Creating a STIRR

It’s a warm Tuesday night in December, and in the inner-Sydney suburb of Ultimo around 120 of Australia‘s most prominent new internet entrepreneurs and investors have gathered to share ideas and hopefully stimulate business development. But this isn’t any ordinary mixer. This is STIRR Sydney, an Australian take on the successful US-based mixer event.

Within 60 seconds of walking in (about half an hour late) I’ve been seconded into one of six groups taking part in a session called Half-baked. It’s a great idea – a fictitious company name is assigned to each group, whose task then is to determine what the company does, what its elevator pitch is, what its marketing plan will be, and what its revenue model looks like.

My group is given the company name MidgetGame. Several somewhat politically-incorrect ideas are thrown around before the idea begins to coalesce – a ‘midget’ in this case is a mobile software widget – for our purposes a mobile representation of the user, which can be used to play various games on a mobile phone.

The tag line? Something along the lines of a Mobile Mini-Me. The marketing plan? Word of mouth, as players sign up their friends so they can battle each other in multi-player games. And the revenue model? Most likely a subscription model.

Within about five minutes the basis of the company is down on paper, and we’re ready to present.

In the end, MidgetGame came second to ShoeWave – some kind of online marketplace for trading the solo socks that inevitably find a home in your underwear drawer. Mind you, the ShoeWave team featured among its members Mike Cannon-Brookes, one of the founders of the internet software company Atlassian, who was recently named Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young.

After the completion of the Half-baked session, four companies – Remember The Milk, Quotify, Studentface and bluepulse – were invited to get up and give a one minute pitch of their business to an audience of fellow entrepreneurs, investors and high net-worth individuals. Each of the attendees was handed fake VC money (emblazoned with the face of the Podcast Network’s co-founder Cameron Reilly), which they could invest in the company of their choosing. The company that scored the greatest investment – Remember The Milk – took home a $5,000 subscription to the Microsoft Developer Network.

Many of the people at STIRR class themselves as web 2.0 – a difficult term to define that has become the catch-all for a bunch of internet-based business models that rely just as heavily on new web tools and technologies as they do on understanding the psychology of their users. Some are media oriented, some lean towards commerce, some improve productivity and others are mostly social in their function, but they all push the boundaries of what has been possible online before.

The idea of bringing STIRR to Australia was the brainchild of Martin Wells, founder of the online software company Tangler, who had previously attended some of the STIRR mixer events in the Silicon Valley suburb of Palo Alto. Wells says he had been impressed with STIRR’s entrepreneurial focus, getting as many start-ups as possible talking to each other and bringing together other companies that service them. Sponsors for the night included the investor companies Technology Venture Partners and Neo Technology Ventures, along with Atlassian and Tangler, which itself is building a platform that is all about creating and uniting groups.

Knowing that Australians are chronically bad networkers, the Half-baked idea was introduced to get people who didn’t know each other talking early on. The overall goal is to gather a large number of people to learn and get excited about what each other are doing in a fairly light-hearted but beneficial way.

There are literally dozens of these events on in the US in any given month, from regular mixers like STIRR through to one-day seminars and the semi-regular BarCamp events happening all around the world. At its core, web 2.0 is all about social networking – harnessing the power of connections to create opportunities and build companies greater than the sum of their parts.

What STIRR Sydney (and hopefully the other events to follow) proved is that internet entrepreneurship is alive and well in Australia, and that with the right stimulus we really can network with the best of them, both online and off.

Brad Howarth is a journalist and the author of ‘Innovation and the Emerging Markets: Where the Next Bulls Will Run’, a study on the challenges facing small Australian technology companies.

You can read his blog at lagrangepoint.typepad.com