Top takeaways from the VC lovefest at SXSW Sydney
Venture capital was a popular topic at the SXSW event, with multiple panels involving top startup investors drawing capacity crowds.
AI is the biggest thing to happen in our lifetimes, bias is not “unconscious”, investing by gut feel needs rethinking and venture capitalists don’t need to take themselves too seriously. These were just a few of the main themes that emerged at SXSW Sydney this week from the multiple well-attended panels involving Australian VCs.
The speakers also reflected something that might not have been so obvious even a few years ago - VCs are slightly less male, pale and stale in 2023 than they were in 2013 (the year a lot of our large funds were born). Though as the women VCs pointed out, there is still some work to be done here on rethinking what have become industry norms.
On a panel looking at the future of VC, Jessy Wu, investment principal at Afterwork Ventures, a new challenger community driven VC firm, questioned the use of “gut feel” by VCs which can lead to an industry full of like-minded founders. “I think we need to continue to challenge ourselves not to rest on the laurels of gut feeling and pattern recognition, but continually challenge where the next great innovator is going to come,” Wu said.
Picking up on the theme of diversity, Flying Fox Ventures partner Kylie Frazer said that her contrarian view is that unconscious bias is grossly overstated to make us feel better about ourselves. “Most of us just have bias” she said. “We have a responsibility to step outside the fields in which we work on a daily basis and challenge some of those big scary structural ideas,” said Frazer.
