00:35:04 · Michelle Gilmore, Sachin, Xharmagne Carandang
[00:35:04] S1: Okay. I I think that talent follows money. So there's a bit of chicken and egg conversation about where that is and why that is. And that particularly most of the VCs that started that kind of movement were there. Like, I I honestly do think that that could have been started in other places. I know that there is the... I lived in New York, so I was on the other side of the, you know, the East Coast West Coast fight. Although I absolutely didn't have a didn't have a dog in a fight. But I... I'm not sure that I believe that when you hit a ceiling, that's the only option. I don't... I just don't subscribe to it. I think that it... There are different ways to think about it. There are different ways to think about growth. There are different ways to think about diversity. I think that there is a bubble of talent that all think the same there, even though they think they think differently. You have the same conversation over and over and over again, whereas the conversations I'm having in Japan and South Korea are so interesting, particularly with engineers. So I think that we can go broader. [00:36:13] S2: I think an interesting insight there is, one of the Notion founders, you know, based in The States, but was running out of money. So went to Japan and stayed, I think, his mom or something in Japan. And a lot of the Notion design and aesthetic and minimalism feels very Japanese. And that's probably an example of forcing non consensus and that terming consensus. [00:36:35] S0: It's
00:36:35 · Xharmagne Carandang, Georgie Healy, Michelle Gilmore, Daniel Palmer, Adam Miller
[00:36:35] S0: It's [00:36:35] S4: whether culturally we can get on board with the fact that SF isn't Mecca. I did look into this once before because I just kept hearing from this late early series A stage people just max exodus from Australia. And it was the same three things. Talent density, just volume of talent with operational experience. You know, maybe they've got three years experience here in Australia for these deep AI use cases and ten years experience in Sandtran, investor pool, just volume of investors, and their risk profile in The US. They are more willing to give checks to more risky ventures and yeah the hustle culture. They're just like, will work yourselves to the bone for me in America. So it's not your kind of company culture, I'm sure, but for some. [00:37:39] S1: I mean, I'm not necessarily saying I don't subscribe to the values. I'm saying I don't accept the premise that that's the only way. Mhmm. I think that it is a slither of what is possible, and it is a bias that we pretend it isn't. Like, we say it like it's fact when actually it's because it's where the money is. Mhmm. And it's where the checks are just written very easily. And I am not sure that those norms need to prevail. [00:38:14] S3: It's interesting to me though because, like, I'm surprised out of those three options, like, probably our main reason wasn't one of them, which is just that there's a lot [00:38:22] S5: of our customers there. And maybe that's because we target tech companies, so
00:38:22 · Adam Miller, Daniel Palmer, Georgie Healy, Sachin
[00:38:22] S5: of our customers there. And maybe that's because we target tech companies, so [00:38:26] S3: I guess definitely, that's probably a key reason why it's relevant to us, I think there's a lot of companies that do that. [00:38:31] S4: Do you have to relocate to San Fran for that though? [00:38:33] S3: It's helped us build relationships, particularly for a platform like ours where we have to do a lot of forward deploy style work with the companies we work with, having people in their time zones, having people that they can speak to in person has actually really helped us from a go to market point of view, more so than I didn't think we ever really had too much trouble raising capital while we were a Sydney based company. [00:38:59] S5: So yeah, I totally agree with [00:39:02] S3: your points, but just to put our hat in the ring as the main reason, or the main benefit I'd say we've seen from it, that would actually probably be it. There is just a lot of tech companies there and they are maybe even slightly more custom than Sydney based equivalents to invest in new technology. More refined in their buying processes as well, [00:39:23] S2: you know, the go to market cycles, I saw this in VC in like Europe and Australia would be like double, triple the time of American buyers, because they're just used to, okay, new technology, seen this before, [00:39:34] S3: buy. You know? We've seen that time and time again.
00:39:34 · Daniel Palmer, Xharmagne Carandang
[00:39:34] S3: buy. You know? We've seen that time and time again. [00:39:38] S0: One Yeah. Thing on the talent, if we say there's talent density over there, I mean, we see people from Australia go, oh, that is Mecca. I'm gonna move there right after I graduate. So one trick is how do we stop that? Fill that environment and tell them that that isn't... Doesn't have to be Mecca, like you're saying.
00:39:38 · Xharmagne Carandang, Sachin
[00:39:38] S0: One Yeah. Thing on the talent, if we say there's talent density over there, I mean, we see people from Australia go, oh, that is Mecca. I'm gonna move there right after I graduate. So one trick is how do we stop that? Fill that environment and tell them that that isn't... Doesn't have to be Mecca, like you're saying. [00:39:56] S2: I think Canva is doing some interesting things there. They're growing their research team quite rapidly. They have a few people in SSAT, but their research team is is is here, and they've just brought in a head of research. I think that's probably one of the few companies in Australia that's genuinely doing proper ML research. If that cascades into, I'm sure a lot of those people will start companies, there'll be some good talent on the market. But then also, like, I think another thing we didn't mention about SF is the Stanford and Berkeley, they're two of the best, like, technological institutions in the world. And I think like there's this essay by Paul Graham, Cities and Ambition, which I really like. And one of the things it says is that a city is downstream of its like institutions. So like there's a reason Boston has such a good deep tech scene because at MIT that there's a reason that there's a lot of great philosophical thinkers and writers from Cambridge and Oxford because that's what those institutions reward. I don't think any of our institutions really stand for much in terms of like being world class in something. I think that's downstream of people wanting to go to other places.
00:40:55 · Adam Miller, Sachin
[00:40:55] S5: Interesting anecdote, I would say most of our most ambitious founder friends has moved to SF, but a lot of them continue to hire in Australia, partly for that R and D question, but also partly, there's just great talent here. And they want to be close to what they feel like is the zeitgeist at any given moment, like literally being able to network out towards your customers, but still they hire a lot in Australia. [00:41:19] S2: I [00:41:21] S5: was just gonna bring it back to something we were talking about before. Michelle, you were talking about amplification and displacement in something what you're saying before. And think a lot of what people are questioning right now is what does AI amplify and what does it take away? You know, people are talking about what are the skills that are still going to remain with AI and what gets amplified. So I'd love to hear from perspectives about what are those skills that are going to remain with us and still be important.