Co-CEO Firmable, Partner at Glitch Capital CEO Saniel Ventures Chair SecondQuarter Ventures Director SEEK Ltd and Buildxact Former CEO, Aconex
Melbourne
Joined May 2009
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The team’s put me to work.
I’m in San Francisco rolling out #TechIntelligence posters downtown, with more going up in Sydney and Melbourne.
A lot of effort from the team to build the model of 75k+ technologies used by 19m companies across the US, Canada and APAC, and it’s great to finally share it with the world.
If you sell to B2B, try it out for free (link in comments). Enter the tech stack you sell against, see a sample of who’s running it, and who to call.
Now, to get this glue off my boots...
#B2BSales #GTM #SalesIntelligence
Zeller launched three complex fintech products with no room for error in under 14 months.
A feat that helped crown Zeller the fastest Australian company to reach unicorn status.
In this episode of Imperfect Company, @samkroon and I interview @benpfisterer, one of the co-founders and CEO, to discuss everything from fundraising to culture, product, and strategy.
Some great lessons for founders.
Dom Pym is a prolific founder, and this episode of Imperfect Company is full of lessons from founding 22 companies.
@dompym is the co-founder of Up, the fastest-growing bank in Australian history and one of the only neobanks still standing, which was acquired by Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.
He started his first company at fourteen, became SAP's youngest-ever employee at nineteen, and has since founded twenty-two companies, including a record label, the world's first online grain exchange, and Pin Payments.
I spoke to The Australian yesterday about the weekend's essay from Dario Amodei calling for a slowdown at the AI frontier, and the responses from Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
A slowdown only makes sense if it's global and unanimous.
If it isn't global, it isn't a slowdown; it's a handicap. And there is very little in the current market to suggest everyone is holding up their end, especially with major IPOs on the horizon and credible new frontier models emerging from China every few months, plus open-source models nipping at the heels of every frontier lab.
That competition is pushing quality up and prices down. Something we're benefiting from directly at Firmable. This is how competitive markets behave when the prize is this large.
Which brings me to the part I most want Australian business leaders to be thinking about.
Pacing frontier capability is a decision for a handful of labs, all of them offshore. Adopting and deploying AI is a decision for every company, leader and worker in this country. The first is not a licence to defer the second.
If we read "slow down" as permission to wait, we will be among the very few who do. When it comes to adoption, this is not the moment for Australia to ease off.
Thanks to Joseph Carbone and Perry Williams for a balanced piece. Link in the comments.
Credit where it's due. The government is listening to changes to CGT.
The revised draft legislation, released last Friday, drops the $10m lifetime cap for individuals, extends the R&D tax incentive eligibility window from 10 years to 15, and cuts the investor holding period from five years to three.
Those changes came from founders and investors making the case, publicly and privately, over the last four months.
What’s clear from these changes is that Treasury is listening, which is great to see.
But we're far from where we need to be.
A $50m turnover ceiling still disincentivises the best companies at the exact moment they start to scale. Eligibility of what an ‘innovative company’ is also remains unclear. I’ve written about this before, but any uncertainty at the commencement of an investment can be enough to push investors away. Uncertainty is its own tax.
Then there's the $160m Treasury says this will cost over the forward estimates. Which I disagree with completely. A single great company that starts, scales, and exits in Australia will pay more than that alone in CGT at exit.
The bean counters at Treasury have modelled the revenue it gives up as if it were a zero-sum game.
Aconex employed hundreds of people in Australia. Company tax, PAYG on those salaries, GST and, of course, CGT when we exit. One company that stays and scales covers $160m many times over.
I don’t think they’ve modelled the revenue that’s being lost when founders look overseas to start and scale their companies. I met some of those founders last month in SF.
Keep going. Restore a simple 50% discount for all business investment and let founders get back to building.
I'm in San Francisco this week. So is the Deputy Prime Minister, but we’re here for very different reasons.
He's meeting with Anthropic and OpenAI, working on Australia’s data centre pipeline.
I'm here as the co-founder of @_Firmable and a Partner at @GlitchCapital, meeting with Australian founders who moved here this year. The CGT changes came up in almost every conversation as part of the reason they left Australia to build their business in the US.
What a mess.
The AFR published two opinion pieces todaythat demonstrate this shambles.
In the first, Treasurer Jim Chalmers set out how Australia can benefit from AI if we get it right. And that’s a big if. The headline number he was spruiking was $150 billion of data centre investment by 2030.
Jim, data centres are the bottom of the stack. Concrete, power and imported GPUs. Enormous capex, very few jobs, and negligible compounding growth for our country. If that's only our AI strategy, we’re in trouble, as we're importing expensive chips, hosting someone else's product, and then buying the intelligence built on top of it at full retail.
The bigger opportunity is in using and complementing the frontier models. Products built on top of frontier models that solve real business problems. That's where jobs are created and where the productivity Chalmers is chasing actually comes from. I’m seeing it at what we’re building at Firmable, the companies we invest in at Glitch and the founders I’m meeting in the Bay Area.
In the second op-ed, @Shaun_Cartoon laid out what Chalmers is actually doing to the people who build that layer. Effective rates for founder and employee equity are doubling to 47%, which is why founders are leaving.
Australia is courting the frontier labs on one hand, and taxing the hell out of the Australian founders and builders.
You can't be a value-add exporter of AI when the value-adders are in San Francisco.
If Australia is serious about backing innovation, restore the 50% CGT discount for all businesses. This alone will generate far greater productivity gains for our country than data centres will.
Can you motivate sales people without commission?
@didierelzinga got to $100M of revenue without sales commissions, and it all comes down to motivation.
What do you think?
Can you motivate sales people without commission?
@didierelzinga got to $100M of revenue without sales commissions, and it all comes down to motivation.
What do you think?
Is Australia still a place where you can successfully start and grow a startup?
Australia will soon have the highest taxes and most complicated systems for startups to navigate.
The question is, what sort of future do we want Australia to have?
Do we want our most aspirational companies to head offshore and take jobs with them, or do we want to foster an environment for them to flourish here?
Great to chat with @Edward Boyd on Sky News’ Business Weekend.
Watch the full interview here: youtu.be/DzYCGzTYIeU?t=1098
The AI sector is far broader than data centres.
We need the ability to train models here in Australia, to compete at the vanguard
I was asked whether the Office of AI's new framework pays enough attention to our own sovereign AI capability. It barely rates a mention.
Surprising, when you have some amazing success stories already.
@tryheidi is a phenomenal Melbourne-built company training its own models to support clinicians, transforming how healthcare professionals document and evidence their consultations, so they can spend more time with patients and less on paperwork.
This is what AI leadership looks like: not just buying tools built elsewhere, but building world-class AI companies here that create enormous value in sectors like healthcare.
If we want AI to lift the broader economy, these are the companies we should be embracing, and backing.
Dr Thomas Kelly, Yu Liu (CTO), Waleed Mussa (CFO)
The one mistake that can set your startup back years?
Mark Finn, co-founder of ROLLER, says it’s hanging onto the wrong people for too long.
You usually know the hire isn't working sooner than you admit. But the hard call gets put off… one more quarter, maybe they'll turn it around.
Meanwhile, your best people notice. They start to wonder: "I'm working hard, why is this being tolerated?"
That's when you lose the trust of exactly the people you can't afford to lose.
Great conversation with Mark on the latest Imperfect Company by Glitch Capital.
Mark Finn's entire customer base at ROLLER was turned off overnight.
Yet the business came out stronger.
I asked Mark for his worst day in the office. He knew the exact date: March 23rd, 2020, the day the PM named trampoline parks and entertainment venues as the first to shut down.
Great conversation on how ROLLER came out stronger.
The CGT changes are the worst thing to happen to Australian startups in my lifetime.
But the fix is easy.
Go back to a simple 50% capital gains discount for business investment.
The government needs to take action, or we’ll continue to lose startups and scale-ups with amazing potential for growth, wealth and job creation to the US.
Great to chat with @Edward Boyd on Business Weekend.
Watch the full interview here: youtu.be/DzYCGzTYIeU?t=1098
I've signed this petition, and I'd encourage anyone who cares about Australian innovation to do the same.
Removing the 50% CGT discount is, in my view, the single most damaging policy change to our innovation ecosystem in my working lifetime because it's regressive against risk-taking.
Having established that indexation plus a 30 per cent minimum rate fails start-ups and disincentivises local entrepreneurship, the Innovative Business CGT Concession (IBCC) proposes to rebuild a fraction of the current 50% discount and place it behind a labyrinth of qualification gates: a new-equity requirement, an age limit, a turnover cap, a subjective innovation test, an active-asset test, a five-year holding cliff and a $10 million lifetime cap.
The 50% discount kept us broadly competitive with the US and UK. It costs nothing to administer and was simple to understand.
Kudos to @GeoffWilsonWAM Wilson for being such a strong voice on this topic in recent weeks. Petition can be found here: wilsonassetmanagement.com.au…
Every week we discover something more about the #CGT mess this government is creating.
So, any Australian who has bought an investment property, likely with a view to coming home, now pays 47% for the entire time they own it, even if they are resident overseas for a fraction of that time.
We are telling our best and brightest young Australians working overseas to sell their connection to Australia and not to come home. How stupid!
Add this to my list of the seven terrible consequences of this unnecessary and destructive change to CGT for startups and business more broadly.
@kate_cornick
@GeoffWilsonWAM
Budget’s nasty CGT surprise for Australians doing a stint overseas afr.com/wealth/personal-fina…
The 7 negative consequences of Labor's CGT changes for Australian startups. Or as I call it, the death of aspiration, productivity and upward mobility.
The fight for the future of our startup innovation sector is not over. These are some of the consequences I can think of, what have I missed?
1. Founders and jobs will go offshore. Many of Australia's fastest-growing and most promising companies will relocate, taking their current and future headcount with them. I’m already seeing this with Australian founders moving and starting their companies in the US. Anywhere from 10 to 100 jobs per company, and thousands for the most successful ones.
2. The best employees and founders never go again. With a $10m lifetime cap, talented people who've already had an exit are disincentivised to take equity in their next venture, pushing the very best people away from joining startups on equity terms, or overseas.
3. A shift away from risk assets. Investors move toward low-risk, high-yield assets that just beat inflation (e.g., dividend stocks) rather than high-growth stocks, further pushing the ASX into a high-yield, low-growth profile where the status quo is cemented and innovation stalls. The long tail of this is pain for the consumer, as there's less competition in the market overall.
4. Less 'productive' investment overall. People are incentivised to park money in the family home or superannuation instead (a trend made worse by last year's family home super changes).
5. Federal CGT tax take falls too. By over-taxing, the government gets the "tobacco excise" effect: people stop transacting, move offshore, or hold assets in hopes of a future reversal. Revenue drops rather than rises.
6. Capital is pushed into international funds. Australians are incentivised to invest and park their productive money in offshore funds because foreign funds pay no CGT, making the tax treatment and structuring more advantageous offshore than at home. Plus, there are fewer startups locally to invest in.
7. Complexity increases tenfold. The only real winners are the accountants and lawyers. Founders, employees, and investors are moving away from the venture asset class because they can’t understand the quagmire of tax policy they must wade through.
The best CGT change for a positive future for our startups is not a carve-out; it's returning to a 23.5% rate that put us on par with the US and UK, an easy-to-understand system that aligning everyone's incentives. This is not about paying no tax; it's about balancing tax revenue with the needs of Australian founders and their companies here.
While housing may have other pressures or considerations, the system wasn’t broken for tech.