In a week when Victoria’s startup community is reeling, it would be easy to believe the story is only about loss. The Victorian Government has confirmed it will wind down LaunchVic as an independent agency and consolidate its functions with Breakthrough Victoria and Invest Victoria, as part of a public sector overhaul. On paper, this… Read more »
With LaunchVic now dissolved into Breakthrough Victoria, it feels like the right moment to revisit the themes I explored in Melbourne’s innovation crisis is about culture – and what comes next and take a more personal look at what went wrong, what could have been built instead and perhaps what can come next. When LaunchVic… Read more »
Remember when Twitter used to be good? I reckon it peaked somewhere around the first COVID lockdowns. In those days, there was a running gag on the site where everyone would refer to it as a “hellscape”. And it did invite some of the worst that humanity has to offer. Opinions, as the old joke… Read more »
If the $467 million Airwallex raise and secondary share sale told us anything, it is that Australian venture capitalists are increasingly less venture and a lot more capital with a spreadsheet. When Blackbird and Airtree, two of the country’s flagship VC firms, finally joined a Series F round for a company they had previously passed… Read more »
In the eyes of big AI companies such as OpenAI, the troves of data on the internet are highly valuable. They scrape photos, videos, books, blog posts, albums, painting, photographs and much more to train their products such as ChatGPT – usually without any compensation to or consent from the creators. In fact, OpenAI and… Read more »
Back in the depths of raising funds during Australia’s funding winter, I was given some unexpected but prescient advice by an overseas investor: “Don’t come here.” My co-founder Skye and I were on the outskirts of London and meeting with the General Partner at one of UK’s largest fintech funds, canvassing the idea of expanding… Read more »
The global investment frenzy around AI has seen companies valued at trillions of dollars and eye-watering projections of how it will boost economic productivity. But in recent weeks the mood has begun to shift. Investors and CEOs are now openly questioning whether the enormous costs of building and running AI systems can really be justified… Read more »
For 60 years, Warren Buffett has written an annual letter to shareholders of the company he’s run since 1965, Berkshire Hathaway. He acquired the small textile company for US$18 a share to fire the CEO. Buffett subsequently described it as “the dumbest stock I ever bought” despite the fact that today, Berkshire Hathaway Class A… Read more »
When I began reading Elaine Castillo’s Moderation, a new American novel about the psychological damage of online moderation, I had to pause. I’d read novels that confronted difficult material before, but this one blurred the line between bearing witness and re-enacting pain. The book follows Girlie, a content moderator for a social media giant whose… Read more »
For 16 hours last July, Elon Musk’s company lost control of its multi-million-dollar chatbot, Grok. “Maximally truth seeking” Grok was praising Hitler, denying the Holocaust and posting sexually explicit content. An xAI engineer had left Grok with an old set of instructions, never meant for public use. They were prompts telling Grok to “not shy… Read more »
“Has Melbourne lost its spark”? In the tech world, the debate between Sydney and Melbourne often mirrors the more light-hearted rivalry about which city serves the best coffee. But when it comes to tech ecosystems, the stakes are much higher. The perception that a startup scene is “dead” can be deflating for early-stage founders. Of… Read more »
The hardest lesson I’ve learned about raising capital is that there’s no such thing as the right investor — only the right capital stack. Every time we started raising for Goterra’s next phase, the advice was the same: find your lead investor, fill the round, move fast. That playbook hasn’t changed much, even as the… Read more »
Startups are raising capital later. Often with more traction. All of which is lowering the risk to investors, thanks to AI-enabled product development. Welcome to the shifting Australian startup ecosystem. Investments in AI have dominated the headlines of late. Globally record sums are being poured into the space, with forecasts suggesting AI could add $600 billion to… Read more »
In the startup world, we’re conditioned to worship at the altar of data. We’re told to build cases based on data before we build products, to chase quantifiable metrics, and to present spreadsheets that prove a market exists. But what happens when you discover a problem so fundamental that no one has been able to… Read more »
The world’s largest cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), experienced a major outage that has impacted thousands of organisations, including banks, financial software platforms such as Xero, and social media platforms such as Snapchat. The outage began at roughly 6pm AEDT on Monday. It was caused by a malfunction at one of AWS’ data… Read more »
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