Hamish McKenzie is a Baltimore-based reporter for PandoDaily who covers media, politics, and international startups. His first name is pronounced “hey-mish” and you can follow him on Twitter.
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How pelicans spurred a New Zealand startup to get more from the real world
A year ago, Chris Smith was at the zoo in Wellington, New Zealand, looking at pelicans, marveling at the amount of water they could hold in their beaks. Five weeks later, he had built an app, started a company, and signed a four-year contract with the zoo. They must have been very compelling pelicans. One of the two plaques at…
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Kia ora e hoa ma: PandoDaily is in New Zealand
Last week, PandoDaily brought you Australia (more stories to come), this week we go even further towards the Antarctic to bring you a country of even more modest size and first-rate flat whites (which, for the uninitiated, is a style of coffee y’all should be drinking). The native Maori people call it Aotearoa, “Land of the Long White Cloud,”... -
Hard yakka: Why Atlassian’s founders are the pride of Australia’s startup world
A few years ago, Mike Cannon-Brookes was invited to speak to a student entrepreneurial society at a Sydney university. The co-founder of Atlassian, one of Australia’s most successful software companies ever, showed up to the venue in cut-off jeans and a T-shirt. One of the workers who was setting up the venue mistook him for IT support. When Cannon-Brookes walked…
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Boom, crash… what? A dotcom train wreck finds a remarkable second coming
It was 1999, right in the thick of the dotcom boom, and Sydney-based ad-serving startup Sabela Media was just one day away from closing a $14 million venture round. Things couldn’t look much better for Sabela, which in the space of 18 months had become one of the top five ad-serving platforms in the world and had expanded to New…
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Sydney vs Melbourne, rival cities but sisters in startups
Many countries have strong rivalries between their two leading cities. New York vs San Francisco, Shanghai vs Beijing, Toronto vs Vancouver. In Australia, it’s Sydney vs Melbourne. This past week, I have been reporting from Sydney and meeting as many people as possible from the city’s startup ecosystem in that short period of time. Since announcing my arrival in the…
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The startup, the lawyer, the Quora question, and the $1.2M seed round
For Australian textbooks startup Zookal, the journey to a $1.2 million seed round started with a question on Quora. The young company’s founders had exhausted their fundraising options in Australia, and they were preparing for a trip to Silicon Valley. Having reached out to a network of Aussie entrepreneurs in the Valley, they still found themselves with a... -
Aussie app-toy Zimmi can vomit, giggle, and sneeze – but can he sell?
Zimmi has bulging, expressive eyes, a cutesy little giggle, and he farts in nine different ways. If you tickle Zimmi’s nose, he’ll sneeze; if you feed him a chili pepper, he’ll turn red in the face; and if you flip him up and down a few times, he’ll throw up all over the screen. It’s up to you to wipe…
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In cash-strapped Aussie venture market, a bird flies into a vacuum
here’s a gap in Australia’s venture capital sector as big as the Outback. While the country has enough serial entrepreneurs and angel investors to be able to support young companies at the seed stage and enough interest from large national institutions and American VCs to flesh out the big growth rounds, anything in between falls into a void. Silicon Valley…
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How an Australian startup raised $3M in seed funding from Silicon Valley
The 15-hour flight from San Francisco to Sydney is a rough one for humans, but it’s even more difficult for money. When it comes to fundraising, Australian startups really feel the pain of geography. Not that many American investors make the long schlep across the Pacific. So, if Aussie startups need to get capital from outside the small pool of... -
Strewth! PandoDaily hits Sydney
It took more than 15 hours in a stinky plane, but I’ve arrived in Sydney to bright sunshine and a calendar full of meetings with startups, investors, and tech companies. I’ve got only four days in the city, but I figure I can use that time to get a whiff of what Australia’s gutsy, under-the-radar entrepreneurs are up to, and…
