Every year around March, a familiar gravitational pull tugs at tech leaders across the country: pack your bags, head to Austin, eat a breakfast taco the size of your head, and spend a week at SXSW pretending the jet lag isn't destroying you. I've made that trip many times. This year, I didn't. This year, I went to Adelaide instead.
And honestly? Zero regrets.
South Start 2026, or SOUTHSTART RESONANCE if you want the full theatrical title, wrapped up last week, and I'm still processing how good it was. So here's my attempt to bottle it up before the warm glow of South Australian Shiraz fades completely.
What Even Is South Start?
For the uninitiated, SOUTHSTART has grown over the past decade from a local meetup to a national movement, placing South Australia at the centre of the country's innovation conversation. It's not a trade show. It's not a pitch fest dressed up in a lanyard. It gives you the space to step back, zoom out, and reconnect with why you started. Three days of immersion, reflection, and inspiration.
The 2026 theme was Resonance, and if that sounds a little woo woo, well, stick around. Day 3 is going to confirm your suspicions and you're going to love it anyway.
I brought a crew from Bilue with the intention of picking up new ideas, getting a pulse on the startup ecosystem, and finding some genuine business opportunities. We got all three. We also got exceptional South Australian wine, which as someone who considers themselves an avid appreciator of the good stuff (look, I just really like wine and the people you drink it with) was not exactly a hardship. Taking a group of Australians to Adelaide and expecting them not to get excited about the wine is a bit like expecting the dog not to notice you picked up the lead.
Day 1: Beautifully Chaotic
The first day, PRECINCT, spread activity across the Adelaide CBD with a festival hub and additional programming focused on youth entrepreneurship and investors. It was chaotic. But it felt like chaos by design, the kind of productive, electric disorder that happens when a lot of smart, motivated people are pointed loosely in the same direction and told to collide.
Two sessions stood out immediately.
The team from Tribe ran a GTM framework session that genuinely made me sit up straight. So much go-to-market content out there is built for consumer businesses. Growth hacks, funnel optimisation, acquisition loops that only work if you're selling something to millions of people with a credit card and low friction. Tribe brought real, considered thinking for B2B. As someone running a 100-person digital consultancy, the frameworks they walked through were immediately applicable.
One line from the session stuck with me, and I'm paraphrasing here:
"As an investor, I don't care about your product. I mean, I do, but I kinda don't. I care about your distribution. Who is buying it and how. If it's being bought, there's clearly a place for it. I don't need to know about all the features of your product."
That's the kind of sharp, counterintuitive thinking that I just love, makes me slump back and think about my approach a bit more.
The second standout was a session on using Claude Code to automate and hack your B2B sales pipeline. I'll be honest. I work closely with AI tools, I know Claude reasonably well, and I walked in expecting to politely endure 40 minutes of someone discovering features I already knew about. I was completely wrong. What made it remarkable wasn't the technology. It was the people using it. These weren't engineers. These were non-technical sales and business operators who had opened Terminal, rolled up their sleeves, and were using Claude Code at a depth that genuinely surprised me.
One of them captured the mindset perfectly:
"Claude doesn't replace your need to work. I use it as a sparring partner. I'll work with Claude for hours developing ideas and approaches to sales, enriching data, shaping my approach to market. It doesn't replace me thinking. It helps me develop better ideas by thinking more."
Watching non-technical people automate meaningful parts of a B2B sales workflow with that kind of intentionality was a proper eye-opener. If that doesn't make you think about where AI capability is heading, I'm not sure what will.
Night one was a speakers dinner that we somehow ended up at. Sometimes the best things at conferences are the ones you didn't plan. We spent the evening with the brilliant Base Yates, who heads up partnerships and is one of those rare humans who makes you feel both inspired and completely at ease within about three minutes of meeting them.
We also shared a few beers with Peter Helliar, one of Australia's most beloved comedians and TV personalities, who was keynoting the following day. Top bloke. Great company. My wife later reminded me we'd seen him in a play a few months earlier and that I had completely failed to mention it to him all evening. Pete, if you're reading this, you were fantastic in that play, the oversight was entirely mine, and I still owe you a round.
Day 2: All In, One Room (Well, Several Rooms)
ASSEMBLY, the second day, took place at the National Wine Centre with a multi-stage program and six concurrent streams: INTERSECT, SCALE, BUILD, CAPITAL, SIGNAL, and SALON, each reflecting a different mode of thinking, from growth and execution through to sense-making and humanity.
The National Wine Centre is a genuinely great venue for this kind of event. The setup was built for meeting, connection and discovery. The app made targeted networking remarkably easy, and I'd go as far as saying it was the best conference networking tool I've used. You actually end up talking to the people you were meant to talk to, which sounds obvious but is somehow still a rarity.
Night two was the party. More great South Australian wine, and my supposedly discerning palate had absolutely no notes. Great food, and the kind of warm, relaxed atmosphere that only happens when people have spent two days genuinely connecting rather than performing for each other.
Day 3: The Woo Woo Day (I Mean That With Enormous Affection)
Right. Day 3.
OFFSITE shifts to McLaren Vale and is framed as a regional setting for reflection and relationship-building, positioned as a contrast to typical conference schedules that prioritise continuous stage programming over extended small-group connection.
For context: I've visited McLaren Vale many times. Taking me there on the final day of a conference is a bit like telling a kid the last day of school is at Disneyland. I was, to put it mildly, not going to complain.
We walked through the vines in the morning, then gathered for a fireside chat on meditation that finished with a guided meditation session. And I say this as someone who would normally describe themselves as loosely in the "sceptical but ok why not" camp: it landed. Nobody was weirder for having done it. Everyone was better for it.
Then more incredible South Australian produce, more wine that I was tasting with great seriousness and careful consideration and definitely not just grinning about, and more of the conversations you'd started over the previous two days but hadn't quite finished. Day 3 isn't about new content. It's about deepening what's already there. It's a genuinely clever design decision and one I haven't seen another conference pull off with this much intentionality.
So, SXSW vs South Start?
SOUTHSTART has deliberately kept itself small enough that a founder can actually sit down with an investor, or a CTO can workshop a problem with someone three steps ahead. That intimacy is the point.
That sentence could have been written about every interaction I had across those three days.
SXSW is spectacular. It's enormous, it's buzzing, it's got energy unlike anything else. It's also enormous, and buzzing, and occasionally you come home feeling like you attended a very expensive music festival that had some business panels in it. Also, I've genuinely tried to find good Texan wine. I've really tried. It's not there. McLaren Vale wins that round without even breaking a sweat.
South Start is tighter. More focused. More human. The conversations go deeper because the environment is designed for depth rather than volume. And when you're trying to find genuine business partners, real thinking, and real connection, depth wins.
The Bilue team came home with new ideas, new relationships, and a much better appreciation for what South Australia is quietly building as an innovation ecosystem. South Australia has a strong reputation within the startup community and ranks as the most significant provider of government support in the country. That's not a marketing line. You feel it on the ground.
Will I be back next year? Without question. Will I be skipping SXSW again? Ask me in January. But I'll be thinking about it over a glass of McLaren Vale Shiraz, so the answer might be obvious.
One More Thing
Full transparency: I spent an hour or so sparring with Claude to help write this post. Together we've found and referenced material from a range of sources which you should check out including; Aedasa, Southstart, Wikipedia, Channellife and IT Brief Australia
All in all, it didn't make the development and writing much shorter, but the difference is real.
This is a better, more considered, more informative piece than I would have produced on my own. Which, funnily enough, is almost exactly what that bloke said on stage about using AI in his sales process.
Maybe he was onto something.
