UTS Startups

Dr Naomi Koh Belic - MC: Are you guys excited for the UTS Startups Summit? Can we get a little bit louder, one more. Yeah, that's better, that's much nicer. So this entire startup summit is really designed to show you some real examples of what's possible through tech-enabled entrepreneurs that you can actually relate to.

Murray Hurps - UTS Director of Entrepreneurship: This is the event I dreamed of having when I was 16, when thinking about career choices to be able to see people pursuing tech-enabled entrepreneurship, to see people like me doing things I can do and getting results that I want to get so I can feel like this is more normal desirable accessible for all the students that are attending today.

Aaron Ngan - UTS Startups Inspiration Manager: So the objective of the UTS Startups Summit is really to bring as many students as possible in contact with other student speakers who are entrepreneurs and who are doing big things so that the students who are in high school, they get to see sometimes for the first time exactly what is possible when people follow and start to pursue tech-enabled entrepreneurship.

Geoff Donaghy, CEO, ICC Sydney: This inaugural event, the inaugural [UTS] Startups Summit which we were delighted to actually support and sponsor it was very important for a number of reasons, one to sow those seeds with young students at the right stage as they're starting to work out what they're doing for the rest of their education to give them the windows of opportunity for entrepreneurship. We're just delighted to support that.

Murray Hurps - UTS Director of Entrepreneurship: We're supporting 640 startups at the moment under UTS Startups and a lot of the support we give is just about connectivity so our connections to the right mentors the right investors, customers, talent, researchers whatever. That sounds easy but giving that surface area for luck for good things to happen is there's a continuous huge amount of work and it's wonderful to just have a giant venue nearby that is continuously running giant events that you can throw relevant startups into when there's a trade show about a particular industry or a particular technical skill to say "go to that", and suddenly they can connect with hundreds or thousands of people that seems like a giant surface area for luck for good things to happen that we're really happy to take advantage of here.

Geoff Donaghy, CEO, ICC Sydney: We've got an internationally recognized sort of wide-ranging legacy program where we work with clients right at the earliest planning stages to inject these sorts of connections and these sorts of Innovations into their program as early as we possibly can and an important part of that is our desire and as part of the legacy program for startups and entrepreneurs.

Aaron Ngan - UTS Startups Inspiration Manager: So working with ICC Sydney has been one of the joys of this event. I don't think that we could have hosted this event anywhere else. The entire planning process, I have to say was incredibly rigorous from the planning teams and the different event managers. I felt that every step of the way had a clear understanding of what the space was what was capable and what we were suggesting.

Angelique Wan - Co-founder and CEO of Consent Labs: The Summit's gone above and beyond my expectations. I mean this is the very first one that we've ever run, so I didn't really have any idea of what to expect but I can only imagine what an incredible opportunity this is for these high school students to be able to interact with real-life founders and hear their life journey and be inspired about a topic that I never got to hear about when I was in high school myself.

Marcus Radice-Jones – Founder of Grow Your Gaming Channel: There's been a lot of people who've helped me in my entrepreneurial journey get to where I would I am. Now I wouldn't have been there without them, so maybe hopefully I can be one of those people to some of these guys and if not one of those people maybe I can just be the person who just shifts their course just like one little degree and you know in 10 years down the track that one little degree results in them ending up in a very different place that is a place that they would appreciate much more than where they would have ended up without that little shift.

Aaron Ngan - UTS Startups Inspiration Manager: One of the things that the students really got was courage. Courage to give it a go courage to try some things out encourage to allow themselves to fail because so many of the speakers shared hey this is where I failed this is where things didn't work out this is where it wasn't that perfect straight line This is where actually it was all over the place and I really think the students got that and got that they can actually try that and they can get started right now they don't have to wait to this imaginary future.