Zepto Connect events are a vehicle for us to host and curate compelling conversations about the things we’re passionate about like technology, big ideas, brilliant businesses, innovation and amazing people—sometimes all at the same time.
Our first Zepto Connect event was hosted by Zepto’s Head of Marketing, Communications & Government Relations — Emily Curlewis. It was a virtual fireside chat with Dominic Pym co-founder of Up, the Tech Council of Australia's CEO Kate Pounder, and tech public policy leader, Damian Kassabgi.
The topic — What's Next for Australian Tech? — enabled a robust discussion of views on the Australian tech landscape, why Australia punches above its weight in unicorn-per-capita production, and where the country’s tech leaders see future opportunities.
Read on for some of our favourite moments and insights, and scroll down to the very bottom for a link to a replay of the entire Zepto Connect event.
McKinsey produced a report for the Tech Council last year which looked into what Australia is great at when it comes to the tech sector? We commissioned the report because, if you ask politicians about Australian successes in agriculture or mining, for example, they confidently reel them off. But when you ask people in the community or in parliament the same question about Australian tech, they don't really know.
McKinsey's report answered this question for us, revealing that what Australian tech has been best at is enterprise software—SaaS.
Interestingly, PayTech emerged as a promising sector, not least because of the success of established companies like Afterpay and scaling ones like Zepto. Other areas that performed really strongly were biotech, medical devices and, to a degree, media and design.
What was also really interesting when we asked McKinsey about where growth was coming from, it was in areas where we're already strong like mining tech, ag tech and ed tech
It's an interesting time for Australian tech. Ten years ago our sector was really different. Just look at the number of unicorns Australia has produced in that time, for example.
We have 2.3% of the world's unicorn companies now, even though we have about 1.6% of global GDP. 67 of those unicorns were founded — so didn't just scale — after 2010. There has been massive acceleration in the success of the sector.
But, right now, contraction in investment is on a lot of people's minds. They're wondering how long that might continue, and what it means to tech businesses that have to raise investment over the next 18 months
In newer sectors where Australia has strengths like in climate tech or energy tech, there’s healthy funding going globally into these areas. They're massively different business models to enterprise software like FinTech and PayTech. These are much more capital intensive companies. They need bigger upfront capital investments at earlier stages if they're going to be able to scale production.
I think there's a real question about whether we’re going to be as good at producing those kinds of companies and scaling them globally like we did with Afterpay and Atlassian. But that's where this next crop of growth may well come from.
When I worked in the Prime Minister's office as Digital Economy Advisor, it really was the nascent stages of the tech sector in Australia.
We're talking about 2010, and the area of main focus around the ‘digital economy’ was, okay, let's create a NBN, so we can have a functioning internet in this country. It was the early days of Atlassian, and I remember attending a forum at the University of New South Wales with Scott Farquhar. At the time, Atlassian was the first real baby emerging from Australia's tech sector at a time when Australia was simply seen as an outpost for the big US companies.
The discussion then was very much how do we get Google to have more engineers here? Or how do we make sure Microsoft and Apple don't just see Australia as a sales office? We wanted high-tech jobs here as well. The big shift has come from the behemoths of Atlassian, Canva, Afterpay. Now others like Zepto are coming to maturity, are well established in Australia, and thinking about how their really interesting innovation can be taken overseas.
Australia has shifted from being seen as an outpost, to a place where there is a lot of talent, so companies can emanate from here into a global footprint. That's been the trajectory.
It means the ecosystem here is really different to 10 years ago. Someone can start a business here, and know it can go global because the infrastructure is in place with VCs, talent and experience. The one thing we still need to attract is what I would call global leadership that can be based out of Australia.
Afterpay was the first consumer-facing tech product to launch in the US and succeed. To have tens of millions of Americans adopt a consumer facing Australian technology was novel. It was the first time US regulators saw how Australians thought about regulation, how we thought about engagement between private sector and government which had always been fairly hostile in the US.
Atlassian now has a stone base in Silicon Valley and listed on the NASDAQ. So, the US is becoming much more familiar with the idea that — yes — you can have a global company with its leaders in Australia and a big presence in the US.
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