Jack Flintoft

Being back in Australia, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet founders and students tackling important (and oftentimes, crazy) problems. But the startup ecosystem here feels structurally different from the U.S.

Capital flows are slower, and there’s less social permission to chase moonshots (someone told me that they’d “feel bad” competing against an incumbent company here). Yes – Australia has serious talent and even deeper technical expertise, but most of the funding historically has flowed to founders who’ve spent years in their respective industries. 

But the best founders aren’t always insiders.

Great founders don’t just respond to an industry’s constraints, they shift the tectonics underneath the industry to suit a new paradigm. Doing so, they actually create *new* markets that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. That shift sometimes needs an outside lens.

If Travis and Garrett had been cab drivers before Uber, they probably would’ve built a dispatching software tool for taxi cab drivers. But they were outsiders to the industry. And so they built something that expanded, rather than cannibalized, the category entirely – moving from regulated taxi licenses to elastic labor supply. Uber therefore grew the taxi supply share (since it expanded the supply of people who could drive). That’s how you end up with a $190B+ company.

It’s not just Uber though, you’ll see this pattern across iconic companies:

• If Brian and Joe had backgrounds in real estate or hotels, Airbnb might have tried to optimize hotel bookings or build a better hotel chain. Instead, they turned unused living spaces into bookable accommodations, opening up a vast new supply of places to stay and creating a peer-to-peer lodging market that didn’t exist before.
• Figma likewise wasn’t built by Adobe alums – Dylan reimagined design collaboration as a multiplayer game and moved the whole thing into the browser (and in the process, opened up design to even more of the masses).

And yet, when evaluating startups, so many people reach for lazy proxies or “filters”. Have they worked at X company? Studied at Z school? Been deep in Y industry?

It’s not really that these signals are useless (recruiters rely on them for a reason) – they’re just often orthogonal to what matters.

What matters isn’t what the founder has necessarily done (or how long they’ve been inside the industry) – it’s what they question.

That’s not to say you don’t need to intimately know and understand the space you’re building in. But that you also need distance. You need the kind of lens that lets you see the rules – and ask why they exist in the first place.

There’s this old interview from 2000 where Larry Page (co-founder of Google) is asked what the future of Google looks like, to which he prophesizes:

“The ultimate search engine would understand everything on the web. It would know exactly what you wanted, and give you the right thing. That is obviously AI.”

This was 25 (!!) years ago. He wasn’t describing what was – he was describing what could be.

The best founders – like Larry – don’t build within the lines. They redraw them, and then make you wonder why they were ever there at all.