What entrepreneurship actually means

Rob: G'day, and welcome to the National Virtual Expo. My name is Rob, your host for today's session on entrepreneurship and how you can get involved in it at university. I want to pay my respects to the traditional custodians of this land. If I look at entrepreneurship, this is one of the key skills for the future because technology is changing everything. We've had a lot of sessions at this virtual expo about AI and how it's impacting the workforce, things you need to know in terms of your potential career. But in the end, all business, all work in some way is human to human, and the core skills you gain by being an entrepreneur are some of those core human-to-human skills.

Rob: My guest today is Sam Brew from the University of New South Wales. He is the chief student entrepreneur -- how's that for a title? We're going to be talking about getting involved in entrepreneurship activities in general, as well as how you might do that at university. Now, before you switch off and say, "I don't want to run my own business" -- entrepreneurship doesn't have to be just about starting up your own business. The whole mindset is about how you run projects, how you build something new. And you can do that even if you're working inside another company. Really excited for this session. Sam Brew, welcome to the National Virtual Expo.

Guest: Thank you very much, Rob. Lovely to be here.

Rob: Super excited to be getting into your experiences at UNSW on the entrepreneurship side of things. Before we get to what it's like being involved in an entrepreneurship ecosystem at a uni, tell me a little bit about you and what you've been building.

Guest: Sure thing. So I'm Sam, I'm a fourth-year student studying maths and economics at UNSW in Sydney. I started to get involved in the entrepreneurship side of things on literally my first day of orientation. I went to a random app-building workshop that UNSW Founders -- the entrepreneurship arm -- was running, did that session, got interested, and kept working with them. Kept going to events. And now I practically live here. What I'm building is a cybersecurity startup. We do end-to-end data encryption and security, mostly focused around large enterprises and government. I've been building that for about two and a half years now, ramping up much more in the last year or so. Two days ago, I just got back from a trip to the US.

Rob: Wow. Yeah, that's crazy. You're not even finished uni and you're already building this thing that's taking you overseas.

Guest: There have been extraordinary opportunities that I've been afforded through UNSW, which have been wonderful.

Rob: Super cool. So, somebody who's watching this might be a high school student who doesn't know what entrepreneurship is, or maybe they kind of know it's about building a business of some sort but doesn't know much more than that. Can you help put some meat on the bones of what entrepreneurship actually is? And then maybe we can get into what that looks like at uni.

Guest: Sure thing. Defining entrepreneurship is always a tricky one. In most of your life -- in high school, in university -- you're mostly being given problems and you're coming up with solutions to them. And that continues throughout most of your career. In entrepreneurship, you're the one finding the questions, you're the one finding the problems, and then you're building solutions for them. The classic example is someone like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs finds a problem, starts building a company, then becomes massive. But most of entrepreneurship is much, much smaller scale than that. It can happen at a tiny community level. It can be really anything where you're finding a problem, thinking, "This problem should be solved, and I think I can solve it," and then building some kind of solution. As an example, I would use this exact expo. You've seen a problem of high school students and related communities not necessarily having all the information they could around choosing their uni, and you've created this as a solution. So I would absolutely call you an entrepreneur in that context.

Rob: It's interesting, isn't it? I've been running my own businesses for nearly 20 years, and it took me a long time to see myself as an entrepreneur. I was like, "No, no, I just want to solve this problem, I want to start something and create something." I thought it was much more about creation. And it's only about five years ago that I actually thought, "Okay, now I'm a proper entrepreneur." Which is interesting.

Entrepreneurship inside organisations, not just startups

Rob: Some people might not realise that entrepreneurship can also happen inside an organisation.

Guest: Absolutely. Some people call this intrapreneurship -- whether you like that term is another question. But in terms of finding a problem within a company, and then rather than going off and starting something completely new, instead staying within that company and building a solution there. A more relatable example might be university societies or high school clubs. You're staying within the system, you're seeing a problem, and you're building a solution to it. I'll use UNSW as an example: the Computer Science Society here built a class scheduling platform, which later ended up inspiring the much larger class scheduling system that UNSW now actually uses. So that would be an example of intrapreneurship within an organisation. But that fundamental ethos of seeing a problem and then building some kind of solution to it is the core of entrepreneurship, I think.

Rob: I was recently at the University of New England, and they were talking about how AI is going to impact learning at university in a massive way. What they've actually done is spun that work out into its own company. It's still owned by the university, still supported by the university, but it's been given the autonomy to build and create separately. So it's still within the bigger framework, but it's a tiny little bubble with more flexibility.

Guest: Absolutely. You need a lot more flexibility to move fast and innovate. Inside big, existing companies, that kind of innovation can get strangled off. Exactly that kind of innovation.

How Sam found the problem he wanted to solve

Rob: Your story -- how did you find the problem that you wanted to solve?

Guest: My story on that one is probably a bit of an outlier. When I talk about founders, I'm talking about people who have started a company, a startup. There are a lot of founders who see a problem through their work or through their own experience. For me, I sort of got obsessed with cybersecurity and logging systems during high school and kept playing with the tech. Because I'd been coding for a long time, I got really interested in that side of things and built it into a couple of hobby projects. And then when I came into contact with UNSW Founders for the first time, I started to realise this could be something I could turn into a business. The exact problem we're working on today is quite different from the problem we were working on two years ago. I started this as a document security platform. Today we do much more work with sensor feeds, with drone feeds. Similar technology, but a very different use case.

Guest: In an ideal world, you start with a problem and then you build the solution. In my case, it was more that my obsession was around the solution, and then I saw the application of that to a specific problem. And that evolved through talking with customers, through trying to get people to trial the tech. There was one really memorable instance where I was talking with a woman connected to the Australian government about using this for document security, and she wasn't really getting it. Toward the end of the meeting she said, "Could you do anything with drone feeds?" And I subsequently spent the next six months doing virtually everything with drone feeds. And she was absolutely right. It's those sorts of spontaneous interactions where you start to work out what people want, because you're not inside their head. You have to go and talk to them. There's a notable pipeline at universities like UNSW -- you have academics who spend their whole lives doing research, and then if they ever try to commercialise that research, they suddenly have to talk to people and they go from introverts to extroverts very, very quickly. The way I found my problem was very much by talking to people and iterating gradually.

Rob: So true. That's one of the things most people don't realise about starting a business or becoming an entrepreneur: you start with this thing in mind, thinking "I'm going to solve this problem," and 99 times out of a hundred, what you end up building and where the real engagement is, is something completely different. And that's where this key skill of being an entrepreneur comes in -- the ability to adapt, to look at the data, look at what's working and what's not, and sometimes make the very hard call of saying, "I've done all this work over here, and I now have to put 80% of that in the bin in order to pursue the actual opportunity." Have you come across that?

Guest: Oh, absolutely. I remember we worked with a healthcare company for about four months and built a whole bespoke solution for them. And then at the end of the day, they couldn't get buy-in from their technical team to actually implement it. So it was sort of like, okay, well, that's four months of work down the drain. But you live and learn. There are certainly things I should have done differently at the start. You learn that through a very organic process. I think you also can't really be taught entrepreneurship -- it's very much something that you work out as you go, because everyone's working on different problems. You're inherently doing something that hasn't been done before. So there are general principles, but you work a lot of it out as you go. And that's often where so much of the value is, because you are training that skill of adaptability, of resilience, of being able to see a failure and find a success in that by learning from it. That probably defines about 99% of an entrepreneur's journey before you actually stumble on something that works.

Rob: I think the real key is that people have got to get more comfortable with failing. And once you see life in those terms -- that you start something, you fail at something, and that actually gives you the learning about what didn't work, which points you in the right direction -- more of us need to do it more often. That's my honest view.

Guest: Absolutely. When you're brought up in a system where you're given a question and it has one answer, you inherently see failure as "I didn't get the answer." But when you don't know what the question is, when you don't necessarily understand your customer, when your customer doesn't even understand their own problem, then it takes a long time to work out what people actually want and what you should be building. There's a quote from Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." And of course, he invented the Model T. So you absolutely need failure to guide you in the right direction, because otherwise you don't have a north star. Your north star comes from talking to people and from knowing what didn't work -- okay, that direction there's a cliff, so I need to be going in that direction instead.

Sam's journey through UNSW's entrepreneurship ecosystem

Rob: Let's hone in on the experience at university. I'll say straight up front, ladies and gentlemen, UNSW is the number one institution in the country when it comes to entrepreneurship. That's not just me saying it -- it's what the data says, it's what rankings show, and it's what the awards reflect. And while we use UNSW as an example, entrepreneurship programs and some element of what we'll talk about exist in some form at most universities. So, Sam, what sort of things have you been involved in, and what skills have you gotten out of that?

Guest: Certainly. As I said, I started my interaction with UNSW Founders -- the entrepreneurship arm at UNSW -- on literally my first day of orientation week. I went to this random event I saw advertised and realised, "Okay, these people are doing something I'm interested in." Kept working with them and went through a number of workshops. UNSW Founders runs sort of three stages: Curiosity, then Idea, and then Startup. I was around a lot of Curiosity workshops on things like tech skills, entrepreneurial mindset, and using different AI tools.

Guest: We also run a really superb programme at UNSW called Coaching Connect -- and some other universities have forms of this as well -- where any student, staff member, or alumni (so after you graduate you still have access to this) can book a free 30-minute coaching session with any of now about 40 mentors who all have experience in and around startups. Many of them have built startups and sold them. I booked a mentoring session with a bloke who would later be my mentor for the next two years. He was exceptional -- very understanding of what I'd already done, what I'd built, what I was interested in, and the fact that I was still studying.

Guest: I eventually did a Startup Year boot camp, which was a programme where we were doing a sort of postgraduate diploma in entrepreneurship, building a startup over the course of a master's degree. I got to do the boot camp for that even though I was still only a first-year undergrad. I met a bloke there who was then running a similar boot camp the following year, more focused on selling to government and commercialising in and around defence. I had a chat with him, went to that, met some people through that. And it really snowballed from there. There's no set syllabus. There's no "you do this, then you do this." Everyone's pathway is very, very unique. I think the best entrepreneurial support programmes provide a wealth of opportunities that you can choose from at the right moment.

Guest: For me, my first year was very much a time when I was exploring uni, working out what I was doing, and deciding in more detail the problem I wanted to solve. That started to crystallise much more in my second year. I then did something called the Peter Farrow Cup, which is the UNSW student pitch competition. We came second in that, which was amazing. And then, at the end of my third year, I did the Founders accelerator. Some universities have this -- at UNSW it sits at the very top of the whole entrepreneurial support programme. They take in a few startups every year, usually run by alumni, some by students and some by staff, and those startups get an injection of cash -- actual investment -- and then a 12-week mentoring programme. At the end of that, I got to pitch to some amazing people, mostly around government and defence. Since then, I've gotten to pitch at Parliament House in Canberra and I've gotten to go to the US twice. It's been really extraordinary.

Guest: And again, there's no set progression by any means. I have friends working on solar panel recycling technology who have gone to China six times in the last six months. Everyone's path is very different. At the end of the day, what a university can provide is connections to people doing interesting things, connections to faculty working on similar problems, and effectively a way of concentrating talent. Just last week I was at Stanford University in the US, and this is exactly what they do as well. Fundamentally, at the very best, what you're doing is concentrating talent. You're putting interesting people doing interesting things in a room together. You talk, and amazing things happen from there. That's really all you can ask for, and that's all you need to do really extraordinary things.

Soft skills, adaptability, and who entrepreneurship is really for

Rob: That's amazing. I think some of the things you've highlighted in your journey -- the networking opportunities, the soft skills to be able to present, to pitch an idea, to persuade, to negotiate, the resilience, the opportunity to travel -- these are amazing skills that regardless of what you study, whether it's engineering, IT, nursing, education, or humanities, I personally believe they're the core skills for the future.

Guest: Absolutely. It is shocking how little of my degree has been immediately relevant to what I do today. It certainly comes in handy, but very often it's almost a slightly separate part of what I do. The biggest value in university for me has very much been that talent concentration -- the connections, meeting extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. What I learn in terms of hard skills in the courses I study is relevant at times and not relevant at others. But it's exactly what you're saying: it's the soft skills, it's resilience, it's networking. It's learning how to have a conversation with someone, work out what they want, and try to convince them of what you want at the same time. It's the opportunity to travel. And I think everyone builds those skills over time, whatever they choose to do.

Guest: There are a lot of academics who go through a PhD, spend 10 or 15 years researching, and are fantastic at what they do but terrible at talking to people. And then if they ever try to commercialise their research, they have to learn that skill really, really quickly. A lot of people who know me now would describe me as a fairly confident person. That was not true at all a few years ago. All of this is learned. Being involved in startups and entrepreneurship is kind of a crash course in a lot of those skills because you have to learn them very quickly -- and you do.

Guest: And it's not for everyone, and that's fine. Some people love running a company. Some people want to be involved in a company someone else is running. Some people just want to be on the periphery. All of that is fantastic and you will learn incredible skills no matter what. I think the most important thing is to trust your gut, because there is no defined pathway and inherently you'll work things out as you go. If there's one skill I've learned above all else, it's to be intuitive with all of this.

Rob: I love that. As you're talking, I'm thinking about famous entrepreneurs like Melanie Perkins, Mike Cannon-Brookes, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg. These people are often held up as "that's what an entrepreneur is." But the reality is that even in those extraordinarily successful big companies, the person who was second through the door, fifth through the door, or tenth through the door -- the engineer who was basically locked in a room and hates talking to people -- that person is still very much at the coalface of entrepreneurship. You don't have to be the face that's out there pitching. There's a role for everybody in these ecosystems. Wouldn't you agree?

Guest: Absolutely. And another part of this that we haven't talked about is venture capital. Venture capital, or VC as we call it in the space, is someone who provides money to startups in exchange for essentially a share of the company. And that's really the way that a lot of startups -- especially those that need a lot of cash to start, like those building hardware -- will get going. There is an extraordinary spectrum of people in that world as well. You meet VCs who are extraordinarily open and extroverted but have no interest in running a company. They just want to provide the capital so that people who do want to run a company can do amazing things. I had a meeting a while ago with one VC who -- we met in a library for an hour and a half and spent half the time talking about maths. She had no interest in running a company, probably wouldn't be well suited to the commercial side of things. But she understood the technology so, so deeply, and that made her really unique and extraordinarily valuable in what she did.

Guest: And just last week in the US, I met one of the first 200 employees at Google -- again, someone who has no interest in running a company. But through the experience of being part of such a dynamic place so early on, he's been able to provide invaluable advice to so many other companies. This space is very much one where everyone has something to provide if they're interested in doing so.

How to get involved, and final advice for high school students

Rob: So what I would say to anyone looking along and feeling like this session has sparked an interest: you need to get involved at whichever university you end up at. If this is really your thing, UNSW is the pinnacle to me. But there are many other universities where it's quite strong as well. And honestly, the startup environments I've been involved in and seen are home to the friendliest, most supportive people on the planet. Everybody wants to see you succeed. They want to see you fail, eat the dirt, and then rise back up -- and they're going to help you do it. So even if you're nervous about going into uni and meeting people, I really believe it's one of the best places, not just for skills, but for meeting people.

Guest: You're so right about the community being extraordinarily supportive. To that I'll say very freely: anyone who comes to UNSW with an interest in entrepreneurship, come by the Hillman Building, come upstairs, there's a big yellow door -- knock on it. I'm right behind it and I'm very happy to talk with anyone, genuinely. And I think virtually any startup hub or entrepreneurship support centre in the country -- in the world, really -- you can just rock up and say, "Hi, I'm interested in startups, what can I do?" and they'll have something for you. It might be a link to an event next week, it might be "come in and see this thing." But there is an extraordinary amount of support available, and they really are some of the friendliest people in the world.

Rob: In a world of AI, where everything can be generated in fractions of a second -- images, sound, music, video, ideas -- all these things are a commodity now. You ask ChatGPT for an idea and it gives you 100 in five seconds. What really matters for you and for your career going forward is the ability to take an idea and turn it into some sort of reality. And that takes resilience, creativity, persuasion, negotiation, and adaptability. These are the things you get from being an entrepreneur or being involved in that ecosystem. So you should get involved. Sam, final thought -- someone's been watching this session, they're a high school student who's interested. What advice would you have for them?

Guest: The biggest piece of advice I would have is exactly what you were saying, Rob -- get involved, because these communities want to have you there. In Australia especially, we need to have you there. Australia's startup community has gone from good to genuinely world class in the space of honestly 18 to 24 months. The space is here. We want you to be a part of it. And even if you have no idea what that looks like yet, if you just have a grain of interest in startups or entrepreneurship or anything we've talked about, come by the university entrepreneurship centre. I would hope that's UNSW, because as we were saying, we are the best in the country for this, the best in the Asia-Pacific. And that's because we have some of the best people and an extraordinarily supportive, well-funded ecosystem that is designed to support your ideas. Fundamentally, that's what we're here for.

Guest: I run student outreach for UNSW Founders. My door is always open. If you send me a connection request on LinkedIn -- I'm probably the only person of my generation who uses LinkedIn more than Instagram -- I'm very happy to have a talk with you. Get involved. Come by these spaces. Have a think about what you want to build, what you want to be involved in building, and what you think you can bring to these spaces. They're here for you.

Rob: And that has been Sam Brew, chief student entrepreneur at the University of New South Wales. If you want to look up Sam and everything he's working on, it's in the description below. Really good to chat with you, Sam. Thanks for joining me at the National Virtual Expo.

Guest: Thanks so much for having me, Rob.