[ianhowson]

This is a great post. I'd like to add:

> You can get even better value if you can build your team outside of Sydney/Melbourne.

So much this, but talent outside the big cities is rare. I lived in Queensland for a while and would have taken a massive pay cut for any tech work... but there just isn't any. I knew more people working in Sydney (fly-in-fly-out) than working in local companies.

You can pick up uni students cheaply. They're grateful for relevant work.

I knew a few founders living cheap but pretty much all knew that moving to the US was an inevitability.

> focused on building a good business first

This is a massive plus of starting in Australia. The business has to make sense. Local funding sources aren't as willing to build perceived value and flip the company -- it's important to have a genuine sustainable business with customers and cashflow.

> 43.5% of your development cost back through the R&D Tax Incentive

Probably half of my lifetime earnings have been paid for with the R&D Tax Incentive and other grants. It's such a good deal that every incorporated company with a tech component should be trying to claim it.

I'm not grumpy or anything, but in Queensland, claiming government grants for tech companies is probably more lucrative than working in a tech company. There's an abundance of funding and a shortage of people able to use it.

> don't limit yourself to selling or developing in only one location

I forget who gave the talk, but it was from Muru-D at Co Spaces in the Gold Coast, and guy said (paraphrasing):

"New Zealanders have an advantage over Australians because they know from day one that they will have to sell overseas to make their company a success. Australia is big enough that you can fool yourself for a while, but it won't take long before you reach saturation and need to move anyway. Better to get it done sooner."

[amyjess]

> So much this, but talent outside the big cities is rare. I lived in Queensland for a while and would have taken a massive pay cut for any tech work... but there just isn't any. I knew more people working in Sydney (fly-in-fly-out) than working in local companies.

This is what playing the long game is for. Take a lesson from Texas Instruments. The founders decided to start a tech company in North Texas, where there wasn't much talent. So they decided to grow their own: they started their own university with a strong focus on STEM subjects, located not too far from the corporate headquarters, and once it grew large enough, they turned it over to the state. To this day, the University of Texas at Dallas supplies TI with a lot of fresh grads, and Richardson, TX has grown up to be a large tech hub.

Of course, this takes a lot of time and a lot of money, but a particularly ambitious and rich team of founders can open a university on the outskirts of, say, Brisbane or the Gold Coast, and given enough time, they'll have people to feed their tech company and turn the area into a tech hub.

[wenc]

The trouble though is that UT-Dallas is still not a spectacular school, so the talent does not rank among the best. It's serviceable for what TI needs, but not the best. And few people will relocate to Dallas just to go UT-Dallas. TI may have gotten by with that level of talent in the past, but if you're a company that is pushing the boundaries, that level of talent may not be sufficient.

If you locate near an already great university in an already attractive city (e.g. UT-Austin), you can tap into a talent magnet that already draws people from around the world. Remember, the talent pool is now global and tech companies that aim from anything short of that would be depriving themselves.

Talent pool size is a real problem. To cite an example: for years, many French-speaking universities in Montreal had a hard time drawing global talent due to the language of instruction; on that basis alone they were less competitive than English-speaking universities in the same city (e.g. global English-speaking universities like McGill draw a from a larger and much more competitive pool of students from around the world) simply because their pool of students are constrained to French speakers. Just as an example: most Asian students will probably not bother to learn French, but many are already learning English in grade school. This means French-only universities lose out on the two biggest pools of engineering graduate students: those from India and those from China. To make things worse, French students from France rarely want to study in Quebec because most of them believe their own grande-ecoles to be better (there is also an element of French snobbery involved when it comes to Quebec).

Anyway, my sense is by setting up shop in a city that already draws global talent, the premium you pay in salaries over the long run is going to be far less than setting up your own university (considering how expensive it is to run a really good university). The payoff is much greater. University reputations are expensive and slow to build, and as can be seen in the UT-Dallas case, one is uncertain to succeed even with sizable investments.

p.s. of course, this argument breaks down if your company does not require a very high level talent.

[seem_2211]

That's an interesting quote on New Zealanders (I am from NZ, but live in SF).

My take on it is that places like NZ are great in that if you can make the jump internationally, you're highly likely to be extremely successful overseas as investing isn't really a thing and the market is so small. The downside is that any investors want more than a pound of flesh for dollar sums that would be seen as laughable in the valley. It's going to be interesting seeing how the sector does over the next ten years - and while it's been great seeing the success of Xero and Pushpay, I'm really excited about the current cohort coming through.

[stephen_g]

Where in Queensland? There is plenty of tech going on in Brisbane if you look for it... I suppose it depends on your specialisation though.

[ianhowson]

I lived in the Gold Coast for 18 months. I did weekly flights to Sydney and drove to Brisbane twice a week.

I didn't have good results looking for work in Brisbane. I could get a job, but not a job I wanted to do, and not for much money. I would've had to move to make the commute feasible, especially with the state of Brisbane parking prices.

I found it more convenient cheaper to travel to Sydney. Gold Coast airport is remarkably efficient and cheap. I met a lot of people doing the same thing; 5:15pm at Sydney Domestic is packed with workers commuting by air.

I live near Munich now and it's amazing to see so many big companies and so much opportunity in such a small place. There are literally hundreds of tech jobs available within 1km of my rural apartment. There are jobs ads on the buses and trains.

[underwater]

Your LinkedIn says you work on embedded systems. Perhaps that is just too niche for an industry the size of Brisbane’s? The frontend market isn’t great, but it does exist.

[lukego]

Just curious: what is some cool stuff happening in Brisbane these days? I grew up there but I moved away to find more interesting work a long time ago. It would be nice to hear about interesting things happen there nowadays.

[stephen_g]

We have dev offices for quite a few majors (Oracle, SAP, IBM, ToughtWorks, Boeing, Boeing Defense etc.), but lots of little interesting companies too.

I’m in Systems programming/electronics design - it’s probably a different story for a front end dev - I don’t think there’s much of that at all!

One little company I used to work for was in traffic systems, basically IoT/sensor networks before it was cool (all on private networks though!) and we developed a system that GPS tracked ambulances and fire engines, and predicted their likely path (destination was known) and ran interventions on traffic signals to both minimise travel time for the emergency vehicle and minimise disruption to other traffic. It’s a lot more effective than the dumb IR blaster systems used elsewhere. We also had a ramp system that staggered cars coming in down on-ramps near chokepoints that significantly increased highway flow and reduced nose-to-tail accidents (from the stop-start traffic) by something like 30%. I think they’re rolling out that tech now with some US cities departments of transport.

Now I work at a little company that makes class-leading satellite/microwave equipment, including maritime and road-vehicle satellite-tracking terminals, frequently up- and down-converters, etc.

There’s actually a surprising amount of microwave engineering, and lots of aviation/defence work (some in the city with Boeing Defense and some out in Ipswich at Amberley), as well as Virgin Australia being headquartered here.

[lukego]

That's great to hear about, thanks!

[underwater]

I moved from the Bay Area to Brisbane. The market is pretty sparse. Seems like Flight Centre, Suncorp, Virgin, TAB, and Auto and General are the big companies.

Console seem interesting, they were recently acquired by Macquarie. Console Connect and Rex are hiring.

I’ve met people trying to take advantage of lack of competition to set up dev offices. I talked with a well funded US startup who seems interesting.

[adampwells]

Megaport is headquartered in Brisbane and we are hiring! Looking for senior and intermediate Java/Kotlin/Sacala devs