Thousands of miles from home, there is still a family for Australians in the Silicon Valley. The beacon of nerds, investment, technology and press stretched across the oceans to Aussie ears and has drawn a number of down-under startups to TechCrunch 50. Saturday night, before TC50’s Monday start, the Aussie “mafia” assembled for a dinner organized by Sydney-based Mick Liubinskas of Pollenizer, Marty Wells of mobile social network of Mig33 and Tangler and Chris Saad of DataPortability.
Besides the startups being touted, one of the evening’s more interesting ideas came from a name that might be familiar to Silicon Beach regulars. Although he has relocated to San Francisco, Australian Elias Bizannes has been hard at work with his Lifeguard government submission. For the past few months, Elias has been asking for feeback from readers of the Silicon Beach google group and so far many of the big names in the Australian entrepreneurial scene have weighed in with input, including Media Connect’s Phil Sim, Southern Cross Ventures Tristen Langley and Yabble owner Ross Hill. At the dinner, Elias explained how he wants to start a couch surfing (how appropriate for all the Aussie boarders) network through Silicon Valley that would find Australian startups based on merit and would keep cost minimal for them, perhaps with a matching fund from government. The goal of couch surfing, he explained, was not only to cut down on travel spending but to create a sense of intimacy and trust between the startup and the host’s Silicon Valley network.
Pollenizer’s Mick Liubinskas showed up in his newly designed company shirt sporting the phrase “My Startup is F_________!”, with the word “focused” filled in the blank, rather than..well..the F word that would describe many startups. Focus is the big mantra of Pollenizer right now, and they have found it is one of the main sources of failure for a startup. Mick is holding a seminar on the topic during the week to help frantic startups hone in on the important and ignore the irrelevant.
