Mike Nicholls, partner at Main Sequence Ventures, said creating hardware and physical goods can be more difficult for Australian companies because, as a relatively small market, local companies needed to export globally by default. He said the biggest results tended to be concentrated around government policy and grant money, but that didn’t mean there weren’t success stories.

“There’s more capital here than there was before, there are more people watching companies here, I think there are more high growth companies. [Afterpay] is a super bright spot in the ecosystem, but I think overall the whole sector’s going really well,” he said.

“There’s a strong desire to push in the direction of manufacturing. For hardware there are some real challenges, especially with supply chain logistics, but there are some really interesting companies coming out of Australia in hardware.”

Mr Nicholls pointed to examples including Morse Micro, which has created a low-power Wi-Fi chip with a one kilometre range, and Baraja, which has invented a new form of LiDAR to give vision to autonomous cars.

Ms Williams said that the main barriers to Australia becoming a tech nation were friction and apathy, where public policy and investment were not aligned with public interest. Issues such as climate change could become huge opportunities for example, with tech solutions to reduce emissions or improve ocean health.

“As a nation we have to focus in and go hard on some of the challenges we’re facing, that are also global challenges, and say there’s a market opportunity for solutions. What are the unseen needs and seen needs that we have, and how might we be a nation of people that solve them?,” she said.

“[In the pandemic] we have seen that when policy, public interest, and funds align, we can actually move mountains in very short periods. The race for a vaccine accelerated not because science moved faster but because there was no friction. But we don’t need a pandemic or a burning platform to unleash that potential.”

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