StartSoc helps entrepreneurs help themselves

While other parties in the ecosystem are important such as investors and educators, it is the entrepreneurs, the hackers, hipsters and hustlers (also known as the developers, designers and business executors) that are the heart of the ecosystem.

Our focus is tech startups & ecosystem enablers

We support all parties in the ecosystem starting with tech entrepreneurs but it is important to recognise there are many parties on the edge of our industry that talk the talk but ultimately dilute or even compete (e.g. for talent, funding or resources) directly with our entrepreneurs and their ecosystem.  They depend on entrepreneurs so we support them first and foremost.

Many also compete on or even foster an un-level playing field by lobbying to create regulatory or taxation complexity or by using sophisticated methods to avoid tax (these methods are out of most entrepreneurs reach because they are surviving on noodles).

We also have challenges with institutionalised brain drain or bias in funding models for government support.

The most common misconception we have to over come is that all startups are the same. They are not. Most of the last 30 years of innovation policy (and indeed most recent announcements) focus on commercialisation of traditional research. That is fine and it is something we do need to do as a nation but that is NOT the focus of the start society, we focus on a parallel challenge that is fundamentally different and higher in value (reward in terns of wealth and social impact) and higher in risk and harder to realise (skills are rarer).

Tech startups founders are our focus because these disruptive innovators have the most leveraged wealth creation and social impact to improve our nation and wider region. Entrepreneurs enable us all to compete globally.

Over half a TRILLION dollars in value (that is 500 Billon or even 500,000 Million or $500,000,000,000 if you prefer) has been created just in the privately held larger tech startup companies in the last 3-5 years. This is more than any period in history and doesn’t include the social impact or the wealth and social impact of much larger listed companies or the smaller companies. Combined wealth and social of all these groups is probably around four or five Trillion dollars just in recent years.

These ‘unicorns‘ are different to traditional companies, they are based on moving fast (Uber has done hundreds of cities in just a few years) and generally don’t require large amounts of capital in the early days. They also tend to know who their (usually global) customer is and what they want and refine this through iterations called experiments or testing or ‘lean’ approaches.

Usually these new companies also don’t focus on protecting themselves with IP like patents, it might be part of the plan in a defensive way but it is not the primary means of capturing value. Value is captured by building a loyal ecosystem (often called liquidity in marketplace businesses) of customers and partners that protects them from competitors and magnifies value for stakeholders in a virtuous circle.

Traditional companies are often at the other end of this innovation barbell. They require capital to do long term research up front and protect findings with patents. Often they don’t have a clear path to commercialisation even after years of collaboration with universities and laboratories. Time to value is often much longer and a high proportion are not aiming to be global from day one and are not planning to scale to hundreds of millions of customers in the first few years (like instagram, whatsapp, twitter and Facebook have done).

Cheers,

Pete Cooper

Founder

The Start Society