The real reason Australia can’t replicate Silicon Valley
Australia’s tech ambitions won’t be realised by copying Silicon Valley’s locations, but by adopting its culture of risk-taking, speed and first-principles thinking, writes ACM CRC Luke Preston.
Orange, Parramatta and Sydney in NSW. Geelong, Cremorne and the Southeast Melbourne region in Victoria. Logan and the Gold Coast in Queensland.
These aren’t the only ones, but are just some of the places in Australia which have been called our answer to the mythical American high-tech hub, or a potential answer, but for a few missing ingredients.
I had the privilege of working at Tesla Motors in Fremont, a part of SV where the EV maker used to be headquartered. Fremont is the current hub for manufacturing the Model S, Model 3, Model X, and Model Y, and will be the main venue for building the company’s planned humanoid robots.
I can confidently say that no Australian location for tech dreamers and doers has much in common with the Valley, as much as some people would like to claim so for a media release or some other grab at investment attraction or prestige.
To me, it comes down to attitude more than anything else. We often miss the point when we talk about American tech heavyweights, particularly those in a certain part of Northern California.
And after working at a number of Australian manufacturing companies as well as Tesla, the biggest difference I’ve noticed is around culture.
In my experience, the manufacturing culture in Australia could do with more first-principles thinking and agency.
The willingness (and licence) to go and solve one’s problems with speed and accountability is a huge benefit to a young or established company.
The way here can be bureaucratic, with some favouring layers of approval and shying from potential consequences, happy to blame somebody else because a wrong decision might be made.
I will always remember a time during my first year at Tesla, sitting at lunch with my boss. I mentioned an automation cell that I reckoned could be fixed for about a million bucks, upping productivity and safety on a fairly hazardous part of the line.
My boss said, ‘Alright, come to this meeting at 1 o’clock.’ I walked into the meeting, my boss asked me to pitch my idea to a fellow (who I later found out was the CFO), and the fellow said, ‘Done, approved’.
I spent six months on it, and my boss checked in on progress only three times. I had seven projects in my first nine months.
I don’t think it’s impossible for an Australian company to develop a culture like that, but it would go against the grain.
When I think of the attitude we could use more of, I think of the famous Steve Jobs quote: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
It’s not like we can’t produce talented technical people in Australia. Our fundamental researchers are celebrated, and rightly so. And at Tesla, Aussies were respected enough to make up a fifth of the engineering team by the time I headed back home.
Again, I will say that Australians often miss the point when we bring up Silicon Valley, that wellspring of so much tech progress and value creation.
We can’t hope to have its wealth levels, density of large, established companies, access to venture capital and other networks, or history. But what we can adopt from it, a willingness to accept risk and have a go, costs nothing.
I celebrate learning for its own sake, inside or outside of a university. That said, dropping out of a degree, sometimes fetishised by the US tech industry, is a perfectly valid choice, particularly if you’ve got an idea with commercial potential.
As evidence, I’ll cite one of Australia’s recent “unicorns” (a startup worth a billion dollars or more, and a term borrowed from across the Pacific).
Cut Through Venture Quarterly Q1 2026 Australian Startup Funding Report, released last month, identifies three new local unicorns. (Pleasingly, for a manufacturing and physical AI enthusiast, each is “deeply embedded in physical-world systems, marking a departure from earlier Australian unicorns that were largely defined by SaaS and fintech”. But I digress.)
One is Advanced Navigation, whose co-founder Xavier Orr dropped out of PhD research on neural networks. He had invented an algorithm that showed improvements over a technique invented in the 1960s, which is widely used for navigation system accuracy.
The company was established in 2012, soon became profitable, manufactures its electronics in Australia, and is now well along in its mission “to be the catalyst of the autonomy revolution”. Some of its customers include NASA, Boeing, and even Tesla.
We should celebrate this and other stories where an Australian took a punt, signed up for vast amounts of risk, and made it. There are other examples, and they’re perhaps more useful than wishing we were – or might soon be – something we aren’t.
I’d argue that Australian manufacturers and other tech companies need to find their own way, but if we’re going to look to Silicon Valley, we should do it with the right eyes.
This article originally appeared at SmartCompany on May 6. You can view the original version here.
