A Blueprint for Australia: Community in the Age of AI

The paradox we don’t talk about

Australia has never produced more billion-dollar companies, and founders have never felt more alone.

In the last few years a generation of Australian software businesses crossed the line that used to be reserved for Silicon Valley. SafetyCulture — started by a former workplace-accident detective in a Townsville garage — was valued at roughly A$2.5 billion in its 2024 raise. Octopus Deploy bootstrapped out of Brisbane for a decade before taking investment that put it near A$880 million. Eucalyptus, founded in 2019, was acquired by US-listed Hims & Hers in a deal worth up to US$1.15 billion (around A$1.6 billion). Simpro grew from a Queensland trade-software idea into a unicorn operating in 38 countries.

These are not flukes. They are proof the talent is here. And yet ask almost any founder one rung below them — the scale-up founder doing $5m, $20m, $50m in revenue, the one with 40 staff and a market turning under their feet — and you’ll hear the same thing. There’s no one to ask. No room where the hard questions get answered honestly. No one a step ahead who’ll tell me the truth.

That’s not a talent problem. It’s a community problem. And in the age of AI, it has become the problem that matters most.

Why community is the scarce resource now, not information

For thirty years the bottleneck on building a company was access to information. How do you price enterprise software? How do you structure a global team? How do you raise a Series B? The founders who could find the answers won.

AI has just collapsed that advantage to zero. Every founder now has the same infinitely patient analyst in their pocket. The playbook is no longer scarce.

What’s scarce is the thing AI can’t give you: judgement, earned the hard way, from someone who has actually made the call you’re about to make. The pattern-match that only comes from scar tissue. The peer who’ll tell you your strategy is wrong before the market does. The person two exits ahead who picks up the phone.

When information was the moat, you could build alone. Now that information is free, the moat is the community around you. The founders and the countries that understand this will compound. The ones that don’t will have the best tools in history and still lose.

Australia’s four hard truths

If community is now the competitive edge, Australia starts with a handicap. Four of them, actually.

One: we are quietly hostile to people who try. The tall-poppy reflex is real and it is expensive. It teaches founders to hide ambition, downplay wins, and never ask for help in case it looks like weakness. A culture that punishes visible striving will always under-produce the open, generous behaviour that great ecosystems run on.

Two: we treat failure as a verdict, not a lesson. In the places that compound — Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, increasingly London — a failed company is a credential. Here it’s still too often a stain. So founders don’t talk about what broke, the scar tissue stays private, and the next founder re-learns the same lesson at the same cost.

Three: our successful founders don’t see ecosystem-building as their job. This is the big one. In the best ecosystems, the people who made it come back — they mentor, they invest early, they take the stage and tell the truth, they convene rooms. Australia has a thin layer of these people and a widespread assumption that, once you’ve exited, your obligation to the ecosystem is over. It isn’t. The single highest-leverage thing this country could do is get its successful founders to believe that shaping what comes next is part of the job. And let’s be precise about what that means: it isn’t catching up with a founder who reached out for a coffee and handing over some advice. It’s a deliberate investment — a set percentage of your time and energy, ring-fenced, spent making the environment better for everyone coming after you.

Four: we are fragmented into a thousand small fires. Walk through a resource like Macks Resources’ map of the Australian ecosystem — a genuinely useful list built by one of our own members — and you’ll find dozens upon dozens of associations, accelerators, angel groups, meetups and founder communities. (See the list.) Most are run by good people trying to do good things. Almost none have the scale, funding or continuity to do it properly. (Telling detail: even that excellent list is necessarily incomplete — Venture Down Under appears on it; our own job board, Innovation Bay Jobs, doesn’t. When the map itself can’t keep up, you know the territory is fragmented.) The energy is enormous. The coordination is close to zero.

None of this is terminal. But you can’t fix what you won’t name.

What the world’s best ecosystems actually do

Here’s the good news: this is a solved problem. Other countries have built the muscle, and the playbook is visible if you look.

Brad Feld wrote it down. In Startup Communities (2012), the investor behind Techstars distilled what makes a startup community compound into his “Boulder Thesis”: it must be led by entrepreneurs, not government or service providers; everyone involved must commit to a 20-year time horizon; it must be radically inclusive of anyone who wants to take part; and it must run continual activities that engage the whole stack of founders, investors and operators. Underneath it all sits his now-famous ethos — give first. Give before you get. Australia is long on programs and short on every one of those four principles.

The UK built the convening layer. Founders Forum, started by Brent Hoberman in 2005, began as a single 50-person dinner in London where founders met investors, CEOs and government in one room. Two decades on it has run 40-plus forums across 20-plus cities and spun up a whole group of businesses to back founders from pre-seed to post-exit. The lesson isn’t the glamour — it’s that someone deliberately built the room, year after year, until the ecosystem had a centre of gravity.

The US institutionalised peer learning at the top. World 50 quietly assembled more than 4,800 CEOs and senior executives from 40 countries into invitation-only peer groups whose member companies average over US$27 billion in revenue. The insight is simple and powerful: put leaders into small, trusted, curated groups, and they learn faster from each other than from any consultant. YPO and EO have run the same model for decades across tens of thousands of business owners worldwide.

Networks like Endeavor and the global entrepreneurship movement added the give-back engine — high-impact founders who explicitly reinvest time, money and reputation into the next cohort, on the understanding that a rising ecosystem lifts everyone in it.

Read those four together and the pattern is unmistakable. Great ecosystems are entrepreneur-led, built for the long term, organised into trusted peer groups, anchored by successful people who give back, and convened on purpose by someone willing to do it for years. Australia has the raw material for every one of those. What it’s lacked is the connective tissue.

A blueprint for Australia

So here is what has to change. Not aspirations — specifics.

1. Make giving back the expectation, not the exception. We need our Atlassians and Canvas, our Culture Amps, Airtaskers, AirTrunks, Immutables, Linktrees, Go1s and Employment Heroes — alongside our SafetyCultures, Eucalyptuses and Simpros, and the many, many founders who’ve built great things and exited — to treat shaping the ecosystem as part of the founder’s job description. Mentoring, early-stage investing, and most of all telling the unvarnished truth on a stage to the founders coming up behind them. Every confirmed Expedition speaker is, in effect, modelling exactly this.

2. Consolidate the energy instead of multiplying the fires. Australia doesn’t need a hundred more micro-communities. It needs the existing good ones connected, resourced and given continuity — fewer, deeper rooms with real funding and a 20-year horizon, in Feld’s sense.

3. Organise founders into trusted peer groups by stage, not by postcode. The World 50 / YPO insight applied to Australian founders: small, curated, confidential groups where a scale-up founder sits with genuine peers and the hard questions actually get asked.

4. Collapse the geography. Australia’s fatal disadvantage has always been distance — a founder in Perth, a specialist investor in Sydney, a mentor in Brisbane, an operator in Adelaide, scattered across a continent. That’s exactly the constraint technology now dissolves.

5. Treat failure as curriculum. Build the rooms — closed-door, off-the-record — where scar tissue gets shared instead of hidden, so the next founder doesn’t pay full price for a lesson someone already learned.

6. Anchor it to something bigger than scaling. This is where Australia can do something no one else has. The world’s great founder communities connect people to each other. The opportunity here is to connect founders to each other and to the country — to the idea that building enduring Australian companies is how we evolve our society and decide what kind of nation we become. Community plus purpose. That’s a model worth exporting.

Where Innovation Bay fits

We’ve spent years building exactly the connective tissue this blueprint calls for — and this year we’re going all in.

There is genuinely nothing else like Innovation Bay in this country. The closest reference points are YPO and EO — trusted peer communities for serious operators — but those aren’t tied to a place or a mission. We are. We’re taking the best of that peer-community model and anchoring it to Australia: removing the geographic borders and the tyranny of distance to bring founders and investors together as one national ecosystem, connected not just by the goal of scaling, but by a shared purpose for the country we’re building in.

And we built it to last in the one way most good intentions don’t. Back in 2019, Mike Cannon-Brookes gave us a piece of advice that has shaped everything since: “there are a lot of people trying to do good out there, but without a strong financial model to enable them.” We took it to heart. Rather than going to government to underpin us — though any support is always welcome — we built a membership model. It has been hard. But it means we can scale for exactly as long as we keep driving real value and impact for our members, and not a day longer. That’s the difference between another small fire and an institution: not better intentions, but a model that funds the mission. It’s the very gap this whole blueprint is about — and we closed it on ourselves first.

Three things make that real this year:

• Our new community platform (on Mighty Networks) — one national home where founders and investors actually connect, year-round, regardless of which city they’re in. [IB LINK]
• The Innovation Bay AI Brain — the institutional memory of the community, so the scar tissue, the playbooks and the connections compound instead of evaporating. [IB LINK]
• Our national events — the moments the whole ecosystem comes together in one room: Venture Down Under, bringing founders and investors face to face [IB LINK], and Expedition, our founder event, below.

We’re not claiming to be the whole answer. We’re claiming to be the spine — the national, purpose-anchored, entrepreneur-led community this blueprint needs, with the events and the platform to back it.

The picture: Innovation Bay in five years

Now look forward. Picture this country in 2031.

There is a model for what we’re describing. In Israel, TechAviv started in 2007 as founders helping founders share hard-won scale-up lessons. Today its members have built 133 billion-dollar companies — and it runs both a club and a fund. They call it network capital and collective intelligence. A small country turned a community into a compounding engine for outsized outcomes. Australia has every ingredient to do the same. What we’ve lacked is the engine. That’s what we’re building.

So here is the picture we’re holding ourselves to.

We are the place where you build a billion-dollar company. Not where you go to feel supported — where the outcome actually changes. Where a founder in Perth closes the round, finds the first enterprise customer, hires the executive who changes the trajectory, and makes the bet-the-company decision with conviction instead of in the dark — because the people who’ve already done it are one message away.

We are the place where you connect with your people. Where you don’t get advice — generic, hedged, free. You get insight and knowledge: specific, earned, and directly relevant to the call in front of you. The difference between insight and advice is the difference between thriving and merely surviving, and in the age of AI it is the only edge left worth having.

We are the place where investors compound. Where the best operators and the best capital sit in the same national network — so investors don’t just write cheques, they scale their portfolios on shared intelligence, earlier signal, and a constant flow of the founders and insights that decide which companies win.

We are the place shaping the future of this country. Because a serious founder community isn’t a nice-to-have on the side of the economy — it is how a nation transforms itself through technology. The companies built in these rooms become the industries, the jobs and the exports of the next Australia. Build the founders and you build the country.

Five years out, the measure won’t be how many events we ran or how big the list got. It will be the companies that exist because this community existed — the billion-dollar businesses, the founders who thrived instead of survived, the capital that compounded, and a national ecosystem that finally behaves like one. That’s the bar. That’s the build.

The scar tissue – the people showing up to give back

The clearest sign the give-back culture can take hold here: look who’s putting their hand up.

For our monthly founder workshops, the calendar is already stacked with operators teaching the things you can’t AI your way through — Mike Baukes on his US$75m raise, Marcus Tan (Siteminder) on the different forms of fundraising, Steve Allan on raising capital and crafting pitches that land, Paul Stovell (Octopus Deploy) on enterprise sales, Brad Banducci (former Woolworths Group CEO) on leadership, Sarah-Jane Kurtini on positioning for scale-ups, Hassanah Rudd on the hiring playbook, Byron McCaughey on better decisions, Andrew Sharpe on pricing and product structure, plus our recurring AI Wins & Spins sessions where founders share what’s actually working.

This is what give-back looks like in practice. People who’ve made the calls, sitting down to save the next founder the cost of learning it the hard way.

Expedition – the room for scale-up founders

If you read one thing in this newsletter, read this.

Expedition is the event we’re building to be the gathering for scale-up founders in Australia. Three days on the Northern NSW coast in the last week of October. Not a conference. No rows of chairs, no slides, no panels performing for a crowd. Closed-door conversations with founders who’ve built things that lasted. Deep-dive Q&A where the hard questions actually get asked. Small breakouts with peers at your stage and real bets on the table. And the rarest thing of all — time to think above the day-to-day.

The theme this year is Built to Last: clarity, courage and conviction in the face of change. It’s built for the founder circling a decision they know matters and haven’t yet made.

The confirmed line-up is exactly the give-back-at-the-top model this whole blueprint argues for:

• Luke Anear — built SafetyCulture from a Townsville garage to a ~A$2.5B company, stepped back, then returned to take on AI head-on.
• Paul Stovell — bootstrapped Octopus Deploy into an ~A$880m software company on his own terms.
• Alexey Mitko — co-founder of Eucalyptus, on the inside of a ~A$1.6B exit and the capital strategy behind it.
• Curtis Thomson — co-founded Queensland unicorn Simpro, scaled it to 38 countries, and now backs founders from the other side of the table.
• More to be announced.

Spaces are deliberately limited. Register your interest in Expedition → [IB LINK]

The ask

This is our End of Financial Year edition for a reason. New year, new posture.

If you’ve built something and made it through — come back. Take a stage. Mentor. Invest early. Tell the truth. If you’re in the thick of scaling — stop doing it alone; the room exists now and we built it for you. And if you believe Australia can build a founder community that’s the equal of anything in London or New York — only ours, with our purpose, connected to the country we live in — then come help us build it.

The talent question was answered years ago. The community question is the one we get to answer now.

— Innovation Bay

---