What makes you think it's any harder than anywhere else?

Part of 2K Australia's problem was that we grew very big when the Aussie dollar was low, then when it came back up we were a very expensive studio. We had very little turnover and a lot of well paid, senior developers made us look even more expensive per head.

We were working closely with 2K China who were a lot cheaper per head.

Given this direct experience, in this instance do you personally think that the well paid senior developers provided value compared to the cheaper her head talent?

Err, in this instance I don't think they were directly comparable.

We always had the impression somebody far up the chain would be looking at the spreadsheet and thinking about where they want to invest further. It may have been our imagination.

In fact, now that I think about it, probably the opposite was happening because a lot of effort when into growing the Marin Studio in California which I'm sure would have been even more expensive per head than us.

Meh. This is what overseas management do to Australian subsidiaries all the time. They don't worry about the profits made by the employees, what they tend to believe is "It's Australia, we get tax incentives to work here, there's no way Australia workers could be as productive as U.S. workers."

Then they try to introduce business practices that only work in the U.S. and consequently fail. I've seen it time and time again.

What is a business practice that only works in the US?

While I'm a US worker, I managed a team in Bulgaria. Initially I synchronized via email, chat with each team mate. Met once a month for architectural review over video.

Management hoisted that we had to do stand ups over video chat daily. It was done 9PM EST, and 5AM their time. The time was picked to match my managers PST schedule. There was also the weekly backlog grooming, biweekly poker plannning, etc.

Working with that team, a European Sales team and on site European vendors. The two things I've seen is our meeting culture grates on them. Secondly my American team mates, I don't want to say looked down. But consistently commented, on lack of devotion and effort of other counterparts.

Believing that only those in the U.S. know how to do anything and everyone else is substandard.

Ripping out existing support and sales structures and adding U.S.-centric ones that piss off local customers and lost them sales.

IMO the main issue is the very strong resources sector driving up salaries (there are a lot of tech companies servicing the mining industry), coupled with the comparatively low population meaning that the overall market is pretty small.

The resources sector is tanking, and very badly.

It is now compared to 3-4 years ago but it's still arguably the strongest part of our economy. It's not like we have much manufacturing.

That just shows you how close to the precipice the Australian economy is teetering on.

> Why is it so hard to run a tech company in Australia

A number of reasons, I think. Our terrible internet, the lack of support from the state governments (and the lack of _understanding_ of our industry for those governments that are trying; see: QLD), an investor base that (after spending the last 7 years navigating it) appear to be desperately afraid of B2C start-ups, and don't quite get B2B start-ups either... the list goes on, really.

Not going to stop me trying, though!

You'd think Atlassian leaving and being really vocal about it would have helped. 6 billion dollar company now.

Did they actually leave though? Or just switch up their corporate structure to reduce tax?

Mostly the latter. They have large - and growing - offices right in the middle of the Sydney CBD.

Specifically a game development company, you mean? Well, I think video game income is quite a speculative proposition, capital city cost of living is high (and that's where the talent wants to live, you'll have trouble attracting people to Dubbo), and therefore it's hard to pay people a living wage or keep a company alive.

Very similar to the Australian film industry, really.

You have direct access to a much smaller market, there are only just over 20 million people here.

To put it into perspective Australia's population is 23.13 million. Most people live near or around the main capital cities. Flipping the coin on the other side when looking at the population for some American States/districts California (38 million), Texas (26 Million), Florida (19 Million) it's pretty easy to see why Aussie market is so much smaller.

There are plenty of smaller nations with booming tech industries, Australia lacks government investment and natural accelerators and incubators which are especially needed in this case due to it's very high COL and COB.

I don't think it's necessarily true that the government doesn't support startups. Programs like the R&D Tax Incentive (cash back on R&D spent, including local developers) and Export Market Development Grant (refund up to 50% of overseas marketing costs) are very useful to small businesses. That said, I don't think the government does a good job

Disclaimer: I work for PwC's Nifty Forms team, which helps SMBs in Australia with these programs.