Mark Gustowski has been involved in startups for longer than you have known about them…particularly in Australia. As the CEO of QUT Creative Enterprise Australia, QUT CEA is a unique hybrid business that includes an incubator, accelerator, c co-working space and an investment fund. This is a very well integrated investment and business building entity.
This puts Mark in the perfect position to take advantage of almost two decades of working with “innovative, fast-growth and creative businesses”.
Back in the late 1990’s, Mark started working with both the national and state governments and built one of the earliest accelerator programs for startups. At the time, the word ‘entrepreneur’ in Australia still carried some negative connotations, due to some negative press that financial entrepreneurs had received in the previous decade.
However, a competitive environment between the Australian states and a national government that recognized the need for a structural change to the economy created the first $20MM allocation to fund startups.
Mark tells so many great stories and shares some amazing insights in this episode…
Episode 22 – Mark Gustowski – CEO QUT Creative Enterprise Australia – The Speed at Which You Need to Move
