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Building a Startup Scene in Any City

52 points by T-A 12y ago

mahmud 12y ago
I never believed there was a formula for attracting hackers' attention until I saw it before my very eyes. If you're a developer in Sydney, there is a good chance you came to the Atlassian HQ for meetups. They give us space, beer and pizza. I met nearly all my non-coworker tech buddies there. I ended up adopting Atlassian products, befriending Atlassian staff, and nowadays I tell all new tech acquaintances to meet me there. Now that I think of it, this is the very exact formula they followed to establish their offices as a tech hub, whether they know it or not. But they are not the only game in town. Fishburners runs a smooth but very ambitious coworking/incubation space, and General Assembly does tech education & training exceptionally well with some of the most talented people around. It's almost impossible to launch a tech startup in Sydney without having a foot in one of those places. And in our case, all three.
- akurilin 12y ago
  The Atlassian folks seem to be pretty generous with their space even here in SF. Always fun to drop by, thanks for having us :)
  - joshmlewis 12y ago
    I don't think the parent comment works at Atlasssian.
    - mahmud 12y ago
      I don't. Which is why I said "They give us space .."
- liamzebedee 12y ago
  Interesting! I live in Brisbane and while we do have the beginnings of a startup scene it's not quite as vibrant as that of Sydney or Melbourne (at least w.r.t. VC and presence of big software companies). I'm going down there in December and possibly studying there next year, would you advise checking out Atlassian's meetup first?
  - mahmud 12y ago
    Change the location to Sydney and see what comes up: http://www.meetup.com/find/tech/ http://www.meetup.com/find/tech/ I get: Big Data CSS R Scala Ruby on Rails SalesForce AWS TDD Wordpress DevOps Micro services Startup Founders 101 Agile & Scrum Product Internet of Things Golang Docker Health tech Python Women who code Android JVM Meteor BI Mobile dev All Things API Node.ninjas Cassandra Online marketing MongoDB PHP Puppet Drupal Mobile.NET OpenStack Web Analytics Continuous Delivery Linux PHP MongoDB
xerophyte12932 12y ago
So how important is the presence of VC's in the area? From what I understand, VC's know that if they invest in 10 startups, only 1 of them would result in a high return but that would make up for the other nine ones. This way, 10 start ups got their shot. Now if all the potential investors in the area are highly risk-averse, and insist that they would only invest if you are already making a huge profit, then that kinda adversely affects that startup scene, no?
justincormack 12y ago
"A few years later, Crowley got a call from the U.K. Prime Minister's office. It was early 2010, and London had found out they'd be hosting the 2012 Olympics. They decided to hold it in the O2 Arena in Shoreditch, an area that happened to have a tech coworking space and the beginnings of a community. They'd just started hosting nightly events but hadn't jumped on the hashtag train, though they knew that branding was needed. The Prime Minister created a task force, and they looked around the world to see which startup scenes were catching fire. That’s when they noticed Silicon Beach." This is a total load of utter shite.
asanwal 12y ago
So this guy is single-handedly taking credit for establishing LA's tech scene aka Silicon Beach? I wonder what others in LA think. We work with a lot of economic dev groups and a hashtag has never come up in the top 100 things of importance. Not sure how access to capital isn't part of the equation? Nice simple and seemingly incomplete formula for building startup hubs. Prob does sell a lot of consulting however as frameworks like this make hard problems sound easy to solve which is always alluring.
thinkingkong 12y ago
I think the single best way you can build a tech community is to just focus on building a great company. So many people worry about an ecosystem but the only way to make that flourish without a constant influx of foreign capital is to build something sustainable.

52 points by T-A 12y ago

I never believed there was a formula for attracting hackers' attention until I saw it before my very eyes. If you're a developer in Sydney, there is a good chance you came to the Atlassian HQ for meetups. They give us space, beer and pizza. I met nearly all my non-coworker tech buddies there. I ended up adopting Atlassian products, befriending Atlassian staff, and nowadays I tell all new tech acquaintances to meet me there. Now that I think of it, this is the very exact formula they followed to establish their offices as a tech hub, whether they know it or not. But they are not the only game in town. Fishburners runs a smooth but very ambitious coworking/incubation space, and General Assembly does tech education & training exceptionally well with some of the most talented people around. It's almost impossible to launch a tech startup in Sydney without having a foot in one of those places. And in our case, all three.

akurilin 12y ago
The Atlassian folks seem to be pretty generous with their space even here in SF. Always fun to drop by, thanks for having us :)
- joshmlewis 12y ago
  I don't think the parent comment works at Atlasssian.
  - mahmud 12y ago
    I don't. Which is why I said "They give us space .."
liamzebedee 12y ago
Interesting! I live in Brisbane and while we do have the beginnings of a startup scene it's not quite as vibrant as that of Sydney or Melbourne (at least w.r.t. VC and presence of big software companies). I'm going down there in December and possibly studying there next year, would you advise checking out Atlassian's meetup first?
- mahmud 12y ago
  Change the location to Sydney and see what comes up: http://www.meetup.com/find/tech/ http://www.meetup.com/find/tech/ I get: Big Data CSS R Scala Ruby on Rails SalesForce AWS TDD Wordpress DevOps Micro services Startup Founders 101 Agile & Scrum Product Internet of Things Golang Docker Health tech Python Women who code Android JVM Meteor BI Mobile dev All Things API Node.ninjas Cassandra Online marketing MongoDB PHP Puppet Drupal Mobile.NET OpenStack Web Analytics Continuous Delivery Linux PHP MongoDB

xerophyte12932 12y ago

So how important is the presence of VC's in the area? From what I understand, VC's know that if they invest in 10 startups, only 1 of them would result in a high return but that would make up for the other nine ones. This way, 10 start ups got their shot. Now if all the potential investors in the area are highly risk-averse, and insist that they would only invest if you are already making a huge profit, then that kinda adversely affects that startup scene, no?

justincormack 12y ago

"A few years later, Crowley got a call from the U.K. Prime Minister's office. It was early 2010, and London had found out they'd be hosting the 2012 Olympics. They decided to hold it in the O2 Arena in Shoreditch, an area that happened to have a tech coworking space and the beginnings of a community. They'd just started hosting nightly events but hadn't jumped on the hashtag train, though they knew that branding was needed. The Prime Minister created a task force, and they looked around the world to see which startup scenes were catching fire. That’s when they noticed Silicon Beach." This is a total load of utter shite.

asanwal 12y ago

So this guy is single-handedly taking credit for establishing LA's tech scene aka Silicon Beach? I wonder what others in LA think. We work with a lot of economic dev groups and a hashtag has never come up in the top 100 things of importance. Not sure how access to capital isn't part of the equation? Nice simple and seemingly incomplete formula for building startup hubs. Prob does sell a lot of consulting however as frameworks like this make hard problems sound easy to solve which is always alluring.

thinkingkong 12y ago

I think the single best way you can build a tech community is to just focus on building a great company. So many people worry about an ecosystem but the only way to make that flourish without a constant influx of foreign capital is to build something sustainable.