| I work with jamesg (who's already commented) as an Aussie in the current YC batch. The short answer is there isn't really an equivalent, although I think I speak for many expat Aussies in saying we wish there were! There are certainly many entrepreneurs in Sydney - check out some of the local meetups like http://www.meetup.com/open-coffee-sydney/ or contact people like Mick Liubinskas and Bart Jellema. However as James said, the incredible wealth of talent, opportunity, and funding available in Silicon Valley has to be seen to be believed. Without such a context, I think it will be hard to develop such a seed funding model. The debate about why Australians need to come to the Valley to start companies has been raging for decades - see commentary on Atlassian's most recent round of funding as a classic example. I think it notable that YC's specific value proposition especially makes sense in a climate where later stages of funding are plentiful. I have no quantitative data to back this up, but it appears sensible to assume that the volume of deal flow (in $M terms) raised in Australia for tech startups would need to be massively higher before a seed investment funnel model would make sense. Finally, go for it! If not now and you, then when and who? :-) |