The surge of start-up activity at UTS follows the appointment six months ago of Murray Hurps as the UTS director of entrepreneurship.
Hurps knows the start-up world inside out. He started his own company at age 16 called Ad Muncher, which ran for 14 years and became the second largest ad blocker in the world.
He was the chief executive of Fishburners, the co-working space which was located in the same building in Harris St, Ultimo, where the UTS start-ups will be housed.
Fishburners grew to be the largest start-up community in Australia. It is now part of the Sydney Startup Hub in a building above Sydney’s Wynyard Station, which also houses the fintech hub called Stone & Chalk.
Prior to joining UTS Hurps was the program director for the accelerator program called FUELD. It was Australia’s first data-focused accelerator program, in collaboration with Westpac, Data Republic, Reinventure, Amazon Web Services and Stone & Chalk.
Hurps is bubbling over with optimism about the future of Australian business after working with the start-ups coming out of UTS.
“These students are creating their own jobs rather than graduating and looking for a job,” he says.
On Friday morning, Hurps spent time helping three start-ups from UTS. The age of each student leading these young companies was 20 years old.
He says their enthusiasm for creating new businesses was infectious.
The start-up initiative at UTS, which is a university-wide, should make UTS the single most important source of start-ups from any university in Australia. The Startup Muster found that the University of NSW and the University of Sydney were ahead of UTS as sources of start-up founders but that will change in 2019.
Hurps says that Fishburners housed more than 1000 start-ups over a five year period.
“We aim to engage all students at UTS, inspire them to become startup founders, bring them together and connect them to outside support, whether it be accelerators, customers, investors or talent,” Hurps says.
“I’ve found UTS students to be incredibly entrepreneurial, and I think our main challenge in 2019 will be in supporting the number of startups our students want to launch.
“Universities are uniquely positioned to move Australia’s entrepreneurial needle in the right direction, and it’s our responsibility to inspire and educate students on the incredible opportunity they have.
“Not only are their living expenses and life commitments the lowest they’re likely to ever be, students are surrounded by available and affordable talent, educational resources and a multitude of support and funding programs clamouring for their attention.
“It will never be easier in their lives to launch a startup, and there will never be a more fertile ground to do so – especially here at UTS.”
Tony Boyd
from A Viral Update http://bit.ly/2EBHzhe
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