Jay:  This week’s show guest is Cheryl Mack, CEO of StartCon. StartCon hosts the largest startup and growth event in Australia, with over 300,000 attendees, and features big-name speakers from the world’s biggest technology companies. Cheryl is also an active mentor for Young Entrepreneurs in the Sydney startup ecosystem. Cheryl, welcome to the show.

Cheryl:  Thanks, Jay.

Jay:  For the audience listening in, maybe you could give us a little bit of background of yourself and how you came up, where you’re from, and how you ended up running StartCon.

Cheryl:  For sure. I actually grew up in Canada. I grew up in Ontario. My parents had their own company, so I was kind of born into startup land. I went to school in Vancouver in Canada, and when I graduated, I started working for a bunch of little startups and helping them figure out their marketing, working myself out of a job as I automated things and then going on to the next startup.

I then decided to move to Sydney, Australia, just for a change of scenery. It was supposed to be a two-year thing, but it’s turned into much, much more. Then I started working for Freelancer.com, and at the time, they had just started this conference thing, but it was a one-day event. I was like “Look, let me take this. I’ll run with it. I can turn this into something really special.” So that’s how I started working at StartCon.

Jay:  That’s a pretty cool background because it sounds like your parents almost indoctrinated you to come into the startup world, which I think is refreshing to hear. My parents wanted me to be a doctor. You also have worked with Startup Grind as well, which I work with here in Hong Kong. Is that right?

Cheryl:  Yeah. I started the Vancouver chapter of Startup Grind. So pretty early on, I realized the amazing people that you meet through the startup community and that I really wanted to foster that. So I knew I was passionate about helping startups. So I started the Vancouver chapter, and then when I moved to Sydney, there was nobody running the Sydney chapter, so I ran the Sydney chapter of Startup Grind for a year before StartCon became a little too much to do both..

Jay:  Just quickly, on Freelancer.com, is that… Is that exactly what it sounds like? Almost like a Fiverr-type company? Can you explain a little bit about that company?

Cheryl:  Yeah. Freelancer.com is actually the world’s largest crowdsourcing and marketplace for freelancing and crowdsourcing in the world, in terms of the number of jobs that are posted. So, yeah, similar to Fiverr but actually much better.

Jay:  Okay. Great. I’ve used Fiverr before and some of the other ones, but I’ve never used Freelancer, so something I’ll definitely check out. You said they were hosting some sort of one-day event, and then you said, “Hey, look. We could do a lot better with this.” What was that? What did that look like before?

Cheryl:  The event, what it was before was something called SydStart. It was basically a one-day, unprofitable event that was just started by someone on the side. He was just doing it as a volunteer thing. What you have to realize is that — what is it? — nine years ago when he first started do this In Australia, there was nothing. There was no events for startups. So this was just like you’re kind of local meetup. And Freelancer.com was like “That’s really valuable.”

And the guy that was running it was like “I can’t do this anymore. It’s grown too big.”

And so they were like “Cheryl, do you have any interest in doing this? You’re already running Startup Grind. Would you want to see if you can do anything with this?”

I was like “Yeah, absolutely. I think that we can really turn this into something special.” So I created StartCon, but it was born out of something called SydStart. But at the end of the day, there’s always been events. It’s about how you build it and what you do with it.

Jay:  For sure. It sounds a little bit like how Hong Kong’s ecosystem has developed. When I first dabbled in it, which was nearly 10 years ago — after the financial crisis was when I started getting interested in startups and early-stage investing — and Hong Kong had zero ecosystem back then. So I basically… I was flying back and forth from Silicon Valley trying to just satisfy my appetite and desire to learn. But in the last five years, things have rapidly accelerated, and I’m sure it’s a similar scene there in Sydney.

So let’s talk about StartCon. When you look at the website and after speaking with you, it’s almost like just one of these huge events, startup-focused. The closest parallel, I think, is probably like RISE, which is a huge conference here in Hong Kong. This was, I think, the third year, and I’ve been involved every year, and every year, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And so I’m super excited for what you’re doing there, because I really think that the potential right now is huge. And in five years’ time, it’s probably going to be this huge, huge global event. Why don’t you walk us through what StartCon is and what you guys hope to achieve.

Cheryl:  StartCon, as you mentioned, is the largest startup and growth conference in Australia. We’re actually about 4,000 attendees and hoping to get more this year. We grew super fast as well. So I started doing this three and a half years ago, almost four now, and just in that time we’ve doubled our attendees. So I think, absolutely, we’re growing really fast, and we’re hoping to be a global force in this space.

You’re right. We’re very similar to RISE in that we have four or five different stages, an Expo with all different tech companies, as well as Startup Alley with many startups exhibiting there. We feature a pitch competition, which I’ll expand a little bit later, but we also have lots of fun things like a fintech track and even a corporate innovation track, networking events, VIP lunches, and a hackathon, even — just so many amazing things. We also do a coding camp for kids, so we’re really big into helping grow that next generation of STEM entrepreneurs. It’s really like two full-on days of…basically, I call it a festival for startups. It’s like you go to a music festival, but this is more focused on the tech side of things.

One of the things that we do differently from a lot of other conferences, particularly here in Australia, is that we really focus on bringing in international speakers. So we try to bring in huge, international names. Last year we had the CEO of Crunchbase, the CEO of Moz, the CEO of Dribble, the CMO of ClassPass. So these are names… You’ve got to remember — Australia is this giant island, and it’s pretty hard for people to get there. So we tend to become this bubble, and it’s really hard for Australian startups to go global, and so our mission is to help local startups become global sustainable businesses. And we feel that one of the best ways of doing that is by exposing them to global ideas and global minds.

As we expand across Asia-Pacific, we hope to bring that to other startups as well and really just try to bring the biggest names possible out.

Jay:  I think it’s pretty important to do that because, as you said, Australia is kind of like an island in the South Pacific. More so, it’s just a matter of exposure, and what you’re doing is exactly the right thing to be doing. I had faced a similar issue five or six years ago here in Hong Kong before things really kicked up. There was just no education. There was no community, and there was no venue or avenue for large speakers, successful startup founders, or VCs to come and educate the people of Hong Kong of what early-stage investing is and why it is an investable asset class.

Because most of the people here in Hong Kong have made their money just through property pretty much, they didn’t really know that there was this whole new thing that we could support and get involved in. So I think these sorts of events is basically the only way to move the ecosystem forward. And, of course, Australia is coming up. During RISE, actually, I interviewed Cameron Adams who was one of the co-founders of Canva, which is, I believe, Australia’s—

Cheryl:  One of Australia’s unicorns.

Jay:  Right. Yeah. So I think that’s a big win for Australia. Hopefully when it has an exit or goes public or whatever they want to do with their company…but I think these are the data points that move the ecosystem forward. So I think it’s great, what you’re doing. Obviously, you have a lot of traction. You just mentioned a bunch of big-name speakers that have come through, and I’m sure you have a great line up for this year as well.

Cheryl:  Oh, we do. I’m so excited.

Jay:  Yeah. Does Freelancer now…are they basically the main corporate sponsor that helps with funding it? How does the revenue model there at StartCon work? Obviously, you sell tickets for the events. I imagine that they’re pretty fairly high-priced because it’s a full two days of a bunch of different things that you can attend.

Cheryl:  Freelancer is, obviously, one of our major sponsors. They do own part of the company that… We are our own company, but we are owned by Freelancer.com as well. So they have been our biggest supporters even before I’ve been running it. Freelancer and Matt Berrie, the CEO and founder of Freelancer.com, has been a huge supporter of the startup ecosystem and helped them in looking to grow it here in Australia and to really support it. They’re a sponsor, but they’re also a really big supporter in many other ways.

Jay:  Got it. Let’s talk about the pitch event. If you look right on the middle of the website, it says, “Pitch for $1 million,” which is a pretty big deal. I know that RISE and these sorts of events usually have pitch competitions, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a prize this big. Maybe you can talk to us a little bit about that because I imagine this is one of the major draws of StartCon.

Cheryl:  It is, absolutely. I’m super excited about the Pitch for One Million competition. We’ve always had a pitch competition as part of the conference. We’ve brought in… Last year, we had about 100 startups that pitched in the pitch competition, which is, by far, the largest in Australia, at least. One of the things that we do a little bit differently is we have a very loose selection process for the startups. I can expand a little bit more on why we do that and why it makes it super cool.

Essentially, the pitch competition, last year we about 100 startups that pitched, but when I looked at the data for who those startups were, I noticed that 90% of them were just from Sydney and Melbourne. I was like “Well, our mission is to help all” — at the time, it was Australian startups — “become global, sustainable businesses, and we’re really not giving enough startups in the country that opportunity.” So I was like, how do we make it more accessible? I figured we can host regional final events in all of the cities across Australia, and the winners will actually fly them out so that they have that chance to get on the main stage at StartCon in front of 4,000 people.

Then I thought, well, if we’re going to do this across Australia and our hope is to go global one day, maybe we should just do this across Asia-Pacific. I’m kind of on this mission to get Australia more included in Asia. So when people say, “Hey, I’m expanding across Asia,” it’s like “Oh, hey, I’m expanding across Asia-Pacific,” because I think Australia focuses a little bit too much on the US when we have this huge opportunity to really partner with countries and economies in Asia. So that was part of the reason why. I was like, let’s do this across Asia-Pacific.

And then I was like, if we’re going to go and find the best startups across Asia-Pacific and put them on a global stage, we should probably have a really good prize for that. So I was like, let me go pitch this to VCs. I kind of stole the idea a little bit from other pitch competitions that are global, so I know that there’s the Get in the Ring where they offer $1 million, so that’s a global one though. There’s nothing in Asia-Pacific specifically that offers this large of a prize for just the APAC region. So I was like, let’s pitch some VCs.

So I got Right Click Capital on board, who are part of the Draper Venture Network, to put up a $1 million term sheet for the winning startup.

Jay:  Wow. That’s incredible. Yeah, I think that that’s another very important. The other big picture issues that I want to make mention of — and I’m sure you guys experience in Australia as well — in Hong Kong, there aren’t a lot of VCs, and so when startups gain traction and they’re looking to move up that funding chain curve, so to speak, a lot of them end up leaving. They go to Silicon Valley. I’m sure the same thing happens in Australia.

Cheryl:  Absolutely.

Jay:  So I think it’s really important, what you’re doing, to prove that we can grow. We can home grow companies—

Cheryl:  This is a viable place.

Jay:  —like Canva and this sort. And so you don’t have to move away. Keep the talent here and show the world that Australia has what it takes.

Let’s dig a little bit deeper into this. You said that there’s going to be regional pitch competitions which will lead up to a main pitch competition for a million dollars. Can you explain a little bit about how you’re going to run the regional events?

Cheryl:  Yeah. Absolutely. There’s quite a few stages. We’ve structured it in a way to really allow as many startups as possible to participate in some way, shape, or form. So basically, we have these regional final events, which are happening in, I think, about 10 or more cities across Asia-Pacific. So we have all the major cities in Australia, obviously — Brisbane,  Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, and Darwin. We have New Zealand on the line pretty quick. And then in Asia, we’re doing Manila, Jakarta, Singapore, Shanghai, and then we have Seoul and Mumbai who haven’t come online yet in terms of launch, but very, very close. So we have some really awesome cities. And basically, startups can apply to that city. They can also apply virtually, so they can actually pitch virtually and either get a fast track to the finals in their regional city or even a fast track to the finals in Sydney, Australia.

We not only have the cities that they can attend, but they can actually also pitch virtually. So we’re really trying to give that opportunity to as many startups as possible because a lot of startups, when they get a bit of traction and they kind of pop out of the fray, they start to get a lot of attention. But there’s a lot of really amazing talent that have gotten that traction but haven’t gotten noticed. And those are the ones that we’re trying to find. For whatever reason, maybe they haven’t pitched well enough in the past, so we have a pitch workshop. I did it yesterday in Adelaide for the startups there. I talked to guys…

“Yeah, we’ve got revenue. We’ve got our first customers. I’ve self-funded it because I haven’t really gone out and done the whole pitching thing.”

I’m like, that’s nuts. If I can help you get the money you need to scale, then that’s going to be a pretty big success for me.

In terms of the selection process, as I said, we actually kept it fairly loose. A lot of pitch competitions, they pick a vertical or they really restrict on the stage. But for me, it’s about trying to help as many startups that are looking for funding get that funding. As an event organizer, yes, I have a lot of experience in startups, but my team, we’re not the best people to be deciding which startups an investor is going to be interested in. So the process that we do, we actually try to allow for as many startups who fit our criteria to have that chance to pitch. And because we have such amazing judges — for each event, we’ve got like 18 judges — it actually creates its own filter that actually filters down into helping us get the best startups on that final stage.

But at the end of the day, there are so many startups that are getting their… They’re pitching on a stage for the first time. They’re getting that recorded. And then any investor that attends any event can watch the pitches from all of the events. So that just gives them that… Even if they don’t make it to that final global stage, we’ve still put them on a global stage by recording their pitch and making it available to all investors who attend any event in any city.

Jay:  That’s awesome. And is there any… Is it any sort of tech startup? Or is there any focus areas like hardware or software?

Cheryl:  No, no focus areas. So any technology startup that is serious about raising funding between the seed to series A phase.

Jay:  Got it. That’s awesome, Cheryl, because like you said, a lot of these companies, while they might be amazing ideas with amazing founders, they just haven’t had the experience to pitch. I see it all the time when I go to demo days, even. That’s not on their mind, and marketing is a very important tool and aspect of being a startup founder, and it’s the only way that you can get to the next level, is to practice your pitch, basically. So what you’re doing is great. I love the idea of virtual pitch and allowing them to have that recorded reel that they can now show. So it’s a win-win for both sides. I will just say that on your list of cities, you didn’t mention Hong Kong, but I’ll just tease this out there that we’re working on something with my company, EEG, Explorer Equity Group, with StartCon. So hopefully we’ll have that up and running soon, Cheryl. I’m just going to leave it there because I don’t want to over promise—

Cheryl:  I hope so to.

Jay:  —and under deliver. But we have something special for Hong Kong, and I hope that we can help support what you guys are doing in the region. I just want to look to wrap up, but I have a couple more questions. First of all, just broad strokes, as you are pretty in touch there with what’s going on in the startup community in Australia, I just want to hear your thoughts on what are some of the major trends that you’re seeing in the next four to five years? Are there any things that excite you particularly about Australia’s startup ecosystem?

Cheryl:  Yeah, absolutely. I’m super excited at the Australian startup ecosystem. There’s a lot of really good stuff happening, and I think Australia, the government, has really, in the last couple of years, really started focusing, and they’ve realized how important it is to foster that ecosystem. So they’re making some pretty giant strides towards making the right decisions and the right procedures in order to really foster that.

I mentioned looking to get Australia more included in the Asia-Pacific region. The Australian government is floating a lot of programs to even foster that as well. So they’ve realized that as well. There’s an Australia-India program. They’ve pumped a million or two dollars into fostering those relationships and knowledge exchange between New South Wales and India as well as Australia and India, which is fantastic.

We have, in Adelaide, a focus on deep tech and hardware and space tech, as well, which is really cool. So I think we’re going to see some really cool stuff come out of Adelaide in the next couple of years. That’s where Elon Musk has put his battery, by the way, for those of you who are not sure where Adelaide is in Australia.

And I think we’re putting a bigger focus on the advanced tech in general. Australia is kind of an interesting country because there’s a lot of money here, and there’s definitely an advanced technology ecosystem. We have advanced technologies, but we also have a limited market. So that means that we need to leverage our neighbors. We just haven’t quite done that yet. So I’m really excited about that next step where we can start to leverage the markets of some of our neighbors.

Jay:  Got it. I think that the world is getting smaller because of the internet, and that’s a good thing. And if we can leverage the internet to basically connect Australia with the rest of the world and make sure that it’s not just a little island floating out in the South Pacific, that would be great.

Cheryl, thanks so much for your time and for explaining and sharing with us the wonderful stuff that you’re working on at StartCon. Just logistics wise, when is the event? How can my listeners, if they’re interested, get tickets to it? That sort of good stuff.

Cheryl:  Go to StartCon.com. If you want to go to the pitch competition, go to StartCon.com/pitch. StartCon, the conference in Sydney, Australia, is happening on November 30th and December 1st. So you can grab tickets to that. The pitch competitions are happening in the cities that I listed, basically between now and November 15th. So head to StartCon.com and pick your city. If you’re not located in one of those cities and can’t travel there, then jump on to the virtual pitch and do that. And hopefully we’ll see you at one of those cities between now and November 15th. And then we’ll be seeing the top 30 startups at the StartCon in Sydney. That’s how you should jump on.

Jay:  That’s amazing. In Sydney, where is the actual event? Is it at a conference center or something like that?

Cheryl:  It’s actually not. We’ve booked the Randwick Racecourse. So horse racing is a big thing here in Australia. So we take over the whole racecourse. It’s like four levels. It’s beautiful because it’s sunny, and it’s summer out in December. So there’s food trucks outside, and you can go sit on the lawn. There’s glass because they, obviously, want to be able to see the racecourse, so everything is all glass, and there’s light streaming it. We take over all four levels — the ballroom for the main stage and the lower level is the expo. It’s really cool. It’s the kind of place you want to spend a day out. It’s not in this enclosed basement bay of a conference center.

Jay:  That’s awesome. Hong Kong people love race horsing too.

Cheryl:  Awesome. There we go.

Jay:  Exactly. I work with RISE here in Hong Kong, so I’m not trying to knock them, but it’s literally in the convention center which is where all the major conferences are. It’s indoors. It’s basically like a big warehouse.

Cheryl:  Yeah, I’ve been there.

Jay:  A racecourse with glass sounds amazing. That just sounds so much cooler. I’m definitely going to come down for that, Cheryl. We really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story and talking about StartCon, and we hope that we can help support it. Thanks again. I’m looking forward to seeing some of the pitches that come up and, obviously, to the event in November-December. Thanks again.

Cheryl:  Awesome. Thanks so much for having me, Jay.

Jay:  Alright. Take care.