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Ok, Matt Barrie, you are forty years of age, you're the chief executor of Freelancer, a
company you started in 2009, which now has a market capital of over 700 million dollars.
You've spent your whole life working in ICT, and you've founded and sold other businesses
beforehand. You've been hugely successful, so why, with your example of success and excitement
and innovation in Australia, why are fewer and fewer Australian kids doing ICT subjects
at University? Well, I think every Australian school kid
wants to go out there and you know, build self-driving cars, and work on mobile phone
apps, or go work at Facebook, or you know, get into the technology industry because,
you know, it's all about creating the future and it's so exciting and, you know, get to
change the world around you. The problem is that school kids can't really connect the
dots between what they learn in high-school and how they actually get to a career in technology
and go about actually starting their own technology business, right. I think that the curriculum
hasn't really changed in many, many years, and it's still back in the, you know, 1950s
to a certain extent and in particular there's no exposure to really what the career paths
are from, you know, when they're in year 10, which is a very, very critical year, when
students make up their minds what they're doing for their HSC, of how they actually
get from high school to actually that particular industry.
Now this is a big problem isn't it, the number of ICT graduates from Australian universities
has declined by what, 60%? 60% in the last decade and this is in the
middle of the biggest technology boom in mankind's history.
This is a total market failure isn't it? It's absurd.
I think it's a national imperative to change this.
Ok, so, three things we can do about it, to change that. What would they be?
Well, I think, if I was in charge, I would think about changing the curriculum. I think
the curriculum has to be delivered online however, because I think that it takes a bit
of time to actually change the system, and retrain the teachers and so forth. But the
great thing is we do have some great educators and technologies, just as, you know, James
Curran runs the National Computer Science summer school who could be part of this. I
would develop an educ... a very, very simple just educational video I would play at careers
fairs or before career fairs so actually kids knew what engineering was because, when I
went through high school, I thought engineering had to do with trains and when I went back
to my careers fair at my old school twenty years later last year, the kids still thought
that it had something to do with trains. So I talked about, you know, the technology industry
and how you get there and so forth, and, you know, I would... I mean I think they are really
the two top things for me. I have to struggle to think of the third point, but I really
do think it's a big thing. It's science, technology, engineering, mathematics; it's a fantastic
and wonderful career path and I just think we have to sell it a little bit better.
Just finally, just talk a little bit about Freelancer.com. Now you described it as part
of the evolution of the internet. Yeah.
Can you just expand on that? Well, fundamentally, we're just eBay for jobs,
right. So we're a global market place where you can get any job you can possibly think
of that can be done by computer, online, done. So it doesn't matter if it's 'build me a website'
or 'design me a logo' or something in astrophysics or genetic engineering or biotechnology or
manufacturing, you can post a job; people from all around the world will bid on that
job and you can get it performed for you. Edit my novel?
Yeah, edit your novel, do the cover for the novel, find you a publisher or help you publish
it online or whatever it may be. We've got over ten million users on the site, and you
know, growing about twenty thousand users a day, and about 5.4 million projects been
posted. And really what it is, is we're a global market place for services and if you
can think about how the internet has evolved over the last twenty years, so back about
1995, it went mainstream in the US, UK, Australia, Canada and other western economies, people
went online being very consumer driven economies, they went online to buy things and this lead
to the emergence of global market places for products, first hand products being Amazon,
second hand products being eBay, and then payment systems like PayPal. Fast forward
15, 20 years later, the internet hits, you know, Indonesia, hits India, hits Pakistan,
Philippines and so forth. People go online, they don't have any money to buy anything,
you know, so they can't buy anything off eBay, they don't have any money... they don't have
any possessions to potentially sell on a market place like eBay, but they can sell their services
or sell their labour, and I believe that it's inevitable that global market place for services
will evolve. It's going to be a similar size and scale to an eBay or an Amazon. We're talking
70 billion, 200 billion market cap company, so that's where we are. We are leaders in
terms of users and projects and so forth and it's a long way to go. All the hard work starts
now, but it's good to be an Australian company in this particular space.
It is, and congratulations. Yup, thank you.
Thanks Matt.