Why You Will Break Your New Year’s Resolution…

We’re now over two weeks into the new year and 29% of resolutions would have already become unstuck, according to research carried out by StatisticBrain.

Almost half of us usually make new years resolutions only for 92% to fail by year end.

Why do we fail at something that means so much to us? We evidently feel that the changes we make will make us better people. Whether that be financially, physically, emotionally or professionally, we make new year’s resolutions because we know that we could be better at certain aspects of our lives (we can always be better!).

In the chaos of the festive season, we quickly forget about everything that held us back during the previous year and pledge that the new year will be different. Just as every new day begins with the promise and excitement of possibility, only to end with parking oneself in front of the television, anxious about the next day’s meetings, the dawn of the new year also presents unrelenting possibility. So it stands to reason that our early optimism drives us to create bold goals and set the bar high, which is absolutely what we should be doing.

Why then do most resolutions fail?

One pertinent reason is the fundamental roadblocks, or ‘disablers’, that stopped us from being awesome at said area for improvement up until that point. Perhaps you didn’t have time to go to the gym (that one is often a poor excuse rather than a fact). Maybe your hectic travel schedule prevented you from getting into the habit of regular yoga classes. You said “yes” to too many new projects at work resulting in long nights and weekend work so you didn’t spent much time with your family. You didn’t perform as well as you would have liked in the office because your sleeping patterns and diet are all over the shop leaving you spent by the early afternoon. Or maybe you just have a bad attitude that needs refining.

In the above cases it is all well and good that we say we want to get fit in 2014, spend more time with family or become the office Superman (or Wonder Woman), but if we don’t change the underlying behaviours and disablers that prevented us from being these things in 2013, then all of the wishing and trying in the world won’t help us.

Once you’ve identified what you want to change, you should consider prioritising. Do we really want to get fit or do we actually prefer sleeping in an hour in the morning? (n.b. I don’t personally advocate not working out in favour of sleep).

Maybe there are other resolutions we could make that we’ll actually keep where the enablers and disablers are more likely to result in the achievement of our goal. Ever wanted to learn a language? Maybe you can use Duolingo for 20 minutes a day during your morning commute to work? Time? Work? Sleep? Money? None are an issue here. A perfect example of how actually thinking about your resolution before you make it can help you achieve it.

Some may say that this is a somewhat lax approach to resolutions, and right they may be. If you really have set your sights on the grand ol’ resolution of losing weight and getting fit and your disablers were many while your enablers, the things that help you achieve your goals, were few and far between, then you will have to influence them.

Perhaps you can get more time by using apps such as the ever popular efficiency apps and enablers such as Evernote, 30:30 or Buffer.  Perhaps you can learn to say no to jobs, work more effectively by having a focus on what actually adds value and not sweating the small stuff.

Spending too long on the morning commute? Perhaps you can negotiate working remotely or closer to home using a flexible office platform like HotDesk?

Overwhelmed with tasks and errands? Consider outsourcing creative tasks through Freelancer or everyday errands through Airtasker. If you’re not outsourcing, chances are you’re wasting time doing what someone else can do for a fraction of the cost. Not only that, but it’s time you could better spend on said resolution.

You could get better at saying no to new projects when you’re already overwhelmed or delegating tasks more diligently in the office. Perhaps you can get a better night’s rest by staying away from the internet for an hour before bed to help you get up for that morning trip to the gym? Whatever your impediments, there’s a ton of ways they can be overcome.

So before you break your resolution, identify your disablers, determine how they can be overcome, and get to work becoming one of the 8% of people who successfully achieve their resolution.

My first week as a full time entrepreneur

Confronting. That is how I felt waking up one sunny Monday morning in an inner west suburb of Sydney.

On the surface of it, this was just like any other Monday morning. The Sydney traffic was doing its very best to slowly steer those game enough to drive into insanity. Railway stations and bus stops were full of people either seemingly in the process of waking up or recounting stories of their weekends. Cafes were buzzing with activity as commuters sought their pick-me-ups ahead of a another work week ahead. And me? Well, I had nowhere to go.

You see, after juggling the demands of full-time work with my startup, shared office space platform Hotdesk.com.au, for almost a year, I found myself in the very privileged situation of being in command of a generous sum of funding and the liberty of focusing purely on Hotdesk for at least a year. I had often preached to anybody who’d listen that if I had the time and the capital I would take the business to grand heights but the time constraints of working at a global investment bank and budgetary challenges of bootstrapping made it all too difficult.

Well, now I had not only the time but also the capital to play with, and it left me feeling like a stunned wide-eyed deer staring into the headlights of an incoming truck – the truck in this case being external pressures of social and professional judgment. While we like to think of family and friends as ever supportive, thoughts of failure and the subsequent loss of respect come bubbling to the surface. We fear not being attractive to the opposite sex. We fear becoming financially insecure. We fear the lack of consistent income. We fear becoming less employable and lastly, and perhaps the most tangible and legitimate fear of the lot, we fear not being able to repay those who have put their hard earned cash on the line, exercising a vote of confidence and belief in our abilities to commercialise an early-stage venture.

We ask questions of ourselves when we see others making their daily commute to a place of gainful employment. Are we just being lazy chasing these entrepreneurial dreams? Is it because we don’t want to ‘work work’. Is it because we have an issue with authority? Are we just dreamers?

Indeed, while having the opportunity to run your own show for a year is a gift and one I wouldn’t change for anything, the weight that comes with it is exponentially heavier and it takes a certain kind of person to embrace the opportunity head on and awaken every day with newfound vigour and energy.

In my case, maintaining some sort of routine synonymous with how I had approached my working week up until that Monday morning was something I knew I had to do. Waking up at 5:30am to hit the gym would not only set structure to my day but would get the cognitive juices flowing, putting me in a good mental space to hit the ground running in the office.

Next up, commuting to a place of work was just as important. While working from home sounds nice and may have many merits, it is often not the most productive of locations for a number of reasons. It is not associated with work time but rather with leisure and rest time so getting ‘into the zone’ doesn’t come naturally and requires a lot of discipline. Second, the process of commuting to a ‘place of work’ gets many people shifting focus and finally, taking up residence in a shared coworking space, where other likeminded entrepreneurs are gathered, provides the perfect environment to not only get some work done, but to network, collaborate and share the journey.

I found that while my days previously consisted of nine or so hours on my day job followed by four or so on Hotdesk in the evening, I was now doing just as many hours scattered  throughout the day, only with one difference – it didn’t feel like work. While I was liberated from being tied to my desk for a predetermined stretch of hours, I was spending more time at it, but it was by choice and it was being fuelled by passion for what I was doing. Unlike most full-time gigs which are based on the supposition that all people are exactly the same and are most productive and effective between the hours of 9am and 5pm, I could take off and go for a run or a walk or anything I desired if I wasn’t ‘feeling it’ and could come back to it later when I was inspired, not when the clock dictated I was good to go.

I am an advocate of Timothy Ferris’s theory on ‘work for work’s sake’ and that we often fill our work day with monotonous, non value-adding tasks in order to feel like we’re working. There is no greater waste of time, which, in our very short lives, is precious.

On effective use of time, it is incredibly important to have some sort of plan of attack to not only your day but also your week and month. What are you looking to achieve? What will help you get there? A list of not only tasks to complete but a well prioritised list based on a sound forecast return on investment is critical. Don’t sweat the small ‘work for work’s sake’ stuff and focus on the important stuff, the stuff that is often the hardest. Find out when you’re best at hitting the hard yards, eliminate interruptions and allocate a few hours of focus towards it. For many, this will be first thing in the morning. Diving into the easy stuff first may put you at risk of getting into a lazy zone which can be difficult to come out of so try to get into a habit of doing the hard stuff first.

While the initial feeling of confrontation was still with me by the Wednesday, the culmination of each day brought with it slightly more sense of control. I was going to bed satisfied and was kicking more and more goals each day now that I had the time to execute on the strategies I had up until this point recorded in spreadsheets ‘to do’ when time and money permitted.

Now in my second week I am under no misconception that I am all over this new way of working. I have a lot to learn about managing my new day to day effectively and balancing it with my social life and relationships outside of the business, but one thing I’ve come to appreciate already is that startup life is about the journey, the moment you focus too heavily on the destination is the moment you draw ever close to throwing in the towel for lack of immediate results.

Embrace the ride, the ups and downs and taking something away from every moment. Chances are, the personal and professional development that comes with building and running a business will not only get you more respect from your peers, make you more attractive to the opposite gender and increase your employability, but for those lucky and hardworking enough, it just may deliver rewards to repay not only your investors but yourself in spades.

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The art of juggling – fulltime employee and startup founder

 

80 hour work weeks are not uncommon if you’re the founder of a start-up – building a business is a tough gig, particularly in the online space where competition is so fierce.

However, there is an emerging group of young entrepreneurs going against the grain and juggling demanding full-time jobs with a start-up. This is an army of entrepreneurs who don’t just preach but also live the lean start-up principles, actively use efficiency tools and effectively outsource and delegate the unsexy stuff or the tasks they’re simply no good at. 

Up until last week, I myself had juggled the establishment of Hotdesk.com.au with a demanding role at Macquarie Bank. While I was lucky enough to receive funding and embark upon fulltime entrepreneurship, juggling fulltime employment with a business did not prevent me from kicking goals on both ends of the field. I thought it would be interesting and worthwhile finding out how other ‘jugglers’ manage to keep things in balance and develop their careers while also establishing profitable businesses and maintaining active social lives. Perhaps many actively employed ‘wantrapreneurs’ reading this can find some inspiration and get started. It is not without its challenges though. 

Daniel O’Brien, director of capital markets and commercial leasing with CBRE and co-founder of Blue Chilli company HOUSL, knows all too well the challenges that come with juggling. “When HOUSL started to gain real momentum, I did find it challenging to balance my home life, day job and HOUSL. Also at this time our second daughter was born, so it was very challenging.  But you are only young once, and I always believed in the HOUSL product and knew the ‘end game’ would all be worthwhile. I had never done something like this before so I was doing all of it “on the run”.  Without the encouragement and support of my wife, it would have been much harder.” 

Despite these challenges HOUSL has tracked a growth curve and has attracted a very high profile investor in REA Group CEO Greg Ellis which has supported the hiring of a CEO, a marketing specialist and a BDM. 

In fact, working in the industry already presented benefits and opportunities that perhaps otherwise would not have presented themselves. “In some ways, working for the largest real estate services firm in the world has introduced me to an amazing network of contacts”, says Daniel. “The challenge has been to respect my role at CBRE and to never compromise existing professional relationships. The great thing about HOUSL is that it delivers real efficiencies and benefits so whenever I’ve sponsored an introduction to key influencers within the industry, the product has been good enough to stand up on its own.” 

This is something that I could relate to myself. The mainstream press I received shortly after launching Hotdesk was enough to get on the radar of key players at my employer’s investment banking arm, all of whom were very helpful in making introductions to influencers in Sydney’s private equity and commercial real estate space. Relationships, strategic partnerships and networks are key when trying to capture market share as a start-up so it is well worth looking inwards to your place of employment for potential boosts, not unlike the ones received in adolescent years when trying to scale a high fence.

Being tactical about it and setting aside time to work on your start-up during predetermined hours is critical to sustainability. Chopping and changing between jobs and tasks on an ad hoc, unstructured basis is not only mentally taxing but unproductive. It can take between 15 and 45 minutes to get into ‘the zone’ after an interruption so a clear focus on the task at hand is critical. Andrei Maior from Barnaby, the newest player on the mens fashion accessory scene, reiterates this point. “Set aside 2-3 hours a day, turn off your mobile and internet connection and just work. At Barnaby, we make use of automation and workflow tools like Buffer and Trello to support structured marketing and effectively manage and share the workload, despite the entire team being gainfully employed elsewhere.” 

Further to this point, Laura Chong, lawyer at Holding Redlich and founder of The 400 Co, a boutique fashion label geared towards saving corporate women time looking for stylish wares without the price-tag, tends to agrees that separating work from, well, work, is important. “Holding Redlich is obviously the priority so I do what I can during my lunch break and always make an effort after work to do something that benefits The 400 Co, regardless of how small that something may be.” 

Jugglers should consider subscribing to the Pareto principle which dictates that 80% of the return is in direct response to 20% of the effort or investment. This rings true of almost anything in life. Determine exactly what that 20% is for your business. Which tasks are generating 80% of the return? Focus on those. Focus on what you are best at. Everything else can be delayed, outsourced, delegated or perhaps dropped altogether. As entrepreneurs we have an innate desire to get our hands dirty and dive into every nook and cranny in the business but this isn’t an efficient nor effective use on our time and may actually be counterproductive as we aren’t focused on what really matters. Timothy Ferris, author of the 4 Hour Work Week, considers this ‘work for work’s sake’ and there’s not many bigger productivity killers. 

Budding entrepreneurs concerned with investing a lot of their time for little return may be well advised to consider lean start-up principles around testing their idea before committing additional time to their business. Testing market appetite for an idea these days can be done quite easily and cost effectively. A simple landing page together with a targeted Google Adwords campaign and maybe an online form are enough to test traffic and interest in your idea.

Pending some early market validation, one can outsource the development of almost anything without spending a fortune. Logos, websites, online stores, brand development, blogging, social media management and search engine optimisation are all only a few clicks and maybe a well planned phone call away on Freelancer.com. These enable founders to test the waters without breaking the bank. 

That’s all well and good but what about the impact on my career you say? Will your employer look down unfavourably on your entrepreneurial pursuits as a conflict of interest? Will your performance in the office be impacted? No on both accounts says Laura Chong. “Having a creative outlet makes you a better employee. Running my own business has helped me look at problems differently which is an important quality for lawyers and I find that I have so much more energy now at work because I have that creative outlet.” Her employer has been very supportive of her pursuits with The 400 Co and her advice for entrepreneurs who aren’t as fortunate to have a supportive ecosystem at work is simple – “either quit or don’t do it”. 

I too found that while at Macquarie that not being 100% invested in one thing makes you in some ways better at both and in many ways a happier person. It may have something to do with an appetite to explore life’s opportunities and not resign yourself to one pathway or corporate ladder or camera lens for the rest of your life. What makes life exciting is seeing, pursuing and experiencing different things. A change is as good as a holiday and the challenging yet rewarding nature of running a start-up can actually make you happier in your day-job and may even teach you a thing or two that you can incorporate into your normal day to make you a more productive and valuable employee.

It is true that some workplaces may have more entrepreneurial values and be more supportive than others so get a good gauge for just how supportive yours is before you start wearing branded youridea.com.au t-shirts to the office on casual Fridays or updating your Linkedin profile headline. Still, if an employer, in today’s day and age where innovative lateral thinking is being encouraged (although perhaps not widely practiced), doesn’t value your drive and would instead prefer that you went home and watched TV, then it may be worth questioning whether this is an employer where you can build a satisfying career and absolutely be your best. It ultimately comes down to transparency though – often a conversation with the right people is all that it takes to communicate that you are doing your own thing on the side and that it won’t impact your meeting responsibilities. Just be sure that there are no conflicts of interest and that you report any outside directorships to your employer. This is usually just a formality to meet the employer’s compliance obligations.

Is it all work and no play then? Finding time for relationships and having a strong network of moral support is ultimately what makes juggling sustainable, at least in the short to mid-term. Juggling fulltime work with a start-up doesn’t necessarily mean you have no time for anything else. Laura Chong has managed to build a fashion label while practicing law and will be partnering with other companies and charities such as 28 Days, Scent Candles and Cancer Mater Chicks in Pink to give back to the community. 

You can do it all. You just need to commit to and work for it. No doubt there may come a time where the crossroads stare you down and a decision must be made between your business and your employer but that doesn’t mean you can’t juggle until such a decision presents itself. Just like the armies of thousands that purport not to have time to exercise or prepare healthy food, there are many who keep pushing back their passions and waiting for ‘the right time’ to do what they love. However, that time will never come – life is always throwing competing priorities our way and the best way to deal with this is just to dive in and get amongst it. If you are passionate about what you do it won’t feel like additional work, it will make you a better employee, give your more energy and just may well present a lucrative and rewarding career path of its own.

 

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Startup Boyfriend

 

I’m going to take a courageous step and let you all in on my love life, not so much because I’m a self-important narcissist, but because, as somebody who has been juggling the demanding duties of full time work with building a start-up and trying to maintain a relationship for the past nine months, I’ve learned some lessons in love that I hope other entrepreneurs, often wrapped up in their own little world, may find helpful or at least somewhat insightful.

Like most driven entrepreneurs, there are rarely enough hours in the day. In my case, a typical weekday would commence with an early morning gym session, followed by 10 hours working for an investment bank while the subsequent four hours of available time would be devoted to working out the intricacies of and building my start-up. Not much time left for romantic walks on the beach.

As such, it was always going to be a challenge when I, after having spent several years deferring relationships in favour of ego-boosting quick fixes devoid of long-term commitment or substance (a nice way of saying casual flings), decided to take one such fling to the next level and embark upon creating an emotional bond built on more than just lust.

The problem with entrepreneurs is that we are in the minority – it takes a certain kind of crazy to devote hundreds and often thousands of hours of your time working on something that in more cases than not, generates little or no return. It takes a certain kind of crazy to consider leaving the comfort of a six figure salary, bonuses, superannuation and paid holidays to back something that may see you living in the bedroom you grew up in for an extended period of time. It takes a certain kind of crazy to think that your business can be different to the 96% of Australian start-ups that fail to scale.

We do so because of a relentless desire and need to build, to create, to commercialise. We see things that we believe others don’t. We aren’t content with the relative safety of the 9-5 grind complemented by a diet of reality television. It simmers just under the surface for years while society’s expectations and a ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ mentality often hold us back until eventually we give in to temptation and dive head first into the demanding world of building something from nothing.

For me, the initial few months working on my start-up was an exciting time – and she thought so too.

The passion with which I spoke and the drive I approached life with appeared to be attractive qualities. Having validated market interest early in the piece with a beta website, my start-up was shortly thereafter featured in The Financial Review’s BOSS Magazine and The Australian, she was thrilled. I’d be thrilled too if my girlfriend ended up in the mainstream press – well, not if it was for the attempted smuggling of pot into Bali.

The problem is though, while all of this may seem appealing on the surface and while people often say they want someone ambitious, the fact of the matter is that the time and effort that comes with building a start-up (or aggressively climbing the corporate ladder for that matter) is not miniscule. While she maintained that she was attracted to my drive and passion, it became quite evident that she wasn’t attracted to everything that came with it. That included a lack of free time and extended to somewhat misplaced priorities.

And it didn’t stop with my start-up. When I did find time to go on ‘romantic walks on the beach’ and engage in civilian activity such as going out to dinner or catching a show, everything else became about business too and every observation became an opportunity wrapped up in a go to market strategy. Car parking, movie tickets, bar service, coffee queues…everything presented opportunities that I made sure she heard about. No doubt all this talk about business drove her crazy. Why couldn’t I just talk about last night’s episode of Big Brother like a normal person?

Despite early indications suggesting cracks were beginning to form, we decided to push on and in true to lean start-up form, tested living together for two weeks. No long term commitment, just an experiment. Needless to say, after years of having my own space, I was absolutely sh*tting myself at the prospect of sharing my house, time and life with somebody else.

While it had been somewhat easier to limit weeknight activity to the odd phone call, a quick dinner or a string of whatsapp messages, now we were in each other’s face every night and I could no longer hide just how devoted I was too my business or to reading about other start-ups, emerging marketing trends, lifestyle design and business in general.

It didn’t take long for a barrage of confrontation in a string of “what am I even doing here?”, “you don’t need me, you’ll be fine just working” and “all you do is work” aligned expletives to rear their head, despite my best intentions to set agreed expectations from the outset that I would spend most weeknights working.

But alas, theory and practice are distinct for a reason. The experiment failed. There was no pivot, we move on…

Looking back though, there were many positives to take from the relationship.

Despite my best efforts, I ended up spending a lot more time out and about than I normally would have and while I was lulled into a false sense of awesomeness, thanks to media mentions et al, I was and perhaps still to a certain degree am, a human being with a lot to learn about sacrifice and loving somebody else, about stepping out of my world and creating a new, equally shared world.

As such, don’t invest yourself in your business to the point where you haven’t taken the time nor made the investment in finding the most important synergy of all, one whose returns cannot be measured by Google Analytics or Xero. The lifetime value of an unconditional and interdependent relationship (note, I didn’t say dependent) that elevates you both to new heights is exponentially more than that of any customer.

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Start-ups left behind in the Asian Century

Start-ups left behind in the Asian Century

Innovation. It was the undisputed battle cry of the year. Looking back, the Asian Century whitepaper was one of the biggest talking points of the year.

Big business and start-ups alike have become overly liberal with their use of the term and encourage relentless innovation and disruptive thinking every chance they get.

However, big business is fraught with bureaucratic structures and established procedures, while the large accounting and legal services firms are shackled by the chains of their core product offering.

It is the lean start-up that has the most room to move and treads the most fertile ground, primed for not only innovative thinking but also for action. Action to turn this thinking into something more than a few multi-coloured marker squiggles on workshop paper or self-serving ideas captured on company web-pages that resemble something from one of the many DIY Geocities sites of the 90s.

The Asian Century whitepaper was supposed to be the Australian Labor Party’s landmark answer to the emerging economies of Asia, particularly that of China, Japan, India, South Korea and Indonesia. It was to be our roadmap and response to the fact that within only a few years, Asia will be both the world’s largest producer and consumer of goods and services.

Yet this whitepaper, like many a corporate boardroom spiel, company-wide email and end of year junket, indiscriminately played the innovation card. In fact, ‘innovation’ was littered throughout the report no less than 90 times. So what does this mean for Australia’s innovative thinkers, creative types and fledgling start-up scene? Sadly, not much.

This 320 page document included an entire four, count them, four paragraphs dedicated to ‘supporting financing for innovation’. And while these four paragraphs touch on some existing initiatives such as the Commercialisation Australia (CA) grants and the Clean Technology program, there’s little by way of forward thinking or new incentives to support what Deloitte Private partner Josh Tanchell refers to as Australia’s greatest natural resource, entrepreneurs.

These fluffy paragraphs would not be out of place in the plush teddy section at Toys R’ Us, right there next to Tickle Me Elmo, or maybe one of the Care Bears, I haven’t quite decided.

The CA grants, while a commendable initiative, are a dollar for dollar incentive, and therein lies the reason why uptake of the grants is so low. Deloitte’s recent Silicon Beach report found that only 21% of Aussie start-ups accessing grants were doing so through CA. Getting a start-up off the ground is difficult stuff and having to front 50% of your start-up costs is no easy feat, particularly if taking the gamble and committing to projects on a full time basis on a stomach full of Maggi noodles, without a steady stream of income.

The fact is that while a full-time job can help fund your start-up, it can also hinder its progress and in a fast moving climate where first to market often wins, the inability to focus all of your creative juices on a single project can hinder progress, sacrifice results and ultimately discourage having a crack.

It’s hard to imagine having a red hot go while working 40 hours a week. This does not even take into account the often overlooked late nights, weekends, domestic duties and other social and family commitments. Yes, it is difficult to see any other reason why uptake of the CA grants is so low other than the fact that it is a dollar for dollar initiative.

Lean start-ups today are finding it easier to get out in the real world and test their ideas through enabling technology platforms such as crowd-funding, crowd-sourcing and a slick application of bootstrapping. But when it comes time to scale, Australia is skating far behind the United States and with all things remaining constant, nothing other than a Steven Bradbury-esque slip up on the part of our Monday night football loving peers will see us closing the gap.

Deloitte found that in the US, comparable companies raise 4.8 times more capital than Australian companies in early stage investments raise and an astronomical 100 times more capital when ready to scale. Scratch that previous comment about Steven Bradbury, at least he was in the final race, we’re struggling to bust out of the heats at this rate.

To add further insult to injury, the red tape island we call home stings those who open their wallets to start-ups with capital gains tax, makes selling company equity notoriously difficult and often restricts bidding for government contracts to ASX 100 listed companies.

Australia must do a lot more to incentivise investment in start-up companies and consider additional tax breaks and the lowering of red tape, particularly with respect to employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs).

The lack of foresight shown by the whitepaper is quite disappointing considering wealth of start-up activity in Australia. We have a wealth of co-working spaces including Hub Melbourne and Sydney, Sydney’s Fishburners and the nation-wide Jelly spaces to name but a few as well as programs and funding platforms such as Pushstart and the fast growing AppVillage through to Starfish and Blue Chilli.

While these platforms are helping to provide some relief, they could do with a hand from the policy makers.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor this year found that more than 10.5% of Australians are engaged in some sort of entrepreneurial activity and one would not be wrong in assuming this number to be much higher under different conditions.

Having said all of this, we aren’t short on start-up success stories when you consider Jetts Fitness, BigCommerce, Shoes of Prey, UberGlobal and enterprise software poster child Atlassian, but this success is in spite of the funding climate. A more robust funding climate would inspire new heights of innovation, rather than just get the conversation started, generate economic growth and place us in poll position, not only geographically, but strategically, to take advantage of the Asian revolution.

Gillard’s whitepaper is to start-ups what Charles Darwin’s Theory Of Evolution is to the faithful and the underlying message is one which tells aspiring entrepreneurs, in no uncertain terms, that if they want to access the capital required to give their ideas wings, then they should knock down a can of Red Bull and start packing their bags…and take their money spinning and job creating disruptive thinking with them.

@SteveGlaveski is an IT Risk professional, aspiring entrepreneur, start-up writer, fitness and rock n’ roll enthusiast.

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