🌆 Intercity rivalry
While state governments are coming to the party to support innovation, there is a cost. The fragmentation of our startup ecosystem is escalating as we build silos around an already fragile epicentre.
This week, I’m in Adelaide as a guest and speaker for Southstart, one of Australia’s longest running startup conferences, minus the Covid years. As a major event for the community that is outside the startup ecosystem’s two major cities — Sydney and Melbourne — it feels like neutral territory.
But, in spending a bit of time chatting to people last night at the opening event, it’s also clear that one of the bigger challenges the ecosystem faces is that there are still a lot of silos of activity spotted around the country. And there’s a definite eastern seaboard 'bubble' that does little to engage with them.
It’s well established that one of the reasons modern Silicon Valley became what it is today is that there were a large number of people — founders, investors, universities, talent — converging in one place when the opportunity of the internet presented itself. Its roots in innovation go back as far as 1955 with the arrival of the Shockley Semiconductors Laboratory in the city.
Declared “dead” following Covid, a new wave of innovation is happening again in San Francisco, with AI bringing back many who had left during the pandemic and the city establishing itself once again as the epicentre of innovation and tech.
