{"id":44136,"date":"2023-10-20T15:33:43","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/the-inside-story-of-the-creation-of-australias-tech-supergroup-a-new-york-cafe-the-ghosts-of-the-past-and-that-photo-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:33:43","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:33:43","slug":"the-inside-story-of-the-creation-of-australias-tech-supergroup-a-new-york-cafe-the-ghosts-of-the-past-and-that-photo-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/the-inside-story-of-the-creation-of-australias-tech-supergroup-a-new-york-cafe-the-ghosts-of-the-past-and-that-photo-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"The inside story of the creation of Australia’s tech supergroup: A New York cafe, the ghosts of the past and that photo – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For a lot of people TechSydney was a new thing, an organisation that popped up suddenly, claiming to be the panacea for all of the Sydney tech ecosystem\u2019s problems, with little information on how that happened or how it was to be done.<\/p>\n

For the founding group and many other supporters it certainly wasn\u2019t a new thing. It was the culmination of years of effort; lessons from years of failed experimentation matched with a renewed sense of purpose and more recent action. Add in some fortuitous timing and there’s now hope we can finally help Sydney reach its potential as a global tech city.<\/p>\n

On Monday night TechSydney CEO Dean McEvoy gave a speech to over 200 people at the official launch of the group<\/a>. In the room, 170 companies were present representing over $11 billion in annual revenue. Crazy.<\/p>\n

That speech covered TechSydney\u2019s goals and some thoughts around initial plans for achieving them.<\/p>\n

What he didn\u2019t have time to cover, however, is how we got to this point, something which is critical for understanding the context and the culture behind the organisation. If we\u2019re to seek to be a transparent organisation then it\u2019s only fitting that we\u2019re transparent about our genesis as well – so let\u2019s get started.<\/p>\n

In the beginning<\/h3>\n

Many startups have an origin myth but TechSydney only has a simple, truthful beginning: A conversation between two Sydney tech ecosystem members in a cafe in New York City in early 2015.<\/p>\n

At that cafe Riley Batchelor and myself – we both regularly visited NYC – discussed how far the NYC tech community had come in such a small amount of time and how Sydney had been trying for much longer with much less success – even taking into account the relative sizes of the cities.<\/p>\n

Fast-forward three months and project \u201cBlueCrush\u201d (deliberately the worst code name they could think of) was underway and Riley and I started approaching other members of the Sydney tech community to gather support for a renewed effort.<\/p>\n

While many people were keen to be involved, to their surprise many also weren\u2019t. It wasn\u2019t that those people didn\u2019t believe in the end goal. Rather, it was the problems of past, failed, attempts to create similar organisations that had many people thinking this too would be a waste of time.<\/p>\n

The ghosts of the past<\/h3>\n

What were the problems of the past that people were so worried about?<\/p>\n

They generally came down to one or more of the following:<\/p>\n