Silicon Beach

California has Silicon Valley. Sydney’s got Silicon Beach. Where would you rather live?

Joshua Gliddon has his first page one in today’s AFR – go get a copy! He’s grabbled hold of the "Silicon Beach" moniker coined by Tilefile’s David Bollinger.

I’ll tell you why this is a big story. There’s truckloads of money available for web startups in Australia if they’ve got a good business model. But many of the new companies Joshua quotes (such as Atlassian, Tangler, Quotify and the Freshview boys pictured on page 1 with their surf boards) are building companies with real revenues and real customers. That’s a good story now, but think about what value they are creating for the future. Any potential M&A activity will be grounded in discussions about real numbers and not just pie-in-the-sky evaluations.

And in case you’re wondering, the idea for this yarn surfaced when I met these guys at Stirr Sydney.