For a third year running, the Startup Spring festival, hosted by StartupAUS, has returned to Australia following a launch event at Sydney Town Hall last night.
Startup Spring is a three-week long, Australia-wide festival of events and activities that aims to celebrate and promote the startup community and to encourage more Australians to get involved and excited about entrepreneurship and technology.
In an address to open the event, Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore highlighted the importance of focusing on opportunities for more people to become tech entrepreneurs.
“We recognise the importance of start up events and promoting the ecosystem,” Cr Moore said.
StartupAUS CEO, Peter Bradd, said “this is the first year where we have had official city support for Startup Spring, which is an exciting and positive step forward for helping our nation transform into a strong and diverse digitally led economy. The City of Sydney is passionate about making our city a hub for tech innovation and that’s why we are so thankful for their support. We look forward to working with the City of Sydney to better this great city.”
A panel discussion took place following Cr Moore’s address including StartupAUS Board Director and founder of Blackbird Ventures, Bill Bartee, founder & CEO at Posse, Rebekah Campbell, and entrepreneur and investor & founder of SYD Ventures and Follow the Seed, Andrey Shirben.
During the discussion, the panelists discussed the need for Australia to do more to develop its ecosystem for tech start ups. Mr Shirben, previously located in Israel said “Israel has seen the fruits of investing in the ecosystem for tech start ups.
“Australia still has to mature,” he said.
Ms Campbell added “the overall culture of innovation needs to change – we need to invest more – and we can learn much from the US in its approach to innovation.”
Mr Bartee said that getting the conversation going about start ups and tech in the community was great. He said Sydney has everything it needs in terms of infrastructure which includes 3 of the world’s top 75 universities. We just need to nurture that ecosystem, he said.
Over the course of the next three weeks there will be events taking place across Australia. A full list of events can be found here: http://startupaus.org/startupSpring/
