That Startup Show starts up

I am quickly coming back to my earlier post about Reactive working together with start ups. Now everyone can inhale a whiff of modern entrepreneurialism by watching the live YouTube project ‘That StartUp Show”. It kicked off in a pub-come-studio in Melbourne, which is by no means a statement on the city’s tech-edge over Sydney. Yet judging from how many times Fed Square, Flinders Street and downtown Melbourne were pushed in the interstitials (hello sponsor City of Melbourne) they kind of think it is. But being from the Emerald if not yet Silicon City, we’ll let that slide. So please watch the first episode down below.

Picking strong cues from ‘The Gruen Transfer‘ and a sprinkling of ‘The Dragon’s Den‘, it pairs stand up comedy with a bar-camp like crowd and light-hearted yet informative chat with founders, journos and (dare I say it) online gurus. I think the wild dancing sequence in the beginning of the show was a bit ill conceived. But keep on watching, the shows gets much better afterwards, decidedly more professional than lo-fi channels like Silicon Beach Santa Monica.

Thanks to host Dan Illic pounding on comic opportunities, we heard catchy lines like “St.Kilda is Sim City for Perverts” (take that, sponsor!) and “Google Plus is the Adelaide of social media“(take that, Google!). Guest and Google Australia’s engineering director Alan Noble just had to grin and bear it.

More entertainment came from Dan re-combining 2 random expressions to create start up ideas: Pinterest for Babies, SnapChat for Kebab lovers and Procrastination Tool for Bored People (‘That’s Facebook!”). Other guests included the founder of (show sponsor) Blue Chilli, Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin. Start up incubator Blue Chilli is actually a place I have spoken at a while ago during one of their ‘Pizza and Beer’ weekly wind downs.

While incubators like Blue Chilli and Muru-D don’t really rival our own agency offering, they do sometimes provide or connect to UI/UX and development resources. This is another sign of our two worlds overlapping In my view it’s for the greater good of creative ideas and speed of innovation in Australia. But maybe you disagree, what experiences have you made at the intersection of agency- and start up land?

Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin sitting in the middle