The Sydney and Melbourne tech ecosystems may not like to hear it, but Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley may well be the new Silicon Valley.
With Advance Queensland and its partners investing $1.7 billion into Queensland’s innovation future, and Brisbane birthing its first unicorn, learning software platform GO1, in 2021, the Brisbane buzz is only getting louder.
One hive of this activity is The Precinct, Advance Queensland’s tech innovation hub for startups, scaleups, investors and incubators. It’s home to more than two dozen tenants making waves in Queensland and well beyond, such as FloodMapp, Hypersonix Launch Systems, Arkose Labs, River City Labs, the Queensland AI Hub, the Queensland XR Hub and the Office of the Queensland Chief Entrepreneur.
One of fastest-growing global success stories to come out of The Precinct is Clipchamp, the free online video editing tool acquired by Microsoft in 2021 and now used by millions as part of the Microsoft 365 suite. Clipchamp co-founder Alex Dreiling says setting up the business in Brisbane, and keeping it there, has been a crucial factor in its success.
“When the discussions happened with both investors and even Microsoft about relocating to the US – I think that’s what every Australian startup is dreaming to do – we were the opposite,” Alex tells Startup Daily. “We relocated our families to the place we want to be in. We’re creating this business here and that’s not negotiable. I believe that has been an advantage for us.”
A chance encounter at The Precinct
Clipchamp’s big break came with a chance encounter on the way to the toilets.
In 2013, Alex and his former SAP colleagues Soeren Balko, Dave Hewitt and Tobias Raub, banded together to try and create “the biggest distributed supercomputer in the world”. The project flatlined and their pitches to River City Labs founder and Shark Tank investor Steve Baxter were repeatedly knocked back.
The team pivoted to a new idea: a free in-browser video editor that would later come to be dubbed “Canva for video”. By 2016, Clipchamp moved into The Precinct, where the River City Labs team would have to walk past their office space to get to the loo.
“We had a little seating corner and our CTO had built a widget where you could see a world map on a very large projection on the wall,” Alex explains. “We had a user counter in the top left corner. Every time a new user registered, they popped up on a world map with a pin on their location.
“Steve [Baxter] was walking past the office all the time, and he could see the user count in the top left corner, and he could see new icons popping up. So, he dropped in and we started talking… seeing us in action led to him to take up investment, then led to the next round, getting his advice and getting exposure to his ecosystem, and scaling from there.”
Staying in Brisbane when the world beckons
Alex Dreiling at Clipchamp’s headquarters in Brisbane’s The Precinct. Image: Supplied.
The cost of startup life is one compelling factor for setting up shop in Brissie. “When we left the corporate world and went into startups, we slashed our salaries down to something that we couldn’t have been living on in Sydney, it’s as simple as that,” Alex reflects. “So we’re able to really run lean up here.”
The talent pool is another key attraction. Clipchamp now has a workforce of nearly 150 working at The Precinct, remotely elsewhere in Australia and other parts of the world.
Alex, who migrated from Germany to live in Australia, says the quality of talent is especially strong in Brisbane thanks to the universities, the breadth of experience and of course, the lifestyle benefits of perpetual sunshine.
“We’ve been able to get a lot of people that came back from Silicon Valley with all those experiences and offer them something that resembled that to a certain extent,” Alex says. “That’s allowed us to really 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 job market for tech employees. “There’s literally a few thousand jobs in Brisbane and southeast Queensland that didn’t exist 10 years ago out of that,” Alex says. “Structurally there’s nothing that speaks against that scaling up and growing further. We have the same conditions that Sydney and Melbourne have – we can bring startups together in very much the same way.”
Building a culture in the River City
Being surrounded by innovation at The Precinct has helped shape Clipchamp’s culture in a positive way. “Your culture is influenced by what’s happening around you, and it’s easier to build a culture that’s conducive to startups in an environment like that just because of the energy around you,” Alex says.
Located within the heritage-listed TC Beirne Building, The Precinct is designed to encourage collaboration between its cohorts. As well as providing co-working spaces, event and meeting spaces and modern common areas, The Precinct offers business support, mentoring, workshops, networking and upskilling opportunities to enhance its tech community.
Having that support infrastructure in place has made startup life a lot less lonely, says Alex. “What I really appreciate about The Precinct is you just walk across the hallway and there’s 10 of you that you can chat to about complicated problems you have,” he says. “Where we were in the city before, it was one of those dated offices – 10th floor, everything carpeted, looks like a hotel from the ‘70s. And you’re among lawyers, tax agents and stuff like that. You can’t talk to anyone about anything.
“So it was the twin effect – the exposure to investors as well as the exposure to other startup CEOs and founders. You realise you’re not alone on this journey.”
On a daily basis, you may even find your colleagues making music. “We have key guitars and banjos and pianos in the office. We’ve had groups of people that get together after work and just jam,” he says. “I love the atmosphere in the office and the culture that we have built.”
Find out more at advance.qld.gov.au/precinct.
This article is brought to you by Startup Daily in partnership with Advance Queensland.
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