Entrepreneurial Journeys Start Early at UNSW

Following the lead of companies like Atlassian, innovative, tech driven businesses are increasingly finding a home in Sydney and while the start-up ecosystem is very diverse, many founders will have one thing in common; time spent at the University of New South Wales.

Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar came up with the idea for Atlassian while attending UNSW and launched the collaboration and efficiency software business straight after graduating. Cannon-Brookes is an adjunct professor at his alma mater now and a leading light in the entrepreneurial, techy community that has grown up around the uni; a rich resource that students at any stage of their education are encouraged to interact with.

The university has been turning out successful businesses at pace, with 105 VC funded founders per 100,000 graduates over the past 10 years, UNSW has the highest raw number of graduate founders who have attracted VC funding – 143 in the past decade.

Earlier this year, UNSW alumni took out more than a quarter of The Australian’s Top 100 Innovators, Airtasker co-founder and CEO Tim Fung and Afterpay co-founder and co-CEO Anthony Eisen both attended UNSW.

Some more conspicuous achievements; PitchBook's annual university rankings placed UNSW as number one in Australian universities for total capital raised. UNSW start-ups have attracted $5.6 billion in capital, Rocket Internet led the field with $1.1 billion, Xendit won $535 million, followed by Rokt with $487 million.

Increasingly, students enrolling at the university are indicating that becoming an entrepreneur is the pathway that they would like to follow.

“One of the things we’ve noticed is the percentage of students that arrive at the university interested in entrepreneurship. It has gone up remarkably,” says Director of Entrepreneurship at UNSW Founders, David Burt. “In the last five years students saying that they’re interested in entrepreneurship has gone from three or four per cent to 20 per cent.”

“In terms of why, we are bombarded with messages about Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, the entrepreneurs of this generation are celebrities, more so than the successful entrepreneurs of past generations,” Burt says.

An entrepreneurial pathway can start as early or as late as a student wants, the support for innovative ideas and commercialisation of them is available to all students at UNSW.

“The tools available, especially for younger people, to build companies have never been more accessible, it has never been easier to start your own company,” Burt says.

The university helps students who are interested in launching a business by stoking their curiosity, giving them appropriate skills and helping them understand the nature of the transition from secondary education to tertiary education.

Compared to a high schooler, a uni student has a lot more agency and control over what they are learning and how they are learning it, that comes with accountability, “We’re not going to hold your hand. There is a phase or a stage change between secondary student to tertiary student,” Burt says.

UNSW is long on design thinking, instilling the ability to conduct problem discovery and the ability to talk to people, which leads to a capacity to research through conversational interviewing.

A key skill given to students is pitching, “It is very different to communicating, I think most schools do a very good job in teaching communication skills, how to make a presentation. But how to pitch a business idea is a very specific type of communication and in our experience it’s not something secondary school students typically show up with.”

The vast majority of entrepreneurship support is extra-curricular and free, students don’t have to sign up to a particular degree or course to access it. The team that Burt runs does some teaching but most of its activity is around practical, applied learning.

“It’s almost vocational in nature, and it starts from whenever they want it to, students can begin on day one if they want,” he says.

But the biggest advantage that the entrepreneurship movement at the university enjoys is the community of successful alumni and motivated students UNSW has supported and encouraged to grow. There is a team dedicated to curating that community, which helps about 10,000 people a year to make contacts and launch and run businesses.

Burt says the entrepreneurship team is there to support anyone with an affiliation to the university and connect them to resources or past students who might have relevant experience, “There are hundreds of alumni in our community who are helping us and are excited to mentor the next generation.”

Given the pace of technological development, the ability to identify business opportunities and act upon them is one skill that should remain resistant to change.

Burt feels that schools can play a role in the making of the next crop of entrepreneurs by informing students that there is another pathway they might follow outside of pursuing one of the professions.

“The best thing that schools can do is to help students understand that being and entrepreneur is a career choice. Just like one can choose to be a doctor or an engineer or an accountant or a nurse, one can choose to be an entrepreneur.

“It's a much less defined pathway, it comes with a lot more ambiguity and a lot more risk, but it comes with the potential to be your own boss, and it comes with a potential financial upside.

“So, when schools are in conversation with students about their economic futures or professional future post-secondary school, I think helping people understand that there is a thing called an entrepreneur is useful, you start and grow companies, and it is an option open to them.

“If they would like to try it, the advantage of coming to UNSW is that you could do a science degree and also learn about entrepreneurship, you could do an engineering degree and learn about entrepreneurship. We have students from every single faculty and course taking our programs because we’re opt in, no one is required to do it, we’re there as extra support for anyone who would like to have that type of skill set.”

For more information about UNSW Founders, click here.