rebelutionary / 2.0

Entrepreneurial Living on Cloud Ten / 2006 Dec 04

Today I finally descended from cloud ten after a surreal week.

I can honestly say that last Thursday will go down as one of the highlights of my life, without parallel.

I could explain it all, but let me start with the video - a picture tells a thousand words and all that. You're probably best to watch it before reading on...

Yep - we won the whole thing. In front of 800 people at the Hordern Pavilion we were named Australian Entrepreneurs of the Year. Surprised? Trust me - you couldn't be as stunned as we were.

For those a little confused, let me explain. About 10 months ago, we were convinced by one of the local Ernst & Young partners to enter their global "Entrepreneur of the Year" awards. It's a 6 stage process that takes about 18 months, run over 45 countries this year and ending with the crowning of the World Entrepreneur of the Year in Monte Carlo. Somehow, we now find ourselves at stage 6.

I say "convinced" because we usually don't enter these sorts of things. There are a million awards one can enter as a company, and 90% of them are just more effort than they're worth. I have to say I'm glad we were convinced. The entire process has been a joy, I'd thoroughly encourage anyone to enter - win, lose or draw - their local awards next year. The people we've met along the way, the contacts and the learning have all been more than worth the 4 or so hours it took to fill out the initial form - including writing an essay on entrepreneurialism, the first essay I've written since university! Oh, they also produce this neat video about your business.

So the inevitable question - did we expect it? Not at all. No clue. To explain, there are 5 categories of awards ('Retail, Consumer & Industrial Products', 'Services, including Financial, Business & Property', 'Technology, Communications, E-commerce & Life Sciences', 'Social Entrepreneur' and 'Young Entrepreneur') and Australia is divided for the awards into 5 regions. (If you're interested, you can read all the details at the site)

Going into the night, we had won the Eastern Region Young Entrepreneur which meant we were competing with the other 4 regions for the National Young Entrepreneur award. I honestly thought we were a 50-50 chance of winning the Young Category, two of the other contenders being very strong indeed (Aconex and Pipe Networks). Halfway through the night we won that and the celebrating started in earnest.

An hour later when the national award was announced, we were kicking back relaxing. You see a) we didn't think we stood a chance against the other category winners, and b) the Young category winner has never won the overall award. Hence our utter and complete surprise when the announcement was made. I didn't even have my jacket on, which is why you can see me buttoning it on the way to the stage :)

I've written about the pendulum before but this has to be the biggest ! moment ever. Having a table of our best supporters there on the night made it all the more special.

After the champagne had stopped flowing, the tequila was shot and the bar stopped serving the after party - we both stumbled into work the next morning to an amazing response. The whole thing was a humbling experience (god - do we really have to go to Monte Carlo and represent the country against 44 others?). The award is 100% attributable to our incredible team, friends and family - the support network that underlies any leader.

To see how excited they were the next day was a huge buzz. They deserve to be proud, for such a young group they've achieved the great things that we get credit for. I wish more of them could have been there on the night to experience the euphoria, but Nick and Carli did an admirable job of representing, after they won their tickets (we had an internal raffle for some spare tickets, based on who had entered the Atlassian Foundation's workplace giving program by a certain date).

So today, 4 days later I've finally sobered up and returned to earth. I'm sure my words don't even come close to expressing the feelings of the night, but I hope in re-reading this years later I'll be able to remember myself.

Enough looking backwards. Now back to the serious business of kicking ass.

(If you're interested, the we had an amusing live cross and subsequent news report both of which are available free online as videos thanks to the government funded ABC.)

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