Sydney’s annual free startup festival, Spark, has unveiled this year’s program, ahead of its September 21 launch.
Now in its 11th year, the week long festival comes after a tumultuous year for the city’s tech sector following the closure of the York Street Startup Hub, changes to capital gains tax and the collapse of SXSW.
Spark CEO Harry Godber says the festival’s ground-up approach is its strength
“Spark has been a grassroots event since the beginning, one of the special things about it is it brings together an enormous amount of people from across the system,” he said.
“Everyone from founders, startup teams, investors, policy makers, and corporates.”
With more than 30 events already announced and another 30 or so still to come and spots still available for anyone wanting to run a startup event across New South Wales.
Godber emphasises the event goes beyond Sydney’s inner suburbs with events last year being held in Newcastle, Parramatta, and the Western Sydney Aerotropolis with the Illawarra already booked in for this year.
“We’ve always encouraged anybody to run an event during Spark. That’s one of the hallmarks of being a community event. In the past few years we’ve run a range of activities across NSW,” he said.
“It is an opportunity to get involved where ever you are.”
That community-led approach is also what attracted Sian Priest, formerly of Cicada Innovations, to join the festival team.
“I’m personally excited about Spark Festival because it’s the opposite of top down: it’s grassroots, built by the community to help each other move forward,” she said.
“With AI upending everything and the ecosystems feeling under-supported, people want something raw and community led.”
For more than a decade, Spark has been one of the places where Sydney’s startup community gets together. This year, its organisers are increasingly positioning it as something more: a place where founders can have a voice in the policy debates that will shape their businesses.
Spark Foundation launch
The festival’s September 21 opening will also see the official launch of the Spark Foundation; a registered charity being established alongside this year’s festival.
Godber says the foundation will build on the work Spark has been doing over the past eleven years to connect founders with politicians and investors.
“For over a decade Spark has been an opportunity for over 40,000 people across Australia’s innovation ecosystem to be heard,” Godber said.
Government support, changes to the tax system, eligibility for the R&D Tax Incentive and the regulatory environment around AI have created uncertainty for founders trying to work out where to invest their time and money.
Godber believes the Spark Foundation will help the startup become much better at making its case.
“As an industry we need to do a lot more to make our voices heard,” he said.
“We look to bring founders together with ministers and shadow ministers, as well as investors who don’t always feature in the usual startup conversation like family offices, corporate venture capital, offshore funds and private equity.”
Every event free
Spark’s proposition is that founders shouldn’t have to buy their way into that conversation, Gober says.
“Everything we do at Spark we do is free of charge,” Godber said.
“We are here to help the startups who can’t – and shouldn’t have to – afford to buy access through political donations or memberships of expensive industry bodies.”
Godber expects almost 5,000 people to attend its events across Sydney this year.
“We are so fortunate to have such a wide range of organisations opening their doors to us this year,” he said.
“The real endowment that underpins Spark is the incredible breadth of in-kind support from hundreds of Australians that makes it all happen each year.”
Registration for events is open at spark.org.au and if you want to host an event, expression of interest are still open through the website.
