startups | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

A goldmine in your back yard

Accessible capital, a huge market and a collaborative culture are why startup founders are making their way to Silicon Valley and San Francisco

This is the first of four stories I did for The Australian on why entrepreneurs are making their way to the United States’ Bay Area.

A combination of accessible capital, a huge market and a collaborative culture are why startup founders are making their way across the Pacific to Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

Despite their government’s ideas boom and an easier funding climate, Australia’s startups still see San Francisco and Silicon Valley as being the promised land. In this four part series we spoke to Aussie entrepreneurs about why they’ve made the move across the Pacific Ocean.

In a noisy coffee shop just off San Francisco’s Market Street, PixC founder Holly Cardew explains why she moved to the city. “It’s a place you fall in love with straight away – it’s the people and the attitude,” says Cardew. “You can do anything, people don’t look at you as if you’re crazy if you want to do something big.”

Wider horizons

Cardew made the relocation to San Francisco to find funding for Pixc, a photo editing service that in 2014 was one of the first group of startups accepted into Telstra’s Muru-D accelerator program. In moving to the US she found American investors have far wider horizons than Sydney’s business community.

“Investors ask ‘what’s next?’” Cardew enthused, “in Australia, you don’t even think about that. Americans tend to think a lot bigger. Australians aren’t trained to think about it.” Another aspect Cardew highlights about the Bay Area business culture is how individuals are always happy to help out, “people always ask ‘how can I help’ she says.

One of those credited by Cardew and by many of the people interviewed for this is Temando founder Carl Hartmann. In an archetypal open plan shared office in San Francisco’s Financial District Harmann explains why he’s quick to help, “I’m here today because people who were kind enough to pay it forward.”

Being there

Temando, a logistics service founded in Brisbane, was started to address the difficulties retailers had in fulfilling customers orders across Australia. Hartmann moved to the United States at the beginning of 2015 to access North American customers and to tap local capital markets. “When you talk to the SV funds it’s very hard to raise money if you aren’t here,” he says. “In Silicon Valley it’s where the action is. If you’re not here you are out of sight and out of mind.”

“It’s difficult to build those sort of relationships from the other side of the world. When you’re here, things can move along quickly because it’s easy to collaborate on things. It’s easier to work face to face. For us it makes sense to be here,” Hartmann says. “There’s a unique energy where everyone has come from all over the world.”

Jack Gonzales of location mapping service MapJam is an example of how fast things can move for companies in the Bay Area. “Last year we were approached by some of the big players who asked if we had our own map tiles,” he recalls. “We realised we had an opportunity.”

Gonzales was speaking at the somewhat chaotic San Francisco campus of 500 Startups across from the city’s Moscone Convention Center. Mapjam was accepted onto the prestigious startup investment and acceleration program last year.

A goldmine in your backyard

“You have a goldmine in your local backyard and you have to capitalise on that. Sometimes it’s really spontaneous, ‘hey can you guys come in on Friday?’ You can’t do that when you’re overseas,” Gonzales says. “Our main customers are here and I really want to conquer the backyard before I conquer the globe, just within walking distance from here there are thirty major players.”

Australia does have some advantages for startups, particularly in labor costs for skilled developers. “It’s three times more expensive to employ staff in the Bay Area,” says Affinity Live’s Geoff McQueen in explaining why he’s kept the company’s technical team in the firm’s home town of Wollongong

McQueen, who moved to San Francisco in 2011 to seek funding for his venture believes “Australia is a good place to do a minimum viable product or proof of concept” and warns budding entrepreneurs to have more “than just just a PowerPoint pitch” when they decide to make a permanent move.

In McQueen’s view it’s important to at least visit the Bay Area early in the process of developing a business. “Come over as soon as you can – even if you only have a light idea,” he says. “Anchor your visit around a conference, whatever is relevant to your target industry.”

Achieving your aims

Despite not finding gold on San Francisco’s grubby streets, most of the entrepreneurs The Australian interviewed were all happy they’d achieved their aims in moving to the US which vary from easier funding availability, access to bigger markets and a more vibrant ecosystem than those in Sydney, Melbourne or the smaller centres.

Ultimately though everyone mentions the supportive nature of the Bay Area’s startup culture, “people ask what can I help you with,” says Pixc’s Cardew. “You can do anything, people don’t look at you as if you’re crazy if you want to do something big.”

Breaking the small business drought

The small business sector is essential to the broader economy’s health and diversity but in many countries it’s shrinking. How do we reverse the trend?

In most developed countries the small business community is shrinking. What can governments and communities do to grow what should be the most vibrant sectors of their economies?

What happens when a whole industry shuts down overnight? Australia is about to find when its motor industry effectively comes to an end this week.

The fallout for the workers is expected to be dramatic with researchers reporting the soon to be laid off staff being totally unprepared for their predicament.

So worrying is the predicament of those auto workers that Sydney tech incubator Pollenizer is offering small business workshops for laid off workers.

Those workshops will be needed. One of the striking things about the research is just how few of the workers are interested in launching their own ventures despite their poor employment prospects in other industries.

While the auto workers are a group with relatively low levels of education and work experience, their reluctance to starting a business is shared by most Australians with the nation’s Productivity Commission 2015 enquiry on business innovation reporting the number of new enterprises is steadily falling.

Despite Australia’s population increasing twenty percent since 2004, the number of new business is falling. The country is becoming a nation of risk averse employees, something not unsurprising given the nation’s crippling high property prices which puts entrepreneurs at a disadvantage.

Australia’s reluctance to set up new ventures isn’t unique, it’s a worldwide trend with most countries not having recovered since the great financial crisis.

The tragic thing with this small business drought is that it’s never been cheaper or easier to set up a venture as Tech UK and payment service Stripe show in their list the software tools being used by ventures.

The #StartupStack from Stripe

Accessibility of tools or even government taxes and regulation isn’t the barrier in Australia. As the World Bank reports, the country is the eleventh easiest place in the world to start a new venture.

In United States experience shows there’s a range of other factors at work dissuading prospective small business founders – interestingly the United States comes in at a mediocre 47th as a place to start a venture in the World Bank rankings.

A healthy and vibrant small business sector is important to drive growth and diversity in the broader economy. The challenge for governments and communities around the world is to find a way that will spark the small business communities, in a world awash with cheap capital that shouldn’t be impossible but we may have to think differently to the ways we are today.

Tools for new businesses

What are the basic online tools for business? Here’s a quick list on what small and startup businesses can use to get online quickly and cheaply.

What are the basic online tools for business? Here’s a quick list on what small and startup businesses can use to get online quickly and cheaply. This list will be updated regularly and please let us know if there’s anything we should add.

Email

Gmail

Documents

Google Docs

Microsoft Office 365

Open Office

Storage

Google Drive

Dropbox

Box

Websites

Blogger

Wix

WordPress

Accounting

Xero

Saasu

MYOB

Social media

Google My Business

Facebook

Collaboration

Messaging

What’s App

Workplaces @ Facebook

Google Hangouts (being depreciated)

Analytics

Google Analytics

KissMetrics

Tableau

Customer support

Zendesk

Desk.com

Payments

PayPal

Stripe

What Chinese investors are looking for in tech companies

Founders’ attitudes, market position and the opportunity to pivot are what Chinese investment firm CRCM looks for in an investment

What does one of the biggest Chinese backed investment funds look for in prospective companies? During their recent visit to Sydney China Rock Capital Management’s Venture Capital‘s Toby Zhang and Matt Lee spoke about the company’s investment philosophy.

“In general we invest in very early stage investments – we focus on seed to Series A,” says Zhang, one of the company’s partners. “At these stage of development we’re looking at a combination of talent, technology and market.”

“We like to bring these early technology companies to the markets like China and west coast US where we’re familiar, a lot of the companies partner with us because we can help overseas.”

Zhang and Lee were in Sydney for the announcement of their investment into a local VR video capture company, Humense, the fund’s first foray into Australia.

“When we first started CRCM we only invested in Chinese internet companies,” explained Zhang. “While we’re based in Silicon Valley we were looking at what’s going on in mainland China. We’ve launched three additional funds, all three of these are early stage and cross border. We not only invest in China but also in the US, Israel and now in Australia.

Understanding the founders

“We spend more than fifty percent of our time understanding the entrepreneurs and who’s behind the company. When we form a financial partnership it’s kind of like a marriage where getting a divorce is really difficult so you have to really understand the entrepreneurs.”

“Secondly we look for businesses which can easily pivot if they have to. A good example is a company we invested in recently called Music.ly. We were a fifth stage investor in Music.ly while they still in Shanghai, we saw entrepreneurs who we knew from their previous jobs so we knew how talented they were and we were prepared to back them.”

“More importantly though was their business’ focus on social media particularly with the age group that the existing platforms were losing traction with.”

“Finally with technology we’re looking for companies that can create barriers early that allows them to outcompete their competitors.”

Humense’s volumetric capture relies on an array of cheap, commercially available cameras to collect the images, something that appeals to Zhang’s investment philosophy.

Opportunities for Virtual Reality

“We spent a lot of time looking at the VR space, particularly volumetric capture,” says Matt Lee who originally hails from Sydney. “we felt in Australia with the background of special effects and animation so we felt there was a strong talent base we could leverage.”

Toby Zhang sees the fund making more investments into the augmented and virtual reality sectors. “We think AR/VR is a global tech movement,” he says. “Although historically we’ve been mostly investing in Silicon Valley and China, we have been constantly looking for opportunities to get to know start-ups, entrepreneurs, and investors from all around the world.”

It’s notable the Chinese backed fund is now looking around the world for investment opportunities and focusing on VR and AR technologies.

That strategy makes sense as the barriers to entry fall and the tech industry’s focus moves beyond Silicon Valley and into new markets. Where the US investment funds go will be the big pointer of future opportunities.

The limits of how governments can help startup businesses

The City of Sydney elections illustrate how limited governments are in promoting a region’s startup sector.

Over this week I’ve been posting a series of interviews with the candidates for this week’s Sydney Lord Mayoral election. All of the teams have interesting schemes and ideas on how they can improve the city’s profile as a global tech centre.

While each team’s plans are worthy, it’s worth asking exactly what governments can do to make their communities more attractive to businesses and whether short term subsidies and incentives can help.

There is some evidence they can, prior to San Francisco changing its tax rules the city took second place to Silicon Valley in the southern Bay Area. In the last ten years, the city has become the focal point for the tech industry.

However there is a counter argument that San Francisco benefited on a generational shift of lifestyle preferences away from the leafy suburban lifestyles of Palo Alto and San Jose to the grungy but walkable communities of the Mission and SOMA.

The Bay Area though is a special case, Silicon Valley’s success as a tech hub is based upon massive Cold War tech spending that drove the region’s industry and its that high level support that probably tells us more about government support.

In the case of London and Singapore, the successes have been due to the national governments putting in broader economic reforms and incentives. Also their proximity to Europe and East Asia respectively has made both cities attractive.

On balance it’s those broader economic factors that make regions attractive as industries clusters – local incentives count little compared to access to factors like markets, capital and skilled labour. Taxation is, at best, a secondary issue.

The biggest challenge for Sydney, and most Australian cities, is the the crippling cost of property. In 2013, staff.com released a survey showing Sydney to be second only to Zurich in the cost of establishing a startup.

In many respects, the cost of property doesn’t really matter to prosperous industry hubs – San Francisco, London, Singapore and New York are all eye wateringly expensive and yet they still thrive – however all of those cities have better access to capital and markets, if not labour, than Sydney.

Addressing Sydney’s chronic shortage of affordable accomodation is firmly in the state and Federal governments’ remit and beyond giving property developers a green light to build high rise apartments neither level of government has shown any interest in addressing it.

Similarly, the tax structures which penalise Australian employees of high growth businesses and dissuade investment in early stage ventures are totally the responsibility of the Federal government and it’s hard to see that changing in the term of the current dysfunctional administration.

The relative powerlessness of local governments leaves initiatives by the City of Sydney limited in scope and schemes to promote the city or offer incubator space are peripheral to the factors that encourage the development of a global industrial centre.

Ultimately though, the question has to be how much any government can do to create a Silicon Valley, factors such as labour availability and access to capital come down as much to the community’s attitudes and business’ risk tolerances.

So perhaps we focus on what governments can do for business. Maybe just providing a level playing field can be the best we can hope for.

Risks in the disruption machine

Joining forces with the tech disrupters can be risky as governments doing deals with Uber over public transit are learning

At last year’s Dreamforce, Uber founder Travis Kalanick sat down with Marc Benioff to discuss the ride sharing service’s history and its aspirations to reinvent public transit.

Those aspirations are coming to fruition reports The Verge as local governments across the US sign agreements with Uber to supplement their public transport networks.

In entering those arrangements local officials are finding a number of problems, not least the service’s obsession with secrecy that falls foul of US public data practices and legislation.

That clash between the Silicon Valley obsession with hoarding intellectual property and US open government beliefs is one that will become more common as agencies attempt to ‘Uber-ize’ their services.

However the Uber model isn’t working well in some markets as the fate of Washio shows.

A month ago Mic Magazine wrote about how Washio was a symptom of the ‘disruption’ being wreaked on communities by the tech industry as high priced services displaced undercapitalised smaller business.

Washio’s success, like Uber and most of the tech startups following the Silicon Valley greater fool model, required capturing enough of the market to have a dominant position in the marketplace making it hard for new competitors to enter while driving out existing players who can’t afford to make losses indefinitely. This is path followed by Amazon, Microsoft and even IBM.

However this strategy is risky if there’s not enough capital, which Washio has now found with the service entering bankruptcy this week.

The sad thing is Washio’s unprofitable and unsustainable business model let them kill other companies whose owners, managers or investors were unable or unwilling to compete with a loss making enterprise.

For small businesses in particular the effects of a well funded megalith intent on driving them out of business is particularly cruel – as we saw with booksellers and Amazon.

Local governments need to be particularly aware of the risk of making Uber the only provider of neighbourhood public transport, leaving them the sole player that owns all their data could well prove particularly costly, one only wonders what could happen had a local hospital done a laundry deal with Washio.

Spreading the tech industry’s footprint

The spread of the US’s tech sector shows the country’s industrial depth and strength, it also shows how other factors affect the spread of technology businesses.

Just how broad is the US tech industry? It’s tempting to think that most of the American tech sector is concentrated in San Francisco Bay Area with some offshoots in Seattle and on the East Coast but as this New York Times piece describes, the country has a range of high-tech industry clusters.

Like Silicon Valley itself many of those clusters exist because of other industries, research facilities or companies – Seattle being home to Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon being an example.

Another example of how other industries have influenced the development of industry clusters is shown in the example of Philadelphia.

I hadn’t thought have Philadelphia as having a tech sector until I spoke with Australian tech company Nuix about one of their key North American offices being in the Philadelphia suburb of Conshohocken.

When I observed that Philadelphia wasn’t the obvious place to set up, Nuix’s managers pointed out how the city’s pharmaceutical, medical technology and telecommunications provide a deep talent pool for tech companies along with the city’s location between New York and Washington DC being an advantage as well.

Philadelphia’s civic leaders have contributed to it with their Startup Philly program that offers services and incentives ranging from networking events through to a seed investment program.

VeryApt CEO Ashrit Kamireddi, one of the recipients of a Startup PHL angel round, describes the pros and cons of the city investment program and points out it was the factor in setting up their business there.

Prior to raising a $270,000 angel round led by StartUp PHL, my two cofounders and I had just graduated from our respective grad programs and had placed 3rd in Wharton’s Business Plan Competition. We could have settled our company anywhere, with New York and San Francisco being the obvious choices. For a startup, the initial round of funding is where geography is most critical. Most angels don’t want to invest outside of their backyard, which explains the natural tendency for startups to relocate where there is the most capital.

Kamireddi’s point about capital is critical, for tech startups finding funding is probably the most important factor in where the company is based.

Funding though isn’t the only aspect and for established companies, particularly those in the Bay Area struggling with high costs which is what the New York Times article focuses on in its example of Phoenix, Arizona.

The spread of the US’s tech sector shows the country’s industrial depth and strength, it also shows how other factors affect the spread of technology businesses.

Startups become a Sydney mayoral issue

Encouraging tech startups becomes an issue in the Sydney mayoral election

There’s a mayoral election pending in Sydney and the talk of the city becoming a startup hub is becoming one of the issues.

Over the next few days I’m hoping to interview each of the four major candidates on their policies regarding how they see Sydney competing against the likes of Singapore and Shanghai, let alone San Francisco or London.

In 2009, I was working with the New South Wales state government on their Digital Sydney project which looked at how the state capital could become a global centre, one of the things we found was that the city had many of the attributes successful creative centres had – diversity, tolerance and access to talent.

That project died in the face of bureaucratic ineptitude but the idea still kicks around with last week’s launch of the NSW Government’s Jobs For The Future report which, despite its opening thirty pages of buzzwords and waffle, contains some serious analysis of the state’s reliance on inward facing service industry jobs.

Refreshingly, the NSW Government strategy looks beyond the current mania around tech startups based on the Silicon Valley venture capital model – something the Federal government’s Innovation Statement failed to do – and discusses how to encourage growth and investment in other emergent sectors both inside and outside the inner city startup communities.

While Sydney can be an attractive place to live for the digital elite, it falls down in a number of areas with property being among the most expensive in the world, telecommunications being costly and unreliable coupled with a complacent corporate sector and a stingy investment community.

Making the city more attractive is going to take a number of initiatives that including easing the cost of doing business, improving links between academia and industry along with tapping into Sydney’s diverse immigrant populations.

Some of these factors are within the City of Sydney’s purview but most of them are state or Federal matters. By definition this limits what local politicians can do.

Which doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to do them and it’s good to see these topics have become issues in the local elections. For Sydney though, one suspects it’s going to business as usual until The Lucky Country’s luck runs out.

Creating alternatives to the NASDAQ

Is the NASDAQ still the place for tech companies to list? Nuix’s Eddie Sheehy doesn’t believe so.

Does it really matter what stock market a company lists on? In my interview with Nuix CEO, Eddie Sheehy for the Australian Financial Review, the question arose about where the company will list for its expected IPO next year.

Sheehy’s response was clear, “I suspect we’d get just as good a float out of Australia now as we would anywhere else. In fact better, because I think our shareholders are better known, respected and trusted, there’s nothing that I’ve seen in London or Nasdaq that makes me believe we’d get a better outing.”

Until recently most tech startups aspired to listing on the US NASDAQ exchange and the reasons were compelling as the bourse has a strong technology focus meaning deeper pools of funds, more liquidity along with a community of investors and analysts who had a strong understanding of technology stocks.

The case for other exchanges

Now other exchanges are making their case for tech companies listing with them. The London Stock Exchange making a strong argument for prospective IPOs. Singapore, Sydney and many others have similar pitches for the business.

The problem in those exchanges is the lack of depth in the marketplace. Having a small selection of tech companies listed means limited focus from investors and analysts, it also risks having one or two successful companies dominating the index, as has happened with Xero’s listing on the New Zealand Exchange.

Xero also illustrates another problem with a listing on an exchange not familiar with the peculiarities of tech stocks at the company’s Sydney AGM a few weeks ago where an investor asked ‘when are you guys going to make a profit?’

Rod Drury, Xero’s CEO, was able to deflect the question but it showed how companies listed on exchanges where the the high growth, low yield model of tech startups are unusual. On the Australian exchange, this problem is exacerbated by the investor base being dominated by big, dumb institutions.

Changing perspectives

Nuix, among Xero and a host of other tech companies, are slowly changing the perspectives of those investors but the focus on yield and safety from both retail and institutional investors will remain an obstacle for ventures launching in more conservative jurisdictions.

Other factors are the stability, legal and taxation consideration of those jurisdictions. If stockholders are facing barriers realising their investors or the the domicile puts companies at a disadvantage then that country’s stock market won’t be preferred.

Ultimately though a company’s listing is about access to capital and liquidity. If companies like Xero and Nuix can get both at a reasonable cost by listing on the Australian, Singaporean or London markets, then that’s a choice for their boards.

It’s hard though to see the NASDAQ being knocked off its perch for moment, although it the US tech bubble does pop things may change.

Sending school projects into space

Quberider, a Sydney based startup looks to make space projects accessible to school students

“We’ve been completely blown away,” says Quberider founder Solange Cunin about the interest in the startup that looks to put science experiments into space.

The company that was established by Cunin, a fifth year aeronautical engineering student, and her co-founder Sebastian Chaoui in early 2015 to provide school students with the opportunity to conduct experiments in space.

“Quebrider is a company that focuses on teaching core STEM skills that the current curriculum doesn’t focus on,” Cunin explained about the company. “Things like coding, data analysis and problem solving – all of those things industry needs. We do that in the context of students building their own space mission.”

The Quberider package starts starts at a cost of $5000 and includes a type of nanosatellite called a cubesat – a cube the size of a large coffee mug that contains ten sensors – along with teaching resources and a slot on one of the International space station launches. The program runs for three terms and integrates into the New South Wales high school science curriculum.

“Students end up creating their own software experiments and they sent it up on their own space mission,” explains Cunin. “They get that big bang and their own awesome feeling of being on something big and hopefully that gets them motivated to be involved in science a tech.”

In all, forty NSW high schools have prepared 60 projects ranging from one using the gathered information to create ‘space music’ through to an experiment measuring Einstein’s theory of relativity and time dilation to on the initial launch scheduled for the end of the month.

“Because it’s space it captures their imagination,” Cunin says of the program designed for years 9 and 10 students (14 and 15 year olds) but they have participants ranging from year 5 up to undergraduate level.

“We’re solving such an important pain point for many different people – getting students involved is a big problem for teachers and education and skills are a big problem for industry,” Cunin says.

The project developed out of Cunin and Chaoui’s joint passion for space projects and they came together when working as interns at another space startup.

While they are looking at a small amount of seed funding later this year, most of the startup’s capital has come from program fees and the support of the University of New South Wales where Cunin is a student and the University of Technology Sydney where Chaou studies. Quebrider is also part of Telstra’s Muru-D startup incubator program.

“We’re quite aware we have a lot to learn,” says Cunin about the Muru-D program. “Signing up to this with a good mentor program is important. The big value for us is the mentorship, we meet our advisory board once a fortnight and they’ve become part of the family.”

Ultimately Solange Cunin would like to see their program spread across the country. “What I’d really love to see is nationwide every single student that goes through year nine or ten has a space mission. They get to be part of something bigger and that inspires them and shows that science isn’t something nerdy and is cool.”

As the price of loading payloads onto satellites falls, it’s almost certain these experiments will become more accessible for schools and students.

Indonesia looks to launch a thousand startups

Not having government financial support could be the strength of the country’s 1000 Startups Movement

Can Indonesia create a startup tech culture? The 1,000 startups movement aims to try.

The movement looks to encourage tech startups across the island nation with workshops, incubators and hackathons.

Notably, the program isn’t being supported by the Indonesian government with any money, just an expression of support.

That in itself may not be a bad thing, a program run to meet the needs of communities and industry is much more likely to succeed than one being supported by bureaucrats meeting KPIs or political objectives.

A question though is how appropriate Silicon Valley’s ‘unicorn’ model for tech startups is for a developing nation like Indonesia. While the nation has a high level of mobile phone penetration and a young population, it doesn’t have the sophisticated investment community or financial markets that underpin the Bay Area’s or those of other technology hubs.

Indonesia, like most developing nations, needs to find its own model which may turn out to be very different to today’s Silicon Valley when it reaches maturity later this century.

That the 1,000 Startups Movement isn’t part of a government department gives it a chance to develop a unique Indonesian identity rather than trying to recreate an officially mandated copy of Silicon Valley. It will be fascinating to watch.

The quest to solve students’ problems

In the quest to solve students’ problems, Fluid Education’s Giorgio Doueihi set out on a winding path to provide solutions.

17 year old Giorgio Doueihi had a problem, his school had just rolled out a student diary app that was unusable. So Doueihi, who’d started coding at 13, decided he’d write a new one.

“I’d been dabbling with a bunch of projects at high school and I’d taught myself how to code,” Giorgio told Decoding the New Economy at Telstra’s Sydney Muru-D incubator.

That app was quickly adopted by his high school which had spent $100,000 developing the unusable system. Giorgio finished school, started university and Backpack, as his app became known, was accepted into Sydney University’s student INCUBATE startup program.

“I found out about INCUBATE and thought ‘I might just pitch this idea I had at high school’ then it kind of took a turn.”

Backpack became Fluid Education and Giorgio was accepted onto the Muru-D program, the product was doing well in the market and gaining customers when he decided to shut it down and move to a new product.

“Sales cycle was a large part of the pivot,” he explains. “Another part was that it had changed from a student orientated app to something more enterprise focused, something we were uncomfortable doing.”

So Fluid Education pivoted and is now a service for matching tutors to students and managing their appointment with the new platform about to come out of beta, “We’ve gone back to our roots,” Giorgio explains.

In many ways Giorgio Doueihi story is straight out of the startup textbook, he’s passionate, has identified a problem to solve and was agile enough to change the business’ course when he was unhappy with the direction.

Fluid education and Giorgio will be a very interesting story to follow over the next few years.