Episode overview

Simon Thomsen joins Give It A Nudge to turn the tables on Steve Grace, who usually does the interviewing. Simon walks through a career that spans regional newspaper ownership, online journalism in its earliest days, the launch of Business Insider Australia, and three years as editor of Startup Daily. The conversation covers what has changed in the Australian startup ecosystem over the past decade, why Canva and Atlassian are defining moments for the country, and how the next generation of founders is being shaped by values in ways that were almost unheard of in the corporate raider era of the 1980s.

From regional newspapers to startup media

Simon’s career in media started not at a national masthead but in a regional newspaper he bought in his mid-twenties from owners who were going to close it. The Northern Rivers Echo in Lismore was about twelve to fifteen months old when he acquired it with a couple of others, and he ran it for nearly fifteen years before selling to APN News and Media. In 1996 he put up one of the first newspaper websites in Australia, beating Fairfax and News Corp, not out of strategy but because he saw the internet as a distribution opportunity for readers who had moved overseas.

It was a pretty Wild West era

Simon describes the early Australian startup ecosystem as resembling the corporate raider period of the 1980s, when figures like Bond, Skase, and Holmes a Court operated with few constraints. The nascent startup world of 2012, when Startup Daily launched, had a similar energy: few guardrails, enormous enthusiasm, and some spectacular failures alongside the early wins. Now, with Atlassian at 100 billion dollars and Canva a global brand, the ecosystem has matured, but Simon argues the values shift is the most significant change: founders like Melanie Perkins and Mike Cannon-Brooks are defining their legacies during their companies’ growth, not at the end of their careers.

What makes a startup story worth covering

Simon describes his editorial filter as two poles: an idea is either so obvious you can’t believe nobody did it before, or so completely out of left field you can’t understand how someone’s brain produced it. Linktree is the obvious category: it solved a single friction point that millions of people felt every day. Most of the breakthrough companies are in the obvious category. The out-of-left-field ones are rarer but tend to produce the most memorable conversations. He is also honest that not every founder he has interviewed delivered, though those are the minority.

The next generation of investors

Simon points to the emergence of a second-generation investor class as one of the most significant structural changes in the Australian startup ecosystem. Founders who have exited, senior operators from scaled startups, and employees who have accumulated capital through early-stage equity are now deploying their own capital as angels. They are writing cheques of twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars rather than the millions that make the headlines, but they are backing founders at the earliest stage and bringing real operating experience to bear.