In a briefing to portfolio companies, A-List venture capital investor Sequioa Capital calls COVID-19 a black swan event — something rare, of significant global impact, and difficult to predict except in retrospect. Uncertain times always come with new opportunities for those in a position to identify and exploit them, but most black swan events are bad news for… Read more »
A 2017 report commissioned by the Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship (WIE), which mapped the representation of women in the Australian entrepreneurial landscape, found that “while the start-up ecosystem in Australia continues to grow, businesses founded by women are still underrepresented, with fewer female-led businesses starting, scaling and securing finance.” Yet in harnessing the very essence… Read more »
It’s hard to keep up with the number of important days we have in Australia. In March alone, there’s International Women’s Day, Earth Hour, World Water Day and Harmony Day to name a few. Amid this flurry of events, all with their own important messages, there’s one day that often flies under the radar in… Read more »
Australian police agencies are reportedly using a private, unaccountable facial recognition service that combines machine learning and wide-ranging data-gathering practices to identify members of the public from online photographs. The service, Clearview AI, is like a reverse image search for faces. You upload an image of someone’s face and Clearview searches its database to find… Read more »
FinTech Australia managing director Rebecca Schot-Guppy appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Financial Technology and Regulatory Technology last week. The committee is investigating the potential and opportunities in FinTech and RegTech for Australian business and consumers and initiatives to promote startups in the sectors. The committee is due to hand down its final report in… Read more »
Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO and the richest man alive, recently made headlines after pledging to donate $10 billion to a new “Bezos Earth Fund” to help combat climate change. It’s one of the largest charitable gifts in history. Though details regarding the exact kind of work that will be funded are scarce, Bezos noted in… Read more »
You’d thinking flying in a plane would be more dangerous than driving a car. In reality it’s much safer, partly because the aviation industry is heavily regulated. Airlines must stick to strict standards for safety, testing, training, policies and procedures, auditing and oversight. And when things do go wrong, we investigate and attempt to rectify… Read more »
The average person spends more than 90,000 hours at work during their lifetime, and that’s only accounting for paid, 9-to-5 hours. We spend approximately one-third of our lives at work – and yet the work never seems to stay there. We think about work in the shower, on our daily commute or in the… Read more »
Over the past decade almost US$200 billion has been invested globally in mobility technology that promises to improve our ability to get around. More than US$33 billion was invested last year alone. Another measure of interest in this area is the number of unicorns, which has doubled in the past two years. A unicorn is… Read more »
By now, you’ve probably heard that Goldman Sachs is no longer taking companies public if they don’t have any underrepresented board members. You’ve probably also heard about the corresponding kerfuffle in the Sydney Startups group: investors recycled the standard sexist and racist (and everything else -ist) dog whistles about “merit” to criticise the change,… Read more »
Australian startup and scaleups are losing their developers at an average rate of 1.2 years, according to an analysis of LinkedIn data, a churn which is holding back the sector’s growth. This year is crucial for Australia’s tech industry, as the war for talent escalates at a global scale, and local measures, including… Read more »
One of the biggest challenges faced by rapidly growing businesses is determining how to focus their efforts and limited resources. Any point of unnecessary friction adds cost to the business or distracts the leadership team from focusing on more fundamental business questions and growth opportunities. So how can we help our growing businesses to maximise… Read more »
Bestselling business books promise to teach you the winning formula and reveal the secrets of success. But the inconvenient truth is that exceptional successes in business are largely based on luck. No rule exists for achieving exceptional performance because it usually requires doing something different or novel and there can be no recipe for such… Read more »
Each week, the Giant Leap Fund receives an average of 20 pitches from startups across Australia. That means we’ll see over 1,000 decks this year, each typically over 10 slides long, for a total exceeding 10,000 in slides. I review each and every one of them. This is because we know that running a startup… Read more »
A total of 6718 electric vehicles were sold in Australia in 2019. That’s three times as many as in 2018, but it’s still small beer. More than a million fossil-fueled light vehicles (including SUVs and utes) were sold in the same period. The sales figures were published in the wake of UK Prime Minister Boris… Read more »
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