The Sunrise conference in #sketchnotes
I journeyed to Sydney this month to experience Blackbird Ventures’ annual conference The Sunrise. It’s targeted at and tells the story of Australian startup founders and was coordinated by my pro community-bro Joel Connolly. The backdrop was VIVID and the stories were heart-warming in stark contrast to the near freezing temps. Brisbane is making me soft!
First up Jodie Fox from Shoes of Prey told the story from their humble Queensland beginnings to mass customisation via a million dollar partnership with Nordstram. It got me thinking about Codebots and how our platform will unblock the technology pipeline for non-technical users who want to customise software.
While none of their founding team had any cobbler experience, that may not have been a bad thing because it also meant they didn’t hold on to industry-limiting beliefs about customisation.
When it comes to growth-hacking and guerilla marketing, Jodie said it was important to understand the difference in promotional peaks in activity vs a baseline in converting customers.
We were graced with the presence of Australian startup royalty Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian who brought a truly global outlook to the local lineup. With HQ still out of Sydney, he was vocal in his frustration at new visa laws and addressed the important issue of ‘local maximums’.
When asked what makes an interesting startup founder, he responded:
An unfamiliar sight at a startup conference, one of the founders of The Wiggles, Paul Field found interesting parallels between their kid-tainment empire and building a tech business. It all starts with understanding your target audience (and it’s helpful if a new one is born every minute!).
One of the most surprising and high-level talks of the day was the Space Panel. Spiced up by @Flavia Tata Nardini (building nano satellites out of Adelaide), @Andgie the Space Station Flight Controller and Jason Held of @SaberAstro. I had no idea that per capita, Australia has more space-related startups than any other country in the world.
New to me, was shan-lyn ma, founder of Zola an ecommerce wedding registry that is taking that rather large niche, by storm. (Currently valued at $270 million.) Shan-lyn grew up in Australia, studied at Stanford and got experience as a product manager at Gilt Groupe as they scaled from 30 to 1000 staff.
Her confidence against Amazon was evident, as she talked about the giant of e-commerce trying to sell dog food to soon-to-be-married couples while they shopped for luxury goods.
Her AUS > US startup translation was also pretty funny :)
Touchy-feely talk of the day goes to Didier Elzinga from Culture Amp. I have a special place in my heart for this team as I saw them landing their first customers out of Inspire9 back in 2013 and have watched them scale with grace and heart. Their #peoplegeek community is also a shining light for me, a rallying call for a group of people that hadn’t been recognised or organised with such respect until Culture Amp.
A tip of the trucker cap to event organiser, Joel Connolly and high-fives to the Blackbird Ventures team for the quality moderating, thoughtful insights and MCing.
Codebots will be back next year, with a freshly minted SasS platform for you all to test-drive.
