For those who thrive off social interactions, there’s the Churchill Club, a community of technologists, entrepreneurs and innovators that meets in North Melbourne.
Club members get to network with seasoned entrepreneurs and technologists in Melbourne, connect directly with other members online, and discover emerging technology opportunities.
There’s also Lean Startup Melbourne, Melbourne Jelly, Melbourne Nightowls, Melbourne Silicon Beach and Melbourne Startup.
The various universities in Melbourne have a strong entrepreneurial focus, namely RMIT and Swinburne, the latter of which is home to the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship.
While Melbourne is proving to be an ideal launchpad for entrepreneurs, they continue to look overseas to take their business ventures further.
For example, Melbourne entrepreneurs Rob Ward and Chris Peters have been making headlines with their iPhone-related products, the Opena Case and the Quad Lock.
While Ward and Peters have no qualms with Melbourne’s start-up scene, they felt compelled to travel to the United States in order to do a deal with a distributor.
“The best move we made was traveling to the US for CES 2012 as we were able to meet face to face with distributors, and ascertain their size and reach in the market,” Ward told StartupSmart.
“Being an online business, many meetings and general business dealings have been conducted over Skype.”
“But our time in the US made it clear to us that meeting face to face is still a very important part of doing business internationally.”
The CBD and neighbouring suburb Richmond are the respective homes of the York Butter Factory and Inspire9, which are “without a doubt” Melbourne’s start-up hubs, according to Birt.
“These two co-working spaces are the home of so many important events like AngelCube, Startup Weekend, the Sensis API competition [and] Ruby on Rails,” he says.
