Six years ago, Australia's first start-up incubator, Pollenizer, was just Phil Morle and Mick Liubinskas, sharing a desk in someone else's spare office in North Sydney. They knew there would be a role for an Australian tech start-up incubator some day, but they had to wait to find their first start-up entrepreneur and pay their rent with consulting gigs in the meantime.

My company BlueChilli was barely half an idea in 2009, much less a business, and yet last year Deloitte ranked us the seventh fastest-growing tech company in the Asia-Pacific region. We will shortly close our first $10 million early-stage venture capital partnership fund, one of nine such funds. They did not exist in 2009.

Towards the end of 2010, Niki Scevak emailed a very short list of other internet 1.0 people asking them to commit $25,000 to create Startmate the following January. Since then, Startmate has created so much value in its portfolio companies and broader interest in seed-stage technology among high-net-worth individuals that it has spawned BlackbirdVC, which now has about $25 million in invested funds.

Sam is absolutely correct in calling for government and the superannuation industry action on building the next layer of Australian innovation investment, but only because now is the right time to begin putting that layer on top of the foundations we have built together, in a very short time by non-internet industry standards.

A $30 million Australian venture fund cannot put $5 million into a $25 million Series B round very often, and to participate in $100 million rounds or greater we have much more work to do. But you build an ecosystem from the bottom, not the top.