From boom to bust, from unconference to BarCamp and beyond, Mahesh Sharma tracks the fortunes of Australia's startup community.
99designs strengthened its claim as the world's number one purveyor of crowdsourced logo competitions by acquiring German rival 12 Designers, but the quest for global domination has created enemies and taken casualties.
CultureAmp's makers quickly found out that it isn't enough to build a product and hope that customers will see the benefit in using it; instead, the product has to meet the needs of the market.
The recent launch of VC firm Blackbird Ventures caps the two-year rise to power of Startmate founder Niki Scevak.
Can you really complain about a lack of government start-up support in Australia?
It's OK to change the direction of your start-up, says Roamz founder Jonathan Barouch, who has decided to recreate his app from scratch.
In Silicon Valley, the time from failure to success can be fleeting.
Adioso co-founder Tom Howard lives and breathes Australian start-ups, but will his own start-up succeed?
Playing to the market won't make a great start-up, but a passion for your idea will.
A Sydney start-up aims to put a local vibe back into travel tours.
SingTel has cut the "start-up" grass of Australia's biggest telco Telstra, which could suffer for its neglect of local grassroots entrepreneurs.
Rome2Rio's founders have rejected the widely accepted dogma that start-ups must rapidly acquire non-paying consumers and leverage this for a multimillion-dollar investment or buy-out, a high-stakes game dominated by Silicon Valley natives.
Australian entrepreneurs tout themselves as visionaries changing the world, but by blindly fleeing to Silicon Valley, California, to chase the promise of riches and fame, these hordes conjure an image of "moths drawn to a flame".
For over a century, education has been stuck in the multiple-choice paradigm, so University of New South Wales student Dror Ben-Naim used his four-year PhD in adaptive e-learning to develop an alternative: an application-based "intelligent learning system".
The start-up accelerator model made popular locally by Startmate, and internationally by Y-Combinator and Techstars, is being appropriated for the clean-tech industry as part of an experiment to see whether it can be transplanted to a niche.
Scalify's recent $2 million windfall had its genesis almost 10 years ago, and, along the way, the concept has touched key elements of Australia's start-up ecosystem.