Firstly there is no doubt that Australia is a great place to start a business. It's a stable, wealthy country with great health care, financial regulations and

Firstly there is no doubt that Australia is a great place to start a business. It's a stable, wealthy country with great health care, financial regulations and everything generally works. We also have a great FTTH network being rolled out. However as a startup it has nothing on other countries. The biggest problem is that the successful people in Australia simply don't give back like they do in other countries. There is no real sense of philanthropy or altruism nor has there been much pressure from the community to do so. So it has the left the industry with some noble seed incubators at the low end (<50K), pretty hopeless VCs at the high end (2-5M+) and very little in between. You just don't have access to that 200-500K that most startups need (i.e. 2-3 devs + 1 business) but which isn't that hard to get in UK/US/Europe. And you see it in the outcomes. We only really have a small handful of internationally successful IT companies despite the huge wealth in the country.