In this episode we talk with Elena Kelareva, CEO and Founder of GippsTech, about her experiences in establishing innovation systems in regional areas, and her reflections on the behavioural and cultural settings behind successful regional innovation ecosystems. We touch on the definition of tech transfer and tease out a distinction between innovation translating scientific outcomes and entrepreneurship, the latter being more broadly around the establishment of ventures to address new opportunities.
Elena has a diverse background having completed her PhD and having also worked in a number of product development roles including Google Maps. Elena recognised the opportunities associated with regional entrepreneurship and established Gippstech to build new networks and ecosystems to stimulate new venture establishment. Through her efforts she has identified the importance of behaviours and culture in building distributed innovation ecosystems and the key success factors in these ecosystems. We also discuss her observations that ‘fly-in, fly-out’ advisory services have limited sustained ecosystem impact in regional areas but FIFO does have a role in some specialisations.
Elena also shares her observations in agtech innovation and identifies the need for ‘digital agronomists’. She identifies some success criteria for agtech innovation and has seen most success where producers with specific technical skills sets can leverage their production experience to address particular challenges and opportunities. She shares a terrific example around Invest in your Farmer from Northeast Victoria.
Transcipt
CB: Hello. Welcome to Tech Transfer Talk. My name is Cameron Begley. And joining us today from Warragul, Gippsland, is Elena Kelareva, who joins us to bring a rural perspective on tech transfer. We’re looking forward to her insights from her experiences from Google and her establishing GippsTech. Elena, welcome.
EK: Thanks, Cameron. It’s great to be here now.
CB: Terrific to have you, thanks. And I’m really interested in in the journey from Google to the green pastures of Warragul and, and how you’ve immersed yourself in the tech transfer space. But I’m interested, perhaps a little bit, about your career and how you found your way into this world of innovation, ecosystems and tech transfer.
EK: So, I worked in tech my entire career. Started off as a software engineer at a startup called IMC International, which makes software for ports. Ended up doing a PhD in AI after that, and then joined Google as a product manager on the Google Maps web APIs. So, I’ve always been interested in tech and immersed in that field. And my husband happens to be from Gippsland, so I’ve been coming to the region for a very long time, ever since we met during our undergrad years.
CB: Right. That’s the connection.
EK: Yep. Exactly.
CB: Fascinating, fascinating. And you know, when one thinks about tech transfer, you know, being involved in Google Maps, it’s, you know, it would have to be one of the highest used apps going, Google Maps.
EK: Yeah, definitely.
CB: I mean, all of us have navigated around the corner at one stage or another, I suspect.
EK: Yeah, yeah, we’ve all used it. So yeah, it’s definitely one of the most used apps.
CB: So what I mean, I don’t know how much you can share with us, but what did being in tech Transfer at, regarding Google Maps, what was that about for you? What did you do? And perhaps interestingly, what were the learnings that came from something at that enormous scale in terms of users?
EK: So specifically, what I worked on at Google Maps was the Google Maps web APIs. So that’s basically, for anyone on the call who doesn’t know what an API is. It’s basically what an API is, is like building blocks for software. So, it’s the things that software developers use to connect different software to each other. So, the Google Maps APIs are used to embed Google Maps in various third-party websites. So, any time you see a Google map on any website, that’s not the actual Google Maps website, that’s basically the product that I was the product manager of.
CB: And now, I suspect a lot of our listeners are more of the biophysical sciences background. So, another podcast I listened to has this thing called an acronym Klaxon. So, what is an API decoded from the acronym?
EK: Application Programming Interface.
CB: Fantastic. So, it’s the bit that connects the engine to the application, I take it.
EK: Yeah. It’s basically like a way to hook into other applications.
CB: Fantastic. So, was your, in terms of the tech transfer journey, would you have seen yourself as someone doing tech transfer involved in, in your efforts with Google, before we get into Gippsland more broadly and rural more broadly, did you see yourself or call yourself a tech transfer person there or… ?
EK: To be honest. like I didn’t come across that that term until only fairly recently. It’s something that’s not used as much in software development, as far as I can see. So, terms like say, innovation, product development, yes, definitely. but not tech transfers as a term.
CB: Yeah. Okay. So, your departure from Google and setting up GippsTech, that term then or that notion of tech transfer, may not have actually, naturally come to you.
EK: You know, I still wouldn’t really use that term day-to-day. Like, it would be more about like innovation, startups, entrepreneurship, not so much about tech transfer.
CB: Okay, okay.
EK: It’s more a term used in translating research to commercial products rather than entrepreneurship that does not arise from research.
CB: Yeah. Okay. And that’s a distinction that might be worth teasing out a little bit. So, I’m personally, I’m someone that has taken science and engineering concepts and used them as the core of building a new product or taking a new product to market and so on and so forth. But you’re bringing a sort of a lens on that as well. It’s not actually a technology that is being transferred, but it is yet, you know, building startups and entrepreneurship, but not necessarily based on a tech.
EK: Well, more to the point, not necessarily based on scientific research. So maybe that’s the technology that’s being developed by people who are not researchers, which is very commonly the case in the software space.
CB: Right, okay. No, no, no, I’m just I’m just searching for that distinction that you’re drawing there. So, it’s not built by researchers, but it is of course built on technology.
EK: Yeah.
CB: Okay. And that is, t that’s the entrepreneurship that you’ve been immersed in in Gippsland over the last 6 or 7 years.
EK: Ah, yes. So that’s where it might be worthwhile talking about how I ended up leaving Google and starting GippsTech.
CB: Lovely, lovely self-segue. Thank you. So, what brought that moment about? You know, Sydney, Google, you know, relatively well known high performing organisation. Why the exit to Gippsland?
EK: Basically after three and a half years on the on the map’s APIs, I was starting to think about moving on to my next step. Basically, the product had become fairly mature and there were less opportunities for working on new things. So, I was looking at either product management roles in other tech companies or basically because we’d had this connection to Gippsland, my husband and I had been talking for years about how there’s a need to grow tech communities in Gippsland because intuitively, technology and like tech startups have so much potential for growing jobs in regional areas because your workforce doesn’t have to be in the same place as your customers. If you’re building a global tech startup, it shouldn’t matter whether you’re based in Melbourne or Sydney or in a small country town. But what we were seeing in practice was the majority of startups were being founded in the capital cities.
CB: Right.
EK: When I started GippsTech, in Victoria, there were about 25% of the population living in regional and rural areas, but only about 3% of startups were being founded in regional and rural areas.
CB: So, your contention being that that tech startups shouldn’t be geographically dependent, but the data suggested that 97%, 97% of them were geographically dependent, with only 4% being in the regions. And the challenge emerged for you to move the three to a larger number.
EK: Yeah. Basically, I wanted to understand why exactly is that happening, and can it be changed? And thirdly, can it be changed by a small organisation, or does it really take the resources of a large government agency?
CB: Right. And so, the immediate question that strikes me is, have you managed to uncover why?
EK: So, we did a lot of research right at the start to understand what has been tried in different regions around the world to try and shift this dynamic. What’s worked and what hasn’t. One of the things we considered was around tech skills, and are there just not enough people in regional areas with tech skills who might start startups? So, we considered running various tech training, reskilling programs, etcetera. What we very quickly realised was that was just going to contribute to a brain drain, because if you just teach people the skills, but there’s no local jobs available, they moving to the city, not everybody’s entrepreneurial. So, if you just create a tech workforce, people end up leaving.
CB: Right, so, you made them and they leave anyway.
EK: Yeah, yeah. So, what we realised we needed to focus on was actually supporting the entrepreneurs in regional areas to get going. What we found was the thing that was missing was lack of a local supportive community to help entrepreneurs overcome barriers when they run into barriers, because the basic skills and learning, you can get all of that online. There’s plenty of good online courses about entrepreneurship and startups and software development and like how to build tech businesses. But if you’re trying to do all of that on your own and you don’t have anyone in your community, you don’t know anyone who’s gone through that process before, it’s very easy to run into some problem that you just can’t solve on your own. And you get discouraged and give up. And that’s what we were finding was happening over and over again, that there were people with great ideas, but they didn’t have the support network around them in their own local community. And in some cases, friends and family were less than supportive.
CB: So, so having arrived in Gippsland and having spent some time diagnosing why entrepreneurship wasn’t taking root around tech in regional…well, I might generalise to regions but in particular, Gippsland, which is the focus of your efforts, how did you then start to go about moving that needle? Because you made an interesting reference to government earlier and, you know, there is a…I think there is a role for government to pump prime these things. You know, I mean, we might even debate how extensively government should be involved, but in principle, you asked yourself the question can it be done by a small organisation or does government need to prime the pump? And maybe the answer is both. So how do you go about moving this needle?
EK: So, what we started doing was gradually starting to build that local community around entrepreneurship and technology. So, we did what we always recommend any startup founder to do and started running a few basic experiments. So we ran various one-off events and our first significant successful event was the Binary Shift Conference in 2017.
CB: Right.
EK: So basically, we managed to get 60 people from across Gippsland to attend a tech conference. So, the largest tech event that had been run in the region ever up to that point, and it clearly showed that there was demand locally for tech and entrepreneurship and startups. So, that then then led to us being able to get funding to run pre-accelerator programs in Gippsland under the Startup Gippsland program. So, Startup Gippsland ended up becoming one of the largest regional startup programs that’s ever been run in Australia. We’ve now had over 150 startups go through it over the last four years.
CB: Great, okay. And that was a program funded by government but run by a small organisation like GippsTech.
EK: Yeah, yeah. And I think that basically answers your question that I think, it needs to be a combination of government and local delivery partners, because there have been examples in the past where ,as part of various government funded programs like Melbourne-based companies ended up being paid to deliver, deliver one off events in Gippsland. But that never really created a sustainable local community because it was a bunch of people coming in delivering one event and then they’d leave, and it didn’t create that self-sustaining community where people could support each other going forward.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
EK: It was only delivering learnings really, rather than delivering community. Whereas having long running programs active in the region meant that there was a buildup of a growing entrepreneurship community over time. So, people who develop these skills, who had been active in the region for several years, who could then come back as mentors and guest speakers and continue supporting the next set of startups.
CB: So, so an interesting observation that you’ve made there around the, I’ll say, FIFO, fly in, fly out or drive in, drive out, as the case may be, but it delivers content, but not community.
EK: Yeah.
CB: And noting your earlier comment there, Elena, around, ‘Well, there’s plenty of content on the internet, so, great. Why do I need people drive in, drive out in order to deliver content when community is the thing, is the missing ingredient or one of the key ingredients that you need to drive that entrepreneurial spirit?’
EK: Yeah, exactly. I think part of the reason behind these kinds of fly in, fly out, one off events, is the idea of connecting regional entrepreneurs to Melbourne ecosystems. Reality is that people who live three, four hours out of Melbourne are pretty unlikely to travel into Melbourne on a regular basis for events. So, they also need a local community around them where they live. So, they have people they can go to and catch up for coffee with on a more regular basis. If they need support or advice or someone to vent at. There’s also a bit of a, like, you can’t be what you can’t see effect. So, if people don’t know anyone locally who’s started a global business, it can feel out of reach or impossible to achieve themselves.
CB: Yeah.
EK: So, we need visible examples of people building global companies from small country towns as an inspiration to others.
CB: The notion of an innovation ecosystem, it has a meaning, but it also is a little bit of a throwaway line in a lot of circles, too. People talk about innovation ecosystems, sort of as something that you just unwrap as part of, you know, everyday life. I’m interested in your sort of, your learnings and what the key success factors you see in, in a functioning, a highly functioning perhaps, let’s raise the bar a little bit here, what are the key success factors in a highly functioning innovation ecosystem, perhaps with a regional focus, but just what are those key success factors?
EK: I think in rural and regional areas, what we’ve found is government funding does actually make a huge difference because in, so in the major cities with more established startup ecosystems, there you have a lot more businesses whose business model revolves around supporting startups, particularly those at later stages of growth. So, as the startups themselves grow, they end up being able to access more paid services, and therefore it builds up a community of businesses around them to support them. In a rural area where the startup ecosystem is much less developed and most of the startups are very early stage. there isn’t enough startup activity yet to support that kind of ecosystem of support services in a self-sustaining way. If you think about it, a VC fund is never going to fund a regional startup program in one region because they’re always going to be likely to go to Melbourne instead, which has more established startups, startups that are further along. They’re more likely to basically get a good return on their investment. And focus on building their investment pipeline in Melbourne or Sydney ecosystems. So basically, to fund startup support programs in regional areas, it requires government funding. Not the case anymore in more self-sustaining ecosystems like Melbourne and Sydney.
CB: So, there’s a scale component there, or perhaps not so much a scale but a concentration component. It’s the density of activity in a major city, in a regional area of any, anywhere in Australia, maybe arguably anywhere at all. As the population thins out, the distances get longer. You don’t get that density, that concentration of activity. But so, I certainly accept completely that government has a, is a necessary actor in underpinning the funding of these innovation ecosystems. But I’m curious to understand perhaps more of the cultural or behavioural aspects. You know, I suspect some listeners are having a trigger moment around, ‘Well, aren’t they just soft skills?’ No, they’re actually really hard. But I’m interested in the cultural and behavioural aspects. Is there something distinct about regional systems as opposed to the city ones?
EK: So, there’s a few unique things about regional ecosystems. One is that there’s a greater need for building up local skills among the mentors and support services as well. Because having fewer local tech startups, startups that have an innovation focus, that means that a lot of local support services may be less used to working with those kinds of businesses. So that’s one of one of the big reasons why we really try to engage local support services and local mentors and guest speakers to also give them more connection with those kinds of businesses. But when you hear about regional ecosystems, most commonly you hear about towns of a population 100,000 plus. So, whether there’s a tipping point, I would say the tipping point is around about 100,000.
CB: Yeah. Okay. No that’s really interesting.
EK: Basically, cities of 100,000 plus, that’s where we do see, like the city as a standalone startup ecosystem being able to develop some momentum. So, the classic book about building startup ecosystems is called Startup Communities by Brad Feld, was written about the development of the startup ecosystem in Boulder, Colorado, which has a population of 104,000. So that’s very much, like right in the middle between Bendigo and Ballarat.
CB: Right on that. Right on the mark.
EK: Yeah. So basically 100,000 is the point where it is possible to create a vibrant startup ecosystem within the one city.
CB: Very interesting.
EK: For towns significantly smaller than 100,000, that’s where you end up needing to look at building distributed startup ecosystems across an entire region. Connecting entrepreneurs in the entire region with each other.
CB: So, perhaps grabbing that point, then you are, by inference, being heavily involved in building a distributed model. One of the things that brought you and I together and, with acknowledgements to Leecia and Steven Angus out of Snowy, is the whole agtech and the role of innovation and regional and rural innovation in the agtech space. And I’m, our audience has a bit of an ag and biosciences flavour to it, got lots of people out there, bit of a skew towards that interest, so, I’m really curious to explore your experiences with agtech in particular. You know, what kind of worked, what hasn’t worked, whether you’ve been directly engaged through your efforts bringing agtech products forward? I’m really interested to explore that.
EK: So, with regards to agtech, I’ve seen a lot of the agtech adoption side of things living in Gippsland, working with local businesses and hearing their stories, both successful and otherwise, of attempting to adopt agtech products. So, a few things that that have really been key learnings for me…
CB: Yeah.
EK: One is, that a lot of people building agtech products…so, a statistic that I heard through various Melbourne startup ecosystems was, that over 50% of agtech founders have never actually been on a farm.
CB: Yes.
EK: So, as someone who works in innovation and startup ecosystems in general, I always tell startup founders you need to be speaking with your customers. Getting out there, understanding your customers.
CB: But customers just get in the way.
EK: Yeah. So yeah, my biggest advice for, like any agtech startups out there is, is go and actually connect with farmers. Go out to the regions. You can’t just do this from the cities. If you’re working on an agtech product, you need to be heading out to regional areas.
CB: Stage advice? Talk to your customers.
EK: I think, yeah, that’s one of the reasons why so many tech products end up failing…because of a lack of understanding of the customers. Basically, there’s a very small overlap between people building tech products and people who have experience with farming. Small, smaller compared to a lot of other industries.
CB: Yeah. So, have you had direct experience of the intersection of that Venn diagram so that, you know, one circle is farmers, the other circle is agtech product developers and where the two intersect, have you had experience where those two circles intersect?
EK: Yes, and I would say that that’s where the most successful agtech startups come from. So, the most successful agtech startups that I’ve seen typically are those where at least one of the founders has a farming background or has personal experience with farming. Together with some, like some kind of technology innovation that they can see can make a difference to farmers.
CB: Yeah. And I would almost call that a key learning that someone with experience in a farming system has something to do with the product.
EK: Yeah, exactly. From the adoption side, I think one of the other things that I see is, there’s a lot of negative experiences that farmers have had with agtech becausethere’s a lot of cases where agtech startups basically go and try to sell a product to farmers, where the product turns out not to be a good fit. So, for farmers, they’ve had these experiences of being sold products that turn out not to make a difference to their farm.
CB: Yeah.
EK: So, there’s a lot of stories of farmers trying out some agtech product, not getting value from it, and ending up basically deciding not to continue using it after a year or so. So, that kind of negative experience, I think that’s one of the things that ends up hindering agtech adoption, because basically farmers themselves are usually not technical. And so, they may not have the skills to, um, implement agtech products in such a way that really makes a difference to their bottom line.
CB: So, this is interesting, in that I think as consumers, we’ve all experienced products that disappoint. And I won’t name names, but…and in our businesses, we have suppliers and vendors that that don’t meet our expectations. And we just put that down to experience and move on. But I’m interested to just quickly explore the question of, so,, this particular version of this product to solve my problem didn’t work. Are you sensing then that farmers and producers, I should say more broadly, are they saying, ‘Oh, well, that agtech didn’t work, so therefore I won’t try one again’ or ‘That agtech didn’t work. That’s a bit disappointing. I’ll just wait ‘til the next one comes along that looks promising.’ Is it being it, sort of a complete abandonment, or is it just a bit more wariness and reluctance for the next time?
EK: I think farmers tend to be very busy and overworked, and basically, don’t have a lot of time to experiment with things that, may or may not work out. So, I think having those kinds of negative experiences, basically, you end up wasting a lot of time and a lot of money if you try something that fails. So, it’s not like, say, like an agtech product typically would that would be a bit more time intensive and a bit more costly to try than, say, signing up for a free subscription, like a free trial of … software.
CB: Yeah.
EK: So, the amount of time and money investment that would be lost in an unsuccessful agtech trial.
CB: So, I’m sort of interpreting that, Elena, as, you know, a farmer who is inherently time poor, producer, you know, very little time to do things differently. So, they’re very judicious allocations of time to these sorts of product trials and product experiments. So, when they fail, not necessarily not meet expectations, but let’s just say fail, that it creates a very strong allergic reaction to make a follow on investment of their time and, indeed money resources more generally. Is that is that a reasonable sort of interpretation of your observations there?
EK: I’d say yes. And I think one of the like, contributing factors to that, basically, there’s the issue that I’ve already mentioned that a lot of agtech founders don’t, like haven’t actually been on a farm, and they don’t have as much of an understanding of the customer. So, there’s a lot of agtech products out there that may not necessarily be the right fit for a farmer. Yeah, the farmer doesn’t necessarily have the knowledge of that space to be able to understand, ‘Will the product actually make a difference to them and how does it need to be implemented to get the results?’
CB: I appreciate you framing it that way, Elena, because you brought me back to the second thing I wanted to capture from earlier, which is, is this gap. So, you know, noting that a good number of agtech product developers haven’t been in a production system in an agricultural environment. And then indeed, let’s assume the rest of these providers have been, but may not necessarily have the time, money, wherewithal to start actively supporting their product or developing the product further. It strikes me, Elena, that there is almost a digital agronomy or digital extension that is sitting in this conversation that, you know, product providers are feeding one end of the pipe, find poor producers desperately trying to make sense of all of this, placing the occasional bet. And I’m sure there are successful stories, and I hope we will, you will talk about, and you’ll share some. But we’re working in the negative case of the time being time poor producers. Right. That’s it. Massive allergic reaction. Won’t do it again. I’d like to explore that notion of digital agronomy or support for these products.
EK: I think digital agronomy is a really great way of putting it, because I agree that there’s a need for that kind of, like intermediary service provider to provide support. A lot of the time, the startups themselves don’t have the skills or the staff to provide, like further consulting beyond the product itself.
CB: Yeah.
EK: Government funding, so, this is again a bit of a gap in terms of government funding. But generally, government funding for agtech adoption only covers the technology costs, not consulting costs or implementation costs. That’s where you get some of these failures, failure stories where basically, the farmer may have got funding for the technology adoption piece but didn’t get the funding needed to successfully implement the technology and to get the support they need to actually embed the technology properly in their processes.
CB: And it strikes me as a rather interesting irony that, and let’s focus on government for a minute, who spend non-trivial amounts on the implementation of software in all manner of aspects of their own businesses. And yet don’t recognise that same need. So, it strikes me that, you know, enterprise software needs an implementation package. It just comes with the territory. You…I don’t think anyone could imagine that you’d install SAP, and then everyone just walks off and someone flicks the switch and it works. It just doesn’t work that way. And yet what I’m hearing, Elena, is that’s exactly how it’s expected to work in agtech. That will just pay for the software or the kit. And over to you to fill in the gaps.
EK: Well, the funding programs that I have seen, generally, are like funding the technology alone. So, this is something that I think is a bit of a gap. So, there may be situations where the startups themselves can bundle a certain amount of support into the price of the technology subscription. The problem in that situation is that it means that the only support being provided is by the technology provider. So, it’s not neutral support…is technology agnostic. So, there’s no way for farmers to get funding for neutral advice from the kind of digital agronomist person who would be able to evaluate competing technologies to provide unbiased advice about what’s actually best for their situation. If you only paid for the technology part of enterprise software then, like SAP and Salesforce, etcetera, would bundle the cost of their consulting services with the subscription fee. But when you talk to a SAP or Salesforce consultant, they would only sell you SAP or Salesforce. And you wouldn’t even consider any of the other alternatives. Whereas if you are actually…
CB: Quite reasonably so. So, whilst so part of this is about ensuring that the product provider more appropriately costs the offering to ensure that there is a service component, even though it’s obviously shackled to the product that they’ve sold, at least there is some form of support, rather than chucking it over the fence and hoping that it hangs together. But I think the contention that’s being made here, Elena is, but there’s no there is no independent digital agronomy or digital support that’s available. So, there is no pre-purchase support. How does one support a producer to make the best choice of an agtech solution? What has to happen at the moment, is you have to hope that they pick the right one. And/or, if it’s not quite right, there’s enough support and enough resource in the system to fix it.
EK: Yeah, or at least there’s no funding available for that pre-purchase support.
CB: Yeah, there’s no funding.
EK: So, yeah, a farmer who may be a bit skeptical about technology in the first place and may not want to spend their own money, or they may just not have the cash to be able to invest. If they’re looking to implement some kind of agtech solution using government funding for the technology, they would likely just go for the technology, based on their own decision making, without having to, without having the budget for that kind of independent advice.
CB: Where have you seen success with agtech? Have there been any examples that you’ve come across in Gippsland or elsewhere where you’ve seen it all hang together really nicely. From, you know, noting that you’re a digital native, so you know how to do product delivery in digital. This is the thing that you know, you’re exceptionally well-versed in, h Have you seen it done well and successfully in your region?
EK: Well, one example, and this is not a Gippsland based one, but it’s one from northeast Victoria. This is an example that I think, there’s a range of reasons this one’s been successful. So, the founder actually is living regionally and was solving a problem that he was hearing about day-to-day from farmers around him and applying his own past experience to solving this problem. So, the startup is called Invest in Your Farmer. And basically, what it does is, it allows people to invest in agricultural production. For example, if a farmer has a batch of oysters that are just getting started, so the farmer won’t actually get paid for those, like in a typical setting, the farmer won’t get paid for those until the oysters are fully grown and they can actually sell the oysters and at that point get paid. First of all, it’s, it means that the farmer bears all the risk. But secondly, it means that all of the farmer’s cash is tied up in in the oysters while they’re growing. Or the cattle or the sheep or whatever, or the vegetables or whatever product they produce that they’re producing. So, Invest in Your Farmer let’s basically, any person out there, invest small amounts in farming produce at an early stage and then share in the profits towards the end. So, it means the farmer benefits from greatly improved cash flow and also improved stability and basically not having to bear all of the costs of producing the product. The investors benefit from both supporting farmers in their local area, and in a lot of cases, that actually ends up being like, a very effective investment.
CB: Yeah. So, it’s a working capital solution.
EK: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So, the founder. Yeah, it was from…
CB: Yeah. It’s a sheep timeshare.
EK: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So, the farmer was from a financial services background so he could see the, like, working capital challenges of farmers when he moved out into a regional area. And basically, by speaking to farmers, he found that that they would be interested in this kind of model to improve their working capital. And at the same time, there were people locally who were interested in supporting their local farming community and making small investments in local businesses, but they had no vehicle by which to do so. So, so yeah.
CB: The pathway to use free cash flow from others to invest in the working capital of the local producers. So, everything…Yeah. Yeah. So a nice coming together of community resources to support community and local production.
EK: Yeah.
CB: Excellent. No. Nice example. And it’s okay, it comes from northeast Victoria.
EK: Yeah that’s. Yeah, that one. Some of the like success factors there. First of all, the founder actually was living in a regional area speaking to farmers on a regular basis within his own community. So that helped him to really deeply understand the problem that was happening there. And he had the background in finance to be able to design an effective solution. So financial services obviously quite a complex and highly regulated field. But it was the field that he knew well.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, they are entirely reasonable criteria for success that you know your field, you are technically very competent and that you are regionally based. So in delivering, you know, we go back to some of the, you know, the contention that, well, most agtech found…, you know, or over 50% have never been on a farm. Well, you know, you’re in that bit of the Venn diagram, well you’ve been on a farm or and you’re technically competent, that puts you in that little wedge that we were talking about earlier.
EK: Exactly.
CB: And that, that’s the the heating zone for success, one could argue. Not everyone in there will be successful, but the probability of being successful and not starting in there is probably really, really low. That’s a great example and really good to explore the conditions for success which formed around Invest in Your Farmer. Elena, I’m interested as we draw to a close, in some of your broader learnings or final thoughts on, you know, regional innovation and, you know, regional ecosystems. I guess we bundle that up under the banner of Tech Transfer. But interested in your sort of final thoughts on and observations on the journey you’ve been on?
EK: So, when I when I first left Google and moved to Gippsland to try to grow regional startup ecosystems, some of my reasons for doing that was because I could see that the barrier to being remote was becoming smaller and smaller over time.And I think that accelerated even more with COVID, with everybody learning how to use Zoom, learning how to connect remotely. And I would say there’s never been a better time in history to start a global startup in a regional area. I do actually think that that over time that that barrier will continue to decrease further. There’s still at least some cultural barriers and particularly those barriers around lack of local communitiesin regional areas that you can’t be what you can’t see effect. All of those barriers will continue to decrease as just more global tech companies do end up being founded in regional areas, and people do start to see people within their community who are working on these kinds of projects. So, I think for anybody out there who is in the very early stages of thinking about starting a startup, and especially if you’re thinking of starting something in agtech, I would say actually regional areas are the place to be right now.
CB: Elena, thank you very much for joining us today on Tech Transfer Talk. It’s been great, really taking a strong regional focus. And whilst a lot of our conversation has been understandably about Gippsland, I do think a lot of the things that you’ve said will apply to a lot of regions, not only around Australia but elsewhere around the world. So, Elena, thanks very much for your time today.
EK: Thanks, Cameron.