Why we're leaving Australia to build our company (the Australian Dream is dead)

Everyone keeps saying that we're lucky to live in Australia, but right now, to build a business here, it's actually starting to feel like a nightmare. Which is why we're actually packing up our bags and leaving Sydney to go build our startup. 23 more days to go in this, very very expensive, depressing city. Packing up! Saying goodbye to this chapter to all of these. And including that plant over there, which is a bit sad. Look at those big waves! How do you feel? Uhhh... Reminiscent? Appreciative? Yeah... A lot of special memories and moments here (Maroubra). But... It's time to move on to something bigger. And better. I'm personally to Australia, Canadian. I arrived here at the beginning of 2019, and for me, essentially over the last seven years, the Australian dream that I originally had when I arrived here has died, and it's died quite quickly. And being the child of Chinese immigrants who thought that uprooting their lives in Beijing would be a good idea. Moving all the way to Australia, struggling to get by for many, many years, thinking that it would provide a better life for their offspring. Coming from someone in that position, I think it's quite ironic actually. We are collectively in the West, actually looking over like Asia for opportunities, and especially this is happening a lot at the moment on the entrepreneurial scene. So many of the people we've spoken to have said the same thing. So I think for a lot of us, it was already really difficult in Australia. And the cost of living crisis in particular makes it really difficult for you to do so, if you haven't spent years saving up. So we're essentially trying to bootstrap ourselves. We were basically faced with two options. One, we try VCs to give us some money. Most of the VCs talking to is we're giving us not even enough for one person salary in Sydney, which is where we're currently located. And so we started looking at it and it just didn't make sense to try and do this. Like if I have to work full time and we get one salary for her, we're still like we're not able to focus entirely on our business. We looked at the numbers and like, if we even for those really small offerings from VCs for the like a seed round, they're taking 10% at your business, and that's before you've even got off the ground or built anything. We started looking for other options of how we could focus on building this business and getting it to like a sustainability path before we started looking at VCs and investors. If that ends up being the way that we want to go. The numbers and like, regardless of the tax complications involved in running a business here in Australia. It really stopped making sense. Oh, they don't they don't want aspirational people here. The government literally just passed this budget if you're actually saving your money and putting it into investments, right, they're still coming for 30%. It doesn't matter what you do. One of the things that we realize is like, literally June 2026, the Australian government is supposed to be about $1 trillion in debt. The collective population right now metrics of Australia at about 28 million. The US hit $1 trillion in debt and their population was 226 million. They literally had the population to that debt compared to what Australia has right now. And so this debt, the unwillingness to actually rein in their spending, to balance the budget, bringing in, refining what they're here, is just continually going to erode your living ability. And I think that really discourages people from taking risks that are necessary to be innovative, to contribute to the economy, to build something of value. And this is not a recent development. It's been slowly building up over the last couple of years, which is why we are leaving. This is what we're calling Chapter Zero because we have no plan. We actually don't know what we're going to do. A part of the mission behind Musefunnel and the community layer, which is some of you might know is called Muse Circle, is that we are giving power back to people, back to self-starters, back to people who are business and self-employed people, to freelancers, creatives to really take their power back, to be able to collaborate with each other instead of relying on traditional middlemen that we used to have. And I also made a short video about this on this neo-feudalistic future, and how working with each other as small business as self-employed people, working with people that are local to you, is actually the key to setting ourselves up for a better future. And I really like of work, about the future of business as a web, like a mycelium like rhizome, instead of a linear path, a ladder going upwards, just climbing the corporate ladder where these companies that are in power controlling who gets seen by who because there are enough businesses and talent to really go around. We have this idea, particularly in the West, that the myth of the, like superior man, like an Elon Musk or a Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, these individuals that get risen to this prominence have hundreds, if not millions of people behind them standing on top of. There's hundreds of thousands of people whose hands have been involved in creation, the design, all of that foundational infrastructure before they ever start their company. And so this idea that we have these lone geniuses existing in a vacuum doesn't exist. And so that's part of what we see with Muse Circle is bringing back and that collaboration between people. I think about how this is very similar to the beginning of the French Revolution, where you had these salons as well, like in person, in real life at these events, IRL events, if we call them. This is the key to collaboration and bringing people together. No matter who you are, whether you are a business owner or you are a freelance service provider, or you are a content creator, everybody is talking about this new portfolio career, this gig economy era. But there is no infrastructure at the moment to actually surface those opportunities, for businesses, if they want to find people to work for them on an ad hoc basis, or for creatives and freelancers who need jobs, right? This is the elephant in the room is that people are going to get made redundant. It's happening. It's happening everywhere. In every industry. Where are these people going to go? These brilliant minds who are great at what they do, have amazing skill sets, but in the current society that we live in, there's only two ways to get ahead. A, you have money, which then you funnel into paid ads controlled by Meta, Google. Secondly, you are just super great at storytelling. You know how to manipulate human attention. You know how to craft a 60-second reel on TikTok with a hook. But not everybody is a good orator, but they don't have to be a good storyteller to be good at what they do and provide value. But in this day and age, unless you tick two boxes, you're left hopeless. If you get made redundant from your job, what are you going to do? But your skill sets to someone and someone down the road need it. Even though the World Wide Web since the 90s, have had social media for two and a half-ish, two and a half decades, it's still so ridiculously hard to find work. And for people who are not being corporations to hire people on, like an ad hoc basis, inside of their own communities, not on Fiverr, not on Upwork. If you're curious to find out more about what we're building, the link is in my bio. Feel free to go check it out. It is totally free to join and create a profile to start connecting with local businesses and talent. And we're on a mission to make opportunities more accessible for everyone, and not just the privileged few. So this is 'Chapter Zero' if you want to know what happens to us. I'm Nancy and I'm Kether, we're building Musefunnel together. Tech for the people.