Startups

The centre of the tech startup universe is moving from the USA to Asia

A string of data and opinions have been released in recent days that support the view that the global tech startup ecosystem centre is shifting towards Asia and Australasia – where population growth and performance are increasingly leading the world.

These new data points reinforce our long held view that global tech startups will increasingly be created and executed from Asia and Australasia (indeed anywhere with electricity, internet and a desire for education and entrepreneurship) because of the largest population pool, growth rates, capital and increasingly education and thriving local tech startup ecosystems based on reaching global markets.

Your portfolio can get exposure to these opportunities via Cooper & Co.

The future of tech is outside Silicon Valley

Peter Thiel – known for his investments in Paypal, Facebook, AirBnB and Palantir – spoke in Saudi Arabia about his strong views on the topic of ‘the future of tech’ this week.

He believes tech will increasingly be created outside the US and California has lost their monopoly.

This reinforces the views we have long held here at Cooper & Co that while California led the way for decades and wrote the tech startup playbook initially, in the future global tech startup formation will increasingly align with population distribution that has education, capital and a thriving local tech startup ecosystem.

Asia is the world’s largest population region and has many of the fastest growing economies in the world.

The Way Forward for Innovation in Australia

Old innovation ecosystem models are broken, it is time to realise the open models based around startups (particularly scalable global product based tech startups) are the key to our future.the-way-forward-for-innovation-in-australia

The above diagram by StartupCommons summarises the change in focus at a macro level, we also need to look at the basics of our cultural approach to select digital natives from diverse global backgrounds to represent our interests. Run your eye over most of our nation’s government and industry bodies and the focus and representation is a woeful, old, monoculture with computing science degrees a rarity and real recent internet entrepreneurship dangerously absent, they are similarly rarely constituted of independent non-aligned experts with fresh experience.

If these people can’t serve real customers ever let alone recently (in the last decade) how can they serve our society?

This path forward is so obvious other nations have ‘productised’ the right approach in order to give (and sell) to the world.

Read the full (non country specific) report from StartupCommons here.

Blockchain hot spots

As blockchain outstrips bitcoin in fintech what are the hot areas? CB Insights has some insightful views, looks a bit like Google Trends…

Software Entrepreneurs Must Go Mobile-First Or Die

Mobile has long been the catch cry for startup and enterprise Business Technology experts alike. This article originally from TechCrunch gives a very well prioritised list of how and why with examples.

Microsoft Has Just Launched Its First Android Smartphone, The Nokia X2

This new MS CEO is unlike any other, after Office on iPad and Salesforce.com now there is this droid phone, talk about changing strategy …

What We Do

For some time now the question ‘What do you do?’ has been a little bit of a long answer here at Cooper & Co.

We have a diverse range of interests but there are key underpinning motives, values and desires about improving our world with a mix of commercial and non-commercial sustainable activities.

These are captured in our revised one pager ‘ Cooper & Co: What We Do’ which holds at the core our values of developing best practice entrepreneurship, disruptive and sustaining innovation and business technology strategy.

The activities are grouped as follows, all around the core activities of Business Technology Strategy which we define as tech and tech enabled business large and small.

Cooper & Co – Investing, delivering and managing Business Technology Strategy

Enterprise & Mid Market Segment

Commercial

  • Large Transaction Due Diligence Consulting (pre and post transaction, buy and sell side representation e.g. acting CIO/COO)
  • Expert Opinion and Mergers & Acquisition consulting – advisory support with a focus on technology, operations, strategic alignment and execution
  • Project Consulting (e.g. acting CIO/COO and similar) strong background in marketplaces, real-time, finance and trading and high volume retail

Non-Commercial (Pro Bono / Volunteer)

  • Social channels sharing best practice
  • Special Interest Groups (advocacy)
  • Best practice and industry commentary blogs

Tech Startups

Commercial

  • Angel equity – cash investment
  • Advisory Consulting – commission based referral to experts facilitating trade sales
  • Products (creation, development, experimentation, joint ventures)

Non-Commercial (Pro Bono / Volunteer)

  • Tech Startup Ecosystem Advocacy
  • Mentoring / Assistance (e.g. Pitch coaching for SydStart)
  • Community Events (e.g. SydStart now StartCon) and Industry Associations / Policy 
SydStart Panel Discussion

SydStart by Cooper & Co.

Cooper & Co are proud to be the founding and long term sponsors of the largest professional tech startup event in Australia – SydStart.

This event is something we support because we want to grow the startup ecosystem in Australia and it is undergoing a dramatic growth phase, due in no small part to the hyper connectedness and accelerated learning we try to encourage via SydStart events.

The SydStart site has recently been move to wordpress.com and refreshed and for events prior to 2012 you can also still get to the old archive google sites version.