Looking Back to Look Forward

Below are an edited version of my opening remarks that I gave recently at Sunrise Australia 2025, our annual homage to founders.

This year, we celebrate 10 years of putting on Sunrise. 

In a nice coincidence, this year marks my 10th anniversary at Blackbird.

Back in 2015, I was at a career fork in the road, deciding between joining another startup as a product manager, or joining Blackbird. 

Rick Baker, Blackbird’s co-founder, recommended an up and coming Blackbird portfolio company, Canva. 

I recall being dismissive, saying I thought they were already too far along. I distinctly remember saying something like, "I’m not sure how much more there is to do there on product…” 

To be clear - this is what Canva looked like at that time. 

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As stupid as I seem now for thinking that Canva’s product had peaked at the Series A, it captures something about that moment in time in Aussie startups.

There actually just hadn’t really been many startups who had gone much beyond Series A! 

So nascent was our ecosystem that we had no idea how much bigger we could become.

Lately I’ve been reflecting a lot on this quote:

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In 2014, Blackbird had its very first Sunrise. Mike Cannon-Brookes, one of the co-founders of Atlassian, talked about key decisions that played a huge role in Atlassian’s success. Their biggest ambitions at founding was to generate $100M in revenue - they couldn’t imagine a more audacious goal. But by 2014, Atlassian had $320M in revenue, and it was still pre-IPO.

10 years later in 2024, it was generating $4.4B in annual revenue from 300,000 customers. 

I am sure the 2014 version of Mike didn’t predict executing the most successful NASDAQ listing of an Australian company ever, scaling it to $60B in value.

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He probably also didn’t imagine he’d also have a big role reshaping Australia’s energy future through, amongst other things, attempting a public takeover of AGL energy, launching Boundless, and backing SunCable, one of the world’s most ambitious renewable energy projects in the world. 

The second Sunrise in 2015, Leigh Jasper, co-founder of Aconex, spoke about how they got started. 

Ten years later, Leigh is back at it with his next startup, Firmable.

I bet Leigh could not have imagined that inside of a decade he would successfully exit Aconex TWICE,  first by listing on the ASX, and then by having Aconex be acquired by Oracle for $1.6B, only to start another company. 

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In 2016, Mel Perkins spoke at Sunrise about Canva’s overnight success almost 10 years in the making. 

We in the audience were blown away by the stats she shared that day - 9 million designs were created per month on Canva.

But, as of last month, 1 billion designs are created per month on Canva. 

Those figures would have been UNTHINKABLE to us as an audience in 2016. 

Now, that year, in the audience watching Mel Perkins, maybe in one of the seats one of you is sitting in now, was a founder right at the start of his journey. He was in the first year of founding his company, Airwallex.

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Today, Airwallex processes hundreds of billions of dollars in payments all around the world.

And in a nice full circle moment, Airwallex is now a sponsor of Sunrise!  

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My point here is that a lot can happen to one person, or one company, in ten years. A lot more than we tend to predict. 

Close up, you don’t realise that all these changes are to everyone, everywhere, all at once. 

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In 2012, this is what the Aus startup ecosystem looked like. Each line represents an ecosystem player like an incubator, accelerator or VC fund. 

Each station is an individual company. 

There are some very recognisable train lines on this early map, like Startmate, Innovation Bay and Fishburners, and of course Atlassian, which dominated the Bootstrap Line. 

Big thanks to Seb Eckerlsey-Maslin, founder of Blue Chilli, who produced these infographics for many years in the formative years of the Aus startup ecosystem. 

By 2013, there were more stations, and excitingly some more lines which means many more stations will be built in the years to come…

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In 2015, Melbourne got its own map...  With the Square Peg, Rampersand, MAP, Scale Ventures, Startup Vic lines to name a few and a very healthy bootstrap line too in yellow at the bottom. 

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Then by 2015 the Sydney network had become so big you couldn't list each company as a station anymore. 

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And in 2025... well it's just too hard to visualise the whole ecosystem on one rail map! 

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So, if we tend to underestimate what we can achieve in 10 years, what could and should we wish for by 2035? 

‍What you could surprise yourself with having achieved 10 years from now?‍

Sunrise is a place where serendipitous meetings happen. 

Where seeds are planted. 

Where ideas get sharpened and ambitions are raised. 

I hope at Sunrise that everyone will channel the 2035 version of themselves. 

And I early anticipate looking back, 10 years from now, and seeing just how far we all have come.

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