PROVEN STRATEGIC NAVIGATION

Each time I meet someone I haven’t seen for while they ask this perfectly reasonable question, to which I inadequately respond that I’ve been busy. Collating my activities over the last 12 months has reminded me of the many positives in communities, businesses and innovation and the people fuelling them.

I’ve written about this before  (http://www.davidhulston.com/articles/20130813), but it’s worth reiterating. Don’t fill your investment pitch presentation with overblown hyperbole that you have been told investors want to hear. Here are three things that you have probably been told to say, but shouldn’t.

We called 14 October last year as the day that drivers became obsolete. That was the day Tesla Motors sent a software update to tens of thousand of users cars, making them semi-autonomous.

But is it really a zero-sum game? Will the Silicon Valley upstarts Uber and Tesla, plus giants Google and Apple, really crush the existing auto industry? It’s difficult to see what the outcome will be but the patent landscape paints a different view. 

The inaugural Advance Queensland Innovation and Investment Summit represented a coming of age for the Startup community of my home State. It was the moment that the work of the many contributors to the community came to fruition. It wasn’t the result of a single person, group or body. It was the output of many, over a number of years. Most importantly, it was recognition that there are multiple roles to be played in building a startup ecosystem, but ultimately it must be lead by entrepreneurs.

In the early 1980’s I learnt to programme on a Perkin Elmer Interdata 8/32 computer, much like the one pictured above. We wrote code, which then took hours to compile before it could run the programme we had just written. The programming language, COBOL, was updated every decade and continued in use for over 50 years. In my first job I used VisiCalc and soon after Lotus 1-2-3. The Telex machine clunked away in the corner throughout the first decade of my work life. The most amazing piece of kit to come into the office was the fax. Careers were for life. The Government’s firm hand directed industrial policy. The welfare state made us feel safe.