It would be good to see more women in the room at the 2016 SydStart than those present at today’s event for tech entrepreneurs.
Despite getting a number of female speakers on the program — after not one woman was named in the initial line-up — the audience for the SydStart opening sessions at Sydney Town Hall was largely dominated by men.
Interestingly, the opening keynote address from Andrew Hyde spoke to the reasons why women would make very, very good tech entrepreneurs — despite the fact he never mentioned the words ‘women’ or ‘female’ once.
In Australia from Boulder Colorado, Hyde is the founder of StartupWeekend, which holds weekend hackathons in more than 400 different cities across 100 countries.
Having successfully built a global phenomenon from what was once a very small and simple idea, he’s a big advocate for collaboration and creating communities around start-ups. These are some of the things we’ve seen local women here do particularly well in building great businesses around extensive networks, including Lorraine Murphy, Rebekah Campbell, Lisa Messenger and Jo Burston.
He said understanding exactly what ‘community’ means is essential for a start up. It’s not about becoming the president of a club or retaining complete control over your message. Communities, he said, must be collaborative, welcoming, always evolving and un-owned.
Ultimately, communities work when everyone feels welcome, everyone is valued, and everyone can be as complex as they want or need to be. By making these things work, Hyde said some of the biggest issues challenging the tech start-up sector, including diversity, can be solved. “Ask yourself when you’re putting on an event or putting up a blogpost, does this make anyone feel unwelcome,” he said.
But creating a community that’s welcoming and un-owned may also mean giving up control, and being ok with other people taking your message elsewhere. Hyde said this is often considered one of his most controversial points, as most founders do not want to let go of what they’ve created.
Another tip Hyde offered was one I’ve seen many great female entrepreneurs do particularly well: develop considered values around their business and a sense of ‘style’ that maintains their authenticity.
“If you’re starting something, who you are is probably the most important thing,” he said. “A lot of people get caught up in this trap of wanting to be a ‘unicorn’ or on the cover of Forbes magazine … A lot of stuff happens in this industry, what really matters is who you are.”
This means getting the “story of your story” right – that is not the one that you pitch to someone else, but rather the pitch that person then gives about your business to their friends. “If the story of your story fails, you need to re-tool,” he said.
Hyde’s session was followed by Envato co-founder Cyan Ta’eed, who’s created a business with more than 200 employees in Melbourne, and now operates the 88th most-trafficked website in the world.
Having started Envato with her husband from her parent’s garage, she said it’s since been very successful but there are still plenty of things she’d do differently if she was starting again — especially around testing.
Ta’eed offered a case study on how she recently leanly launched a new Envato product offering that she described as the “uber of photography”. Starting with a couple of staff a few hours a week, a $20,000 marketing budget and a WordPress site they created themselves, she said they fundamentally relied on customer feedback in order to get the offering right.
While Ta’eed didn’t appear to have collaborated with Hyde on her presentation, the case study she offered was a great example of building a product around collaboration, feedback and community. It helps to have women at the top.