A key insight out of From Little Things: DNA of a Startup was the following:
- Startups evolve through discreet stages (discovery > validation > efficiency > scale)
- Startups that skip a stage are likely to fail
- Australian businesses manage to raise capital comparable to the averages for each stage except for the efficiency stage which is generally unfunded
- Our hypothesis is that this manifestly effects the ecosystem in Australia. Companies with validated business models either run out of resources and die, or try to scale fragile, in efficient businesses that die later.
We’d like to understand more about this so Pollenizer is collaborating with the Startup Genome Project and Deloitte to create a study showing the state of the startup ecosystem in Australia. The Startup Genome today compares data from almost 20,000 companies globally and includes about 300 from Australia so far.
A key finding in the early data is (not surprisingly) that Australian companies generally do not make it to the scale stage.
We’d like to get some more data before we publish the findings. If you are a startup founder, please complete the survey at http://www.startupcompass.co to help.
We are keen to get data from companies between seed stage and post Series A. The survey will provide a startup with a fascinating insight into its performance and risk status as well as contribute to an aggregated view of the Australian ecosystem. It is otherwise kept entirely confidential. Investors also get the opportunity to collect their investments in a dashboard view of your portfolio if the startup provides access.
I believe that it’s important that we surface how our ecosystem is performing. I hope you can help. Please share this post with others that can spread the word in the search for contributors.