{"id":697085,"date":"2026-05-27T04:05:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T04:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/697085\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T04:05:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T04:05:11","slug":"is-ai-making-australia-a-better-place-to-build-startups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/697085\/","title":{"rendered":"Is AI making Australia a better place to build startups?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome back to Neural Notes<\/a>, a weekly column where I look at how Australia is influencing Australia. In this edition: are the traditional advantages of Silicon Valley starting to matter less in the age of AI?<\/p>\n

For years, Australian founders have been sold a familiar story: if you want to build a global startup, you\u2019ll have to go to the US. Or, more specifically, San Francisco.<\/p>\n

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That idea has shaped much of Australia\u2019s tech industry over the past decade. Raise locally if you have to, but move quickly towards the US. Be closer to the capital, the customers, the talent, and the momentum.<\/p>\n

But a panel at Blackbird\u2019s Sunrise festival last month suggested something more complicated may now be happening thanks to AI.<\/p>\n

The panel featured Dr Thomas Kelly (founder and CEO, Heidi Health<\/a>), Jacky Koh (founder and co-CEO, Relevance AI<\/a>), with Guillaume Princen (head of international startups, Anthropic)<\/a> moderating. And they weren\u2019t arguing that Australia has suddenly become an easier place to build a startup. Quite the opposite.<\/p>\n

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And it\u2019s not that Australia has suddenly become an easier place to build a startup. Quite the opposite.<\/p>\n

In fact, one of the more interesting parts of the discussion was about Australia\u2019s disadvantages\u2026 but why that might be a positive.<\/p>\n

Australians are hard to impress<\/p>\n

\u201cI do think the Australians are generally less innovative,\u201d Kelly said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re less obsessed with being productive and profitable and driving revenue, and they\u2019re generally worse customers, so it is harder to get someone excited about something new here than in other countries, especially in the US.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a surprisingly blunt assessment of the local market, particularly at an ultra-hypey startup conference where Australian founders more commonly frame the country\u2019s problems around funding gaps, talent shortages, or a lack of scale.<\/p>\n

But despite this brutal assessment of the local market, Kelly\u2019s point was this dynamic may create stronger products in the long run.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The] US is the opposite problem,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re too excited, too easy. They\u2019ll churn, and they\u2019ll move on to the next thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The idea was Australia may still be \u201cworse\u201d for startup hype cycles, but hype cycles may matter less in AI than they did in previous tech waves.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say the founders were discounting the US.\u00a0Australia\u2019s smaller capital pools, conservative customers, and distance from Silicon Valley were still framed as genuine constraints.<\/p>\n

Koh spoke about the reality of staying awake until \u201c7am, 3am, 4am\u201d while working with US customers and teams. <\/p>\n

And\u00a0Kelly openly questioned whether Heidi might have grown faster or built stronger enterprise recognition if it had raised more aggressively in the US earlier on.<\/p>\n

But both founders also implied those same constraints can force a different kind of company-building discipline, with less reliance on hype and more pressure to build products customers actually keep using.<\/p>\n

When access stops being the moat<\/p>\n

\u201cThe limiting factor is your ability to execute,\u201d Kelly said, arguing access to frontier AI models is increasingly becoming democratised.<\/p>\n

For years, geography mattered enormously in startups because access itself was uneven.<\/p>\n

In previous startup waves, access itself was often the advantage \u2014 access to infrastructure, engineering talent, or technical capability.<\/p>\n

The AI era may be different. Increasingly, the same frontier models are available to everyone, which places more pressure on founders to differentiate through product design and domain expertise. <\/p>\n

And while this doesn\u2019t eliminate Silicon Valley\u2019s advantages, it could reduce some of their importance.<\/p>\n

Princen said he was seeing startup activity become more geographically distributed as AI tools lowered barriers to building products globally with smaller teams.<\/p>\n

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Koh, meanwhile, argued there are advantages to building further away from Silicon Valley\u2019s intensity.<\/p>\n

\u201cAustralia is a great country to do a lot of deep thinking,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Kelly also argued Australia\u2019s healthcare system gave Heidi a useful environment to build in due to the mix of public and private.<\/p>\n

So while the lure of the US and Silicon Valley<\/a> isn\u2019t going away anytime soon, it was interesting to hear founders theorise on how and why AI may be reshaping where that leverage comes from.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t seem to be about simple access anymore in the way previous startup eras often were. Increasingly, the same models and tools are available to everyone, including those without a technical background.<\/p>\n

And in an increasingly saturated AI market, the harder part may be building something genuinely useful and unique. A GPT skin isn\u2019t going to cut it.<\/p>\n

And perhaps that\u2019s where Australia\u2019s historically low tolerance for hype and BS becomes an advantage. Because mature founders with a good product on their hands shouldn\u2019t need to be coddled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome back to Neural Notes, a weekly column where I look at how Australia is influencing Australia. In…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":697086,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[256,254,64,63,339795,44,1483],"class_list":["post-697085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-neural-notes","tag-news","tag-startups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=697085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/697086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}