Geelong start-ups urged to think big
THE co-founder of Melbourne’s first venture accelerator shared an insight into his “spray and pray” start-up investment strategy with a crosssection of Runway Geelong’s business community last week.
AngelCube founder Adrian Stone’s engaging and wide-ranging “fireside chat” offered a perspective of start-up and scale-up businesses from a serial investor and entrepreneur playing a “numbers game” with his investments.
Among the subjects discussed were the preferred traits in a business founder and why their perspective on the competitive market was key, how exit thinking drives business strategy, the risk in relying on changing consumer behaviour, the importance of having word-of-mouth value and the advantages of being based in a regional city.
Mr Stone, who has invested in dozens of start-ups, said a Geelong founder was more likely to have a bigger outlook as they were unlikely to consider the local market as the entire marketplace.
“A start-up in Melbourne thinks
Melbourne is its entire marketplace, maybe Australia, but in nine times out of 10 it needs to be a bigger global market, not always but for most cases it is,” Mr Stone said.
“I feel regional areas will tend to focus on that more. And you can build a very strong community.”
When it comes to founders, Mr Stone said he was wary of those who thought they knew it all.
Instead, traits he looks for are a preparedness to learn and a sense of urgency.
He cited the advice of Microsoft founder Steve Jobs that start-ups should speak to more customers, repeating the process many times over with each iteration of the concept to make it market-ready.
And while super-success stories such as Uber were on the forefront of technological development, most start-ups didn’t have the budget or capacity to change customer behaviour.
“That’s the number one thing that keeps me awake at night: can I change customer behaviour?” he said. “And the answer for most start-ups is that you can’t.”
Rather than being at the bleeding edge, most start-ups need to position themselves to take advantage of changes in customer behaviour being driven by others.
Mr Stone said having a product that generated word-of-mouth marketing, and developing a networking effect to secure exponential growth, was significant for start-ups.
“You have to have something people want to talk about,” he said.
The interactive discussion was hosted by Runway Geelong founder Nick Stanley and its head of community Brandon Burns on Monday.