Why Aussie startups fail to scale and how the local ecosystem can help

Founders often start companies after creating a new product or finding a gap in the market.

Of course, getting your product right is important — but once founders have their product strategy in place, they often struggle with the managerial demands of running a business, so they fail to hire the right people, identify the best marketing strategies for their target customers, create and manage budgets effectively or build the right networks required to help them grow the company. In short, they fail to scale.

The big companies we know about — Google, Facebook, Amazon — none of them invented anything disruptively new from a product perspective. What they did exceptionally well was create amazing organisations, often using new business models. The founders put the product or technology foundations in place and then hired the likes of Eric Schmidt at Google and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook and gave them the task of turning what was initially a technical vision into a commercial organisation. Read more