re going to turn a lot of people away. A new breed of incubator, that is focused on incubating people and ideas, not selling square metres of office space is revolutionising the seed stage of startups around the world. Watch this space for more in the near future.
3. Creating a startup community/culture – the other thing that we need to do is connect our Startups together. Being an entrepreneur is lonely. You face all sorts of challenges, and the usual places you go for advice – friends, family – are probably not going to be much help in the same way as if you had a problem with a bad boss or relationship hassles, the sorts of things most people have experience with. Creating a community of entrepreneurs, bringing them together to share their challenges and successes is critical to Startup success.

The Startup sector, more than any other, promises to be the most likely and most achievable source of the kinds of change our industry needs to help drive and lead in the region. The challenges are many, but the costs and barriers of getting started are relatively small. As they say, we need to JFDI.

Conclusion

The technology sector, even in a relatively small and tightly knit place like the Illawarra, is a very diverse creature with lots of needs amongst its actors. With our small undeveloped land area, strong university and international linkages (Mascot is close, and we have a very multicultural background which is great for being globally oriented), the technology sector – along with tourism and financial services – is where we need to be leaning to ensure our city has a strong future.

What do you think? What do you need? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or email me directly – geoff.mcqueen@gmail.com.

A quick one that hopefully my geeky friends, followers and random Google searchers will appreciate – a way to restart all services being managed by the popular Daemontool’s supervise package on Linux.

We use supervise extensively for running our various custom daemons that power AffinityLive, and because we’re doing very rapid development releases we’ve recently been seeing some problems with module code at the heart of our app being updated, yet our various daemons not being kicked, and thus using out of date code. There’s the great svc command that you can use to kill a particular process, but doing them all as bulk doesn’t work (unless you’re in as the fully fledged root user, but that isn’t a smart thing to do on live production systems).

To solve this, I wrote a one-line bash script. While not tricky or complicated, the tight permission controls over the supervise directories made it a little more fun than the hello world examples out there.

So, if you want to restart every single process being supervised on a particular server, here’s how:

for i in `sudo ls /var/lib/service/`; do sudo svc -k “/var/lib/service/$i”; done

Of course, if you don’t want to be so brutal as to kill your supervised process, and instead want to send it a HUP or an ALARM, or, if you want to stop all supervised processes for some reason, you can sub out the -k for the other arguments detailed on the svc man page.

Hope that is useful to someone else out there sometime!

Amazingly, it has been almost 6 months since I last wrote a blog post. There’s probably been a million things go through my mind that I’ve thought about blogging about, of which 0.1% would have been worth sharing, but it is still a bit of a disgrace that there’s been such a hiatus. Promise to make more of an effort in the weeks and months ahead – there’s a lot going on, which perversely makes blogging a much more legitimate use of limited time; it allows for processing thoughts and sharing in a more meaningful or deep way that a Facebook status update allows.

Since the last post in November, a few interesting things have happened:

• My team took AffinityLive from a private beta to the public one; we’ve gone from a few dozen deployments (or end users) to many hundreds in the space of a few short weeks. Of course, our challenge now is to work out how to take the curious and turn them into clients who pay us money, but hey, at least we’re seeing people really responding to our message, promise and product 😉 If you’re interested in finding out a little more, check out www.affinitylive.com and especially check out the product tour at www.affinitylive.com/tour/ to see what this thing is all about.
• I’m starting the capital raising process for AffinityLive. While we’ve got sufficient funds to make payroll without any income (and we have income) for a couple of quarters, I’m actually looking to get plugged in, accountable and play on a global stage, and the more I think about it, the more I think that a key part of doing this is dealing in a hand. Since the days of Omnidrive I’ve been watching the scene and doing my thing, and I can’t help but think that a potential early-stage valuation bubble, combined with our desire to scale up to a global audience (which requires more headcount and payroll burn than we have now) will benefit from raising some money. That and I’m in a position to be flexible with where I live and what I do in a way that wasn’t really possible 6 months ago, because…
• As a first-time Angel investor and mentor, I was stoked to see the development and success of the StartMate companies. Particularly big shout-out to Niki for putting it all together, and the Grabble boys from Wollongong who are trying to do something very big, very audacious and which might just change the (retail) world.
• On a personal note, there’s been some changes on the home front, and for the first time in about 4 years I’m single again; painful, sad, but for the better I guess. While it wasn’t planned this way, still having Charlie Horse-Dog at home is great, and I’ve met some great new friends from all over the world via Couchsurfing and AirBNB here at Bungalow13.
• I’ve managed to lose about 16KG. Still have a ways to go, but feeling much better for making the effort to not die young. Jessica Irvine nails it here – having CardioTrainer and an Android device has made all the difference. Am really only half way to where I want to be, but things are tracking well and I’m looking forward to not only going for a ride tomorrow, but also doing my first triathlon; perhaps in the North American summer instead of waiting for October to roll around here down-under.

Anyway, hope to be back here a bit more regularly in the future 😉

Geoff

With the first StartMate applications closing in a few weeks, a few of the organisers and mentors are holding an information session this Friday evening in Sydney.

If you’re thinking about applying to Australia’s first Y-Combinator type startup program, but you’re not sure whether it is for you, come along this Friday to Bar 77 at the Grace Hotel to have all your questions answered.

Details:

• What: Startmate Info Session (brief presentation, Q&A with the mentors)
• When: this Friday, November 19th, 6 pm – ~6:30 pm
• Where: Bar77, Grace Hotel, 77 York Street, Bar77 is up the escalators
• Who for: Starmate applicants, potential applicants, mentors
• RSVP and event page: http://www.meetup.com/Silicon-Beach/calendar/15214990/

After the info session, you’re also welcome to stay around for the regular Silicon Beach Drinks, where you’ll meet a bunch of other entrepreneurs and enjoy two-for-one drinks.