MORGO Noosa 2018. Re-Charged!
Morgo is a C-level entrepreneurial retreat. You come to Morgo for a re-charge — getting new courage for your business journey from seeing what others have achieved. You come to Morgo for ideas — brain food from the other companies presenting and the science talks. And you come to Morgo to make good new business friends with fellow entrepreneurs. All that happened at Morgo Noosa!
At Morgo Noosa there was an amazing group of people: all prepared to open up and share their downs as well as the ups. That is truly inspiring — if they can pick themselves up and go hard, so can we.
Terrie Lloyd shared his history of 17 start-ups in Japan. Yes, 17! Some big successes, but also ones that didn’t work. He told us that the Japanese don’t like risk — which means there are good opportunities for entrepreneurs there, and they can’t believe you will sell your company — it’s like selling your child, so it’s a good place to sell companies! A great way to start.
Christin Burns talked about building Marion’s Kitchen as a successful consumer brand in the US with tight control of quality for the production in Thailand. Alex Teoh talked about building Mint Payments — the long hard part and the rapid growth until he’s now riding a wave. Helen Jarman gave a disarmingly frank assessment of her own strengths and weaknesses and what she’s learned while building her large supply chain management company. Adam Schwab talked about building Lux Group, Philip Mayes about Mighty Kingdom Games — a very personal story, Barry Newstead chatted with us about building Redbubble, and Alex Grant talked about building Myriota to track remote objects — where are all the cows?
Aliza Knox talked about building a team to take your business into Asia, Steven Fang talked about commercialising a way of personalising chemotherapy, Alex MacDonald about new frontiers in space, and Melanie Johnston-Hollitt about the square kilometre array. Steven, Alex and Melanie were all taking us into new technology/science areas that most of us didn’t know about but I think it was especially Melanie who blew our minds. The amount of data that the SKA will produce when fully operational is truly mind blowing: zettabytes. Is that a word you’ve ever needed to use? When the SKA is fully up and running it will produce in one day more data than exists on the internet today … How do you start to analyse that? Melanie has some of the answers.
The theme for Morgo Noosa was “I’ll do it my way”. The speakers had fun with this. Everyone has their own insights on the market, their own twist on product development, their own way of inspiring their team, their unique path to success.
To quote Bertrand Russell, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”[i]
Morgo was full of unreasonable people. Building an incredible range of businesses out into the world, from Ansarada’s virtual data rooms to Soak Society’s bath salts!
And the take-aways? You’re not the only one — everyone has down moments and failures as well as moments of revelation and successes. Everyone has had to be flexible — another pivot anyone? Don’t put a limit on your abilities or how far you can go. Do it your way and enjoy the journey. Try Japan!
