Australia had successful startups like Atlassian and Campaign Monitor generating serious revenue, yet almost no investors funded early-stage companies. Founders had to bootstrap despite a thriving ecosystem. Accel and others only showed up later, leaving gold on the ground.
In those early days when you were thinking back to what Blackbird was like, maybe in its like skunkworks era, just getting started, what was that like?
Well, it was a, it was like a paradox because you had already successful companies. Atlassian already had tens of millions of ARR and several other companies, Campaign Monitor, RetailMeNot, Aconex, Halfbrick Studios, all of these companies that had already succeeded, but there were no investors focused on them. And in particular, all of those companies raised zero in their early days. You had Accel who had invested in about 5 or 6 Australian companies, but it was all towards the later stages of their development. And so you had this cohort of successful startups and you had no investors concentrating on helping and being interested in them in the early stages. So that feeling of, wasn't like you were digging for gold. It was like the gold was on the ground already.
Yeah, it was on the surface.
Paige of Behind Genius driving an AI electric train in St. Louis (Intramotev Visit)
