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Sydney and Melbourne’s tech ecosystems may not want to hear it, but Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley could be the new Silicon Valley.
With Advance Queensland and its partners investing $1.7 billion in Queensland’s creative future and Brisbane giving birth to its first unicorn in 2021, software platform GO1, Brisbane’s buzz is on the rise.
One hive of this activity is The Precinct, Advance Queensland’s technology innovation hub for start-ups, scale-ups, investors and incubators. It is home to more than two dozen tenants in Queensland and includes the likes of Flowmap, Hypersonics Launch Systems, Arkose Labs, River City Labs, Queensland AI Hub, Queensland XR Hub and the Queensland Entrepreneur Office.
Clipchamp, a free online video editing tool acquired by Microsoft in 2021 and now used by millions as part of the Microsoft 365 suite, is one of the fastest-growing global success stories to come out of The Precinct. Alex Drilling, co-founder of ClipChamp, says establishing and maintaining the business in Brisbane has been critical to its success.
“Discussions with both investors and even Microsoft about moving to the US – I think that’s what every Australian startup dreams of doing – but we were against it,” Alex told Startup Daily. I believe it has benefited us.
Opportunity to meet in the Precinct
Clipchamp’s big break came with an accident on the way to the bathroom.
In the year In 2013, Alex and his former SAP colleagues Soeren Balko, Dave Hewitt and Tobias Raub teamed up to create “the world’s largest distributed supercomputer”. The project is flat and their fields to the founder of River City Labs and Shark Tank Investor Steve Baxter has repeatedly backed down.
The team came up with a new idea: a free browser video editor which was later named “Canva for Video”. In the year In 2016, ClipChamp moved to The Precinct, where the River City Labs team had to walk past their office space to get to Lowe’s.
“We had a small seating area and our CTO built a gadget where you could see a map of the world on a very large projection on the wall,” explains Alex. “We had a user counter in the top left corner. Each time a new user registers, they will pop up on their location pin on the world map.
“Steve [Baxter] He always walked past the office, and he could see the user counting down in the upper left corner, and he could see new icons popping up. So he came in and we started talking … seeing us in action got him into investing, and then he went on to the next round, getting the advice and getting exposure to the ecosystem, and then it just kind of expanded.
Staying in Brisbane when the world screams
Alex Drilling at Clipchamp HQ in Brisbane’s The Precinct. Image: Submitted.
The cost of startup life is one compelling reason to set up shop in Brazil. Alex says: “When we left the corporate world and started a start-up, we cut our salary to something we couldn’t live on in Sydney. “So we can lean here and run.”
The talent pool is another key attraction. ClipChamp now has around 150 people working remotely at The Precinct in Australia and other parts of the world.
Alex, who emigrated from Germany to live in Australia, attributes the quality of talent, particularly to universities in Brisbane, to the breadth of experience and the perpetual sunshine lifestyle.
“We’ve been able to get a lot of people from Silicon Valley with all that experience and come up with something like this,” says Alex. “It’s allowed us to attract amazing people… it’s the talent, it’s the lifestyle.
With the success of startups like GO1, Arkose Labs and Clipchamp, Brisbane has seen a boom in the tech worker job market. “There are a few thousand jobs in Brisbane and southeast Queensland that didn’t exist 10 years ago,” Alex says. “There is nothing structurally against that expansion and further growth. We have the same conditions as Sydney and Melbourne – we can bring startups in the same way.
Building culture in the city of the river
Being surrounded by innovators at Precinct has helped shape Clipchamp’s culture in a positive way. “Your culture is influenced by what’s going on around you,” says Alex, “and because of the energy around you, it’s easy to build a startup-friendly culture in that environment.
Located in the heritage-listed TC Beirne Building, the campus is designed to encourage collaboration between the groups. As well as offering co-working spaces, event and meeting spaces and state-of-the-art common spaces, the Prestige offers business support, mentors, workshops, networking and excellence to grow the tech community.
Having that support infrastructure in place has made startup life less lonely, Alex says. “What I really appreciate about the president is that you can walk across the hall and there are about 10 of you to talk to about your complex problems,” he said. “Where we were in the city before was one of those offices – 10th floor, everything carpeted, it looked like a hotel in the 70s. And you’re between lawyers, tax agents and the like. You can’t talk to anyone about anything.
“So it was a twin effect — exposure to investors as well as exposure to other startup CEOs and founders. You know you’re not alone on this journey.”
Every day, you can find your colleagues making music. “We had key guitars and banjos and pianos in the office. We had groups that would get together after work and jam,” he says.I love the atmosphere in the office and the culture we’ve built.
Find out more in advance.qld.gov.au/precinct.
This article is presented by Startup Daily in partnership with Advance Queensland.
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