Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane among the world’s most vibrant startup event scenes: Survey

Sydney and Melbourne are in the top 10 cities outside the US for meetup groups, with Brisbane and Auckland also in the top 20, according to figures from US data analytics firm RJMetrics.

It is worth noting that the figures count the total number of memberships in each city, rather than the number of unique members. This means that one person who belongs to six groups will be counted as six memberships in the figures.

The figures show Sydney has 47,152 memberships, making it the sixth largest startup community outside the US, narrowly beating out seventh-placed Melbourne with 38,888. Meanwhile, Brisbane claims 16^th place while, across the Tasman, Auckland takes out the 18^th spot.

Silicon Beach Sydney organiser Bart Jellema told StartupSmart Australia’s startup meetup groups have grown tremendously over recent years.

“Five or six years ago there were a bunch of us, but no meetups – I think [muru-D’s] Mick Liubinskas might have been one of the first to organise one – so we decided to meet up. At times, we’ve had 40 people per week and other times just a handful. It’s been interesting to see it go from nothing to such a strong community,” Jellema says.

“You don’t go to events to try to get something out of it. But at some stage, someone will talk about a service that’s useful to you, or perhaps you’ll meet a lawyer or accountant and they’ll give you a recommendation.”

The sentiment is shared by Startup Victoria event manager Thomas Anbeek, who describes networking events as crucial to the startup ecosystem.

“They’re a central meeting point where founders who work alone can get together one day a week and drink some beer, eat pizza and make connections,” Anbeek says.

“Networking is crucial. As a founder, you’re doing it by yourself. But building a business is not something you can do alone, and so it’s crucial to have people around who can help you.”

Aside from Silicon Beach, regular Sydney meetups include the Sydney Tech Startup Meetup, Disruptive Startups Sydney, the Fishburners meetups, Sydney Startups Friday Drinks, Startup Grind Sydney, Lean Startup Sydney and Startup Founder 101. Meanwhile, key Melbourne meetups include Lean Startup Melbourne, Melbourne Silicon Beach, Startup Grind Melbourne and Startup Melbourne.

There are also more specialist meetup groups for areas such as robotics, health tech and fin tech in most of the major capital cities, while many regional startup communities in cities such as Cairns, Bega, Geelong, Wollongong and Toowoomba also host regular or semi-regular events.

This story originally appeared on StartupSmart.