Silicon Valley to Fortitude Valley: Queensland start-ups pitch ideas eight miles high

Myriad is the Australian festival for innovation and backed by the Queensland Government’s $518 million Advance Queensland strategy.

The entrepreneurs networking on board Myriad Air.
Photo: Tony Moore

The last five years have seen new-age venture capitalists, who no longer build roads, railways, ports and buildings.

This time they dream about people’s likes and dislikes, their preferences, their choices in shopping, voting, travelling, eating, talking, viewing, walking, talking and exercising.

Using the people’s choices is the new currency.

Already after talks in San Francisco last week, it seems one Silicon Valley firm, the giant 3D design centre Autodesk, with its own Centre of Design Excellence, may open an office in south-east Queensland.

“As a result of discussions that have taken place, the Queensland government and Autodesk are pursuing opportunities to build an exciting development in south-east Queensland,” a source very close to the discussions said.

Autodesk generated revenue of $2.3 billion in 2017 and employs 8000 people.

Founder of Myriad, Martin Talvari (right), with YouTube's That Startup Show host Sarah Moran.
Photo: Tony Moore

Here are few other selections from Queensland’s airborne night of madness.

In the business section the YouTube video program, That Startup Show, hosted by Sarah Moran, continually recorded live interviews with entrepreneurs in the middle of the 747’s business class as people crowded around.

Back in the economy secton of Myriad Air, Alex Dreiling, the chief executive of Fortitude Valley’s emerging video technology start-up Clipchamp – which now has 3.5 million users – was quietly speaking with PieLab Venture Partners' Shaun Bassett.

Brisbane video builder company Clipchamp chief executive Alex Dreiling (right) with PieLab venture company's Shaun Bassett.
Photo: Tony Moore

On the other side of the plane Queensland’s Cas McCullough eagerly pitched her case for lead investor funding to Steve Baxter for her blog-writing business, Writally.

Baxter listened intently, as close to 300 people shouted, laughed and joked as if they were at a wild reception.

Ms McCullough, originally in marketing, offers more than 200 “recipes” for frustrated business owners to write a blog post to lure buyers to businesses.

“If you don’t write for your reader, what you write won’t have an impact,” she said.

“And I’ve seen business go broke because they don’t have the content.”

Malaysian-born Caleb Yeoh has a start-up where international visitors to Brisbane Airport pay at airport shops using Bitcoin and go onto book holidays in Queensland paying by Bitcoin.

He wants to expand his business, TravelbyBit, arguing $5 million in Bitcoin in processed across Australia every week.

This week in San Francisco, as part of the Myriad Air opportunity, three Queensland firms pitched their new ideas to IT networking solutions firm Cisco, itself born in Silicon Valley.

Some of the United States' leading venture capitalists arrived in Brisbane on the 747.

Among them was the influential Jeremy Bloom, a three-time world champion skier and American football player before forming the marketing company Integrate.

San Francisco’s Tony Conrad founded freelancer and entrepreneur webpage company about.me in 2008 and the blog search engine Sphere before becoming a partner in True Ventures.

True Ventures and about.me venture capitalist Tony Conrad with Sarah Moran.
Photo: Tony Moore

With his True Ventures team, Conrad assessed the personal fitness movement and invested in the Fitbit and the Peleton Ftiness bikes.

On board the 747, Conrad said True Venture was known for working with entrepreneurs at “inception point”.

“We really rely on our network to pre-filter, if you will, because if one of the founders passes something along they are vouching for it,” he said.

Conrad says the role of the venture capitalist has changed dramatically in the past 20 years.

“In the very beginning of venture capitalism you might have an environment where you have one lead investor and that investor operated ... almost like an operating partner in a business,” he said.

“And I think as venture capitalism matured you had more and more players come to the table, meaning you had more than one investor, with different agendas, different voices and there is a lot to manage there.

“And I think as we get to where we are today – at least the way we have tried to work it – is we are trying to bring us closer to the beginning.

The Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco was a cultural epicentre in the 1960s.
Photo: Tony Moore

“Not in the sense that we are being operational – because we don’t think that adds scale in our view – but really being in there earlier enough and really help to protect the DNA and identity of their idea.”

San Francisco has history in shaping new movements.

In the 1950s and early 1960s San Francisco gave the world the poetry of the beat generation.

A paver outside Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore today quotes from one of his poems: “Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.”

In the late '60s it added the new sounds and visions of Haight Ashbury, the San Francisco suburb that was the centre of the counterculture movement.

By the 1970s San Francisco’s Bay Area gave us the new electronic punch of Silicon Valley, which spawned the new generation of IT businesses.

Facebook will move into San Francisco and occupy all 37 storeys of this building.
Photo: Tony Moore

By the 1980s Samsung, Google, Apple, IBM and Adobe became household names
Now consumers play as Salesforce, Facebook, Cisco, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Twitter, Instgram, Uber, aboutme, Autodesk and Slack evolve.

Facebook announced on Sunday they will shift 7000 employees into the San Francisco CBD.

In Brisbane on Monday morning, Steve Baxter welcomed the opportunity for start-ups to think outside the box on the first midair pitch between San Francisco and Brisbane.

“Thank you to everyone for allowing this moment of madness to exist.”