rebelutionary / 2.0

Morgo Thoughts & Presentation / 2007 Aug 01

I spent the last half of last week at the Morgo conference on the beautiful northern tip of New Zealand. I have to say that I was thoroughly impressed by the conference in general. Australian tech companies could learn a lot from the way those Kiwis are supporting each other.

I met an absolutely passionate bunch of folks with good ideas on building companies from the "wrong end" of the planet. Down to earth, pragmatic, practical entrepreneurs seemed to be the main. I loved it!

Presentation

Despite being sick as a dog and Australian, my presentation got a good reception. I've posted a copy here (PDF - 1MB) as I thought other's might be interested. I hope it mostly makes sense without the talking!

I was asked to talk about how we've scaled Atlassian over the last 5 years, and chose to focus on some of the bigger scaling problems we've had and how we've tackled them.

The preso seemed to go over quite well with a number of blog mentions and a lovely write up in the New Zealand Herald (the crowning achievement of which might be getting them to write "f**k").

Photos

I haven't got my photos off my digital camera yet, but the Morgo guys have put up a bunch - including one where I look like a stunned mullet, with a mullet:

Other Learnings

A bunch of random notes I collected during the sessions:

• Sam Morgan is a brilliant, clear thinker and deserves his $700 million. He will go on to do many more things mark my words. TradeMe's philosophy of "Don't Be A Dick" is brilliantly antipodean in it's directness and usefulness.
• Rod Drury has balls by floating Xero on the NZX with no revenue, no software and just an image. I think it just might work though. Indeed he describes running a public company as "having your balls hanging out 24-7".
• Apparently US companies spend on average 10-15% on marketing.
• I loved that Ian McCrae described Orion Health as "taking the best from Apple & Toyota to build the first $1 billion New Zealand software company". Now that's a goal.
• There is no better marketing for your company than having two speakers rave about your products directly after your speech!
• Everyone in New Zealand is obsessed by "building the next Nokia of NZ".
• New Zealand is always given credit for it's spectacular ranges of mountains, but never enough for it's spectacular range of beers.
• A lot of our wiki customers hasn't heard of WikiPatterns but loved it when they did.
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the US last year met online - wow.

I will most definitely be back next year - hopefully with a vanguard of other like minded Aussies to show the Kiwis that we're not just good at sports.

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