Last week I had the pleasure of giving a guest speech at Harvard to the Australian students association spanning both Harvard and MIT.
Huge thanks to Blackbird for hosting and sponsoring the event, and to the Australian cohort of Harvard and MIT for co-hosting me.
I was genuinely stoked that so many students came out despite the rain — the place was completely full, 100% RSVP attendance.
Cambridge is surprisingly beautiful. It's lowkey compared with stanford/berkeley campuses and mostly made of brick, but it has a lot of charm and character in a way I really liked.
I was expecting sharp questions but I was not expecting the level of intellectual horsepower in that room.
These students aren't just smart in the "good at exams" way (testmaxxers as I call them) - but are super innovative and all wanted to build companies. I wasn't getting the usual questions around PMF and raising but instead questions around unit economics in emerging markets, debates around the merits of vertical integration for some new method a student had come up with for battery tech. One Perth guy even showed me a t shirt he had made with his own design for a new way of writing out algorithms which was pretty sick.
The Deep Tech Questions
One theme dominated the Q&A: deep tech. The students wanted to know about:
- How to compete with well-funded incumbents when your advantage is technical rather than distribution
- Whether the AI wave is overhyped or if we're genuinely at an inflection point
- How to think about moats when your core technology could be replicated by a well-funded team in 18 months
- The role of patents and IP in deep tech (a topic close to my heart)
The room agreed AI is not overhyped. If anything, people underestimate how much it will reshape industries. But the window for pure-play AI startups is narrowing. The future belongs to companies that embed AI into specific verticals and own the data layer.
On Immigration: The Australia → US Pipeline
Inevitably, the conversation also turned to immigration. A lot of these students are thinking about their post-graduation options, and "stay in the US vs. go back to Australia" is the existential question weighing on everyone's minds.
If you want to build a globally significant technology company, the US is still the place to be. The capital markets, the talent density, the customer base, the network effects—nothing else comes close. Australia has improved dramatically as a startup ecosystem (shoutout to Blackbird and the broader community), but the ceiling is different.
That said, immigration to the US is hard and getting harder. The visa system is archaic, arbitrary, and designed for a world that no longer exists. My advice to the students:
- Start early. If you want to stay, start planning your visa strategy in your first year, not your last.
- O-1 is your friend. For founders and extraordinary talent, the O-1 visa is often the most viable path. Build your public profile, get press, file patents, win awards.
- Don't let visa uncertainty stop you from starting. Some of the biggest companies were founded by immigrants navigating the same broken system. It's a feature, not a bug, that you're forced to build something undeniable.
Australia punches above its weight in producing talent. The question is whether we can keep that talent connected to the Australian ecosystem even when they're building from San Francisco or New York.