Over the Summer break, Startup Daily is republishing key stories from 2025. This opinion piece from editor Simon Thomsen first appeared in February amid news that the NSW that the NSW government and UFC fan premier Chris Minns, paid $16 million to the US cage fighting company to stage 3 events in Sydney at a… Read more »
All too often, those of us living in the ‘remote colonies’ consider ourselves too small to make any real difference on the world stage. And yet, according to global media outlets, Australia’s grassroots campaign to ban social media for under-16s is the most important piece of legislation in the world right now. Jonathan Haidt, whose… Read more »
It’s almost too daunting a task to summarise a year that could be best represented by this….. The long blood donation lines (hours long wait for many) to help the Bondi shooting victims. If there is an image that can truly sum up this year full of chaos, violence, war and fragile peace, technological advances… Read more »
When CSIRO announced it would shed hundreds of research positions, the narrative was predictable: another casualty of budget cuts, another blow to Australian science, another sign that we don’t value research. But perhaps the question shouldn’t be whether Australia invests enough in research, but whether we’re getting enough return from the research we already fund. Or have we been optimising for the wrong metric? The research scoreboard Australia’s research ecosystem has… Read more »
The end of the year means holiday celebrations, summer breaks … and for us, one important thing: best books lists. We asked 35 expert readers for their favourite picks, ranging from novelists to anthropologists, scientists to criminologists – and experts in politics, publishing and philosophy. The only rule? The book had to be published this… Read more »
By age 12, your political operating system is encoded. Everything after is confirmation bias with better vocabulary. This is not cynicism. This is archaeology. Dig into any 50-year-old’s beliefs and you will find layers deposited at the kitchen table, in the schoolyard, at church or synagogue or mosque, in the neighborhood where they learned who… Read more »
Bondi is beautiful tonight. And not because of its beaches, its sunset, its people, its fun. It’s beautiful because you in your thousands, in your defiance, in your resistance and resolve, you have returned to these sands just seven days after a shocking crime, and have said to the terrorists, we are going nowhere. This… Read more »
Melbourne-based women founders community One Roof, has appointed Frances Goh as CEO, replacing her cofounder Sheree Rubinstein. Rubinstein said the transition, after nearly a decade at the helm, follows months of deliberation on the company’s future after it evolved from a women-focused co-working space into a national digital membership community for women entrepreneurs and business… Read more »
The full program for the 2026 Growth Summit in Melbourne is now live, promising expert insights, powerful leadership lessons, and fearless conversations tailored to Australian startups, scaleups, and SMEs. Presented by SmartCompany and Startup Daily, in partnership with Xero, the Growth Summit will see the nation’s brightest entrepreneurs and innovators inspire a new generation of ambitious business leaders. Leigh… Read more »
Every founder I meet these days, looking for PR, begins with the same line: “We’ve built something great.” Yet the question that matters most is often overlooked: will that “something” become a story worth telling? This is especially true in tech, where AI is reshaping the landscape so quickly that nearly every startup is launching… Read more »
Disconnection is a problem that quietly accumulates beneath the surface of modern entrepreneurship. It rarely presents as a single dramatic moment. Instead, it lingers in the background, creating a chain of secondary symptoms that eventually shape how leaders think, decide, and build. For founders and business builders, disconnection often appears as loneliness at the top,… Read more »
Build Club, the US-based, Australian-born AI learning community, has launched Solaris AI, an AI accelerator for companies to reduce the time taken for organisational AI transformation from a year to a month. Founder Annie Liao said Solaris AI delivers fundamentally different approach to enterprise AI adoption, eschewing training programs that rely on generic use cases requiring… Read more »
Digital food safety platform Squizify has continued its Asian expansion, launching a subsidiary in Japan following a $10 million Series A earlier this year. The Brisbane startup, founded in 2018, by CEO Daniel McDouall, helps restaurants, retailers and food manufacturers automate hygiene tasks, digitise HACCP (Hazard analysis and critical control points) compliance, monitor equipment performance… Read more »
I’ve spoken to over 100 founders over the past 18 months about the pros and cons of moving to San Francisco (SF), so I decided to compile everything into this post. Why it’s worth moving to SF? Firstly, SF is not for everyone. SF is for the most ambitious and driven people in the world.… Read more »
The arc of a tech company’s success is often sprinkled with near death experiences. And according to Airwallex cofounder Jack Zhang, the business, which raised $498 million in a Series G this week, had so many lives in its first 10 years, it should probably be nicknamed “Catwallex”. London-based Zhang took to social media overnight… Read more »
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