In June 2018, our Chief Technology Officer Oli Young attended events at London Tech Week, as part of the Startup Catalyst London Mission, supported by a grant from high-tech startup accelerator Tech in SA. London Tech Week is Europe’s largest technology festival, attracting over 55,000 international attendees to its program of over 300+ events. This was Startup Catalyst’s third annual mission to London Tech Week, where they lead the 16 Australian participants through more than 25 official and private events, meetings and tours.
Oli came back to Adelaide with fresh perspectives on the global market and the opportunities for Australian enterprise to partner with startup businesses and embrace emerging technologies.
It was a really interesting experience – London’s tech scene is not that fundamentally different to Sydney or even Adelaide, except for its scale and maturity. This was really encouraging, and it opened my eyes to what’s ahead for the Australian market.
London is going to be an exciting place for innovation in the next decade, and it’s all because of the mix of startups and corporate. There’s a real sense of energy with the way of startups and forward-looking corporates work together. It’s taken some courage for the corporates to start working with these smaller companies who work out of co-working spaces, but it really looks like they’re starting to see the benefits of building those relationships.
The whole week was such an eye-opening experience into the London startup scene – it’s hard to find one highlight, but one great side-effect was spending the week with other some passionate and smart Australians and learning about their journeys.
Startup Catalyst CEO Aaron Birkby gave his quick-fire insights on what Australian business can learn from the UK in a series of 60-second videos which you can see on the Startup Catalyst Instagram account. You can also learn more about the mission in Mission Wrap: London 2018 blog post.