Comment by GVRV
1 day ago
Congratulations Tom!
Tom (and Fenn) had rockstar status back when I was involved in university CS+Entrepreneurship clubs in Melbourne around 2009/2010 (mostly led by fine students at UniMelb, but I was helping spread the word at Monash) because they were the first(maybe one of the first?) Aussies to be accepted by YC. They always generously gave their time and advice at these student events, even dropped by the SiliconBeach networking meets to share their experiences and turned out to be exceptionally kind human beings in person. Definitely the right choice for moding this community!
I remember those days (and your username) very fondly. Great to see you still here.
We were the first startup to be Australian-based then move to the U.S. for YC.
Omnisio was an all-Australian team from the year before us but they were already residing in the U.S.
The first ever Australian-originated co-founder of a YC-backed company was Jamie Cameron. He co-founded Virtualmin, a commercially-supported fork of Webmin for virtual hosting, which Jamie first released in 1997. It looks like Virtualmin is still active today, which is awesome.
It just so happens that Jamie and Fenn used to sit next to each other in the software development team at Pacific Internet in Melbourne, where we all worked in the early 00s. Jamie's brother, Michael Cameron, was a co-founder of Rome2Rio, which was based at Inspire9 along with us from about 2011-12, and became one of the most successful consumer travel startups out of Australia.