00:31:48 · Sachin, Michelle Gilmore, Adam Miller
[00:31:48] S2: reality is, the best engineers have maybe 15 interesting companies they can work at in Australia. In SF, they can go work at OpenAI. Or they can go to work on cutting edge research, which for a lot of them is super interesting. [00:32:01] S1: Yeah, I'm not sure that SF will continue to be the only place. I I think that we're going to see other pathways and that there's really interesting fodder in places like South Korea and Japan. And India is a very interesting emerging market. As a founder, you know, we just... We did our, our pre seed round here with Blackbird. You know, I am definitely not saying SF's the place, nor am I necessarily saying America is a place that we need to extend into. And we actually have more customers via organic growth in places like Japan and South Korea Interesting. Indonesia, Vietnam, India. We've got a really interesting project going on in India at the moment, Sri Lanka. So I I think that the the the issue with the SF hype cycle is that it makes people think there's only a one way to do that. And, obviously, VCs love that because it's predictable, and there's a there's a community there that supports that kind of experience. But I do think that, there's going to be a leveling out and a flattening of that and that there's other interesting places to explore, other markets to tap into. And with AI, we have more ability to do that and tap into talent that's not gonna get paid a million dollars because they can. [00:33:35] S5: Yep.
00:33:35 · Adam Miller, Michelle Gilmore
[00:33:35] S5: Yep. [00:33:36] S1: The great thing about the talent that does get paid a million dollars is they get bored really quickly. Of course. And then they want to work with founders that can actually run a good company that are led by values and ethics. And once they've made their money and they're rich, they're happy to take a a pay cut. So, you know, I'm talking to a bunch of those people now that money is not even a conversation. Like, they're generally not interested about money. Yeah. They're interested about the use case. [00:34:04] S5: Yep. [00:34:04] S1: Do you have domain expertise? Like, do you as a founder have the attributes that I want to work for? What are your values? What do you care about? What kind of world are you trying to create? Which gives me hope. It's not just a paycheck. I I certainly don't want people working for me that are just chasing a paycheck. [00:34:21] S5: Why do you believe this about the geographical dispersion? Because I guess what we've seen in history is that every time there is a new technological platform shift, there's this gravitational pulley towards American SF because of, I think two main things, talent and capital. And I think, like, saw a few years ago, SF started to lose a bit of that pull. Things felt more dispersed. As soon as AI came back to the scene, that pull comes back. And there's just this funny cultural thing where America tracks ambition. Why do you think it will become more distinct? [00:34:49] S1: Is that fact though, or is that
00:34:49 · Michelle Gilmore, Adam Miller, Xharmagne Carandang
[00:34:49] S1: Is that fact though, or is that [00:34:51] S5: subjective view? I think if we look at all the platform shifts in the past seventy years, you'd see that there's... Every time there is that platform shift, there is... [00:34:59] S0: Did you [00:34:59] S1: say seventy years? [00:35:00] S5: Seven years. Seventy. Okay. Yep. So platform shifts over seventy years. [00:35:04] S1: Okay. I I think that talent follows money. So there's a bit of chicken and egg conversation about where that is and why that is. And that particularly most of the VCs that started that kind of movement were there. Like, I I honestly do think that that could have been started in other places. I know that there is the... I lived in New York, so I was on the other side of the, you know, the East Coast West Coast fight. Although I absolutely didn't have a didn't have a dog in a fight. But I... I'm not sure that I believe that when you hit a ceiling, that's the only option. I don't... I just don't subscribe to it. I think that it... There are different ways to think about it. There are different ways to think about growth. There are different ways to think about diversity. I think that there is a bubble of talent that all think the same there, even though they think they think differently. You have the same conversation over and over and over again, whereas the conversations I'm having in Japan and South Korea are so interesting, particularly with engineers. So I think that we can go broader.
00:35:04 · Michelle Gilmore, Sachin, Xharmagne Carandang
[00:35:04] S1: Okay. I I think that talent follows money. So there's a bit of chicken and egg conversation about where that is and why that is. And that particularly most of the VCs that started that kind of movement were there. Like, I I honestly do think that that could have been started in other places. I know that there is the... I lived in New York, so I was on the other side of the, you know, the East Coast West Coast fight. Although I absolutely didn't have a didn't have a dog in a fight. But I... I'm not sure that I believe that when you hit a ceiling, that's the only option. I don't... I just don't subscribe to it. I think that it... There are different ways to think about it. There are different ways to think about growth. There are different ways to think about diversity. I think that there is a bubble of talent that all think the same there, even though they think they think differently. You have the same conversation over and over and over again, whereas the conversations I'm having in Japan and South Korea are so interesting, particularly with engineers. So I think that we can go broader. [00:36:13] S2: I think an interesting insight there is, one of the Notion founders, you know, based in The States, but was running out of money. So went to Japan and stayed, I think, his mom or something in Japan. And a lot of the Notion design and aesthetic and minimalism feels very Japanese. And that's probably an example of forcing non consensus and that terming consensus. [00:36:35] S0: It's
00:36:35 · Xharmagne Carandang, Georgie Healy, Michelle Gilmore, Daniel Palmer, Adam Miller
[00:36:35] S0: It's [00:36:35] S4: whether culturally we can get on board with the fact that SF isn't Mecca. I did look into this once before because I just kept hearing from this late early series A stage people just max exodus from Australia. And it was the same three things. Talent density, just volume of talent with operational experience. You know, maybe they've got three years experience here in Australia for these deep AI use cases and ten years experience in Sandtran, investor pool, just volume of investors, and their risk profile in The US. They are more willing to give checks to more risky ventures and yeah the hustle culture. They're just like, will work yourselves to the bone for me in America. So it's not your kind of company culture, I'm sure, but for some. [00:37:39] S1: I mean, I'm not necessarily saying I don't subscribe to the values. I'm saying I don't accept the premise that that's the only way. Mhmm. I think that it is a slither of what is possible, and it is a bias that we pretend it isn't. Like, we say it like it's fact when actually it's because it's where the money is. Mhmm. And it's where the checks are just written very easily. And I am not sure that those norms need to prevail. [00:38:14] S3: It's interesting to me though because, like, I'm surprised out of those three options, like, probably our main reason wasn't one of them, which is just that there's a lot [00:38:22] S5: of our customers there. And maybe that's because we target tech companies, so
00:38:22 · Adam Miller, Daniel Palmer, Georgie Healy, Sachin
[00:38:22] S5: of our customers there. And maybe that's because we target tech companies, so [00:38:26] S3: I guess definitely, that's probably a key reason why it's relevant to us, I think there's a lot of companies that do that. [00:38:31] S4: Do you have to relocate to San Fran for that though? [00:38:33] S3: It's helped us build relationships, particularly for a platform like ours where we have to do a lot of forward deploy style work with the companies we work with, having people in their time zones, having people that they can speak to in person has actually really helped us from a go to market point of view, more so than I didn't think we ever really had too much trouble raising capital while we were a Sydney based company. [00:38:59] S5: So yeah, I totally agree with [00:39:02] S3: your points, but just to put our hat in the ring as the main reason, or the main benefit I'd say we've seen from it, that would actually probably be it. There is just a lot of tech companies there and they are maybe even slightly more custom than Sydney based equivalents to invest in new technology. More refined in their buying processes as well, [00:39:23] S2: you know, the go to market cycles, I saw this in VC in like Europe and Australia would be like double, triple the time of American buyers, because they're just used to, okay, new technology, seen this before, [00:39:34] S3: buy. You know? We've seen that time and time again.