Where AI Dreams and Cricket Met Reality: VCs and Founders Hit the Reef at Tropical Innovation Festival

CAIRNS, QLD — What happens when you put a boat full of VCs, founders, and one Indian cricket league investor out on the reef? Tropical Innovation Festival found out: and Queensland’s tech scene will never be the same (or sober) again.

The Reef Boat Keynote + OG Investor Panel was billed as an intimate deep-dive into the future of startups and investing. What attendees got was a heady mix of AI predictions, cricket analysis, unpublishable due diligence stories, and existential dread about how hard this whole venture thing really is.

Stuart Clout Sets the Course

Stuart Clout, exited founder and GTM garage mastermind, kicked things off with a keynote that probably caused half the boat’s AI startups to pivot before lunch.

Stuart painted a future where:

• The next-gen winners will be AI-first, ultra-niche, quick-to-profit companies.

• Founders will stop chasing “scale at all costs” and instead, get profitable (we know, wild idea).

• The only thing bigger than the AI opportunity is the hype slide in every pitch deck.

It was inspirational enough to make even the sea-sick attendees sit up and reconsider their B2B SaaS marketplace-for-marketplaces.

The OG Investor Panel

Then came the grey-haired legends of Aussie venture and PE; a panel so experienced they probably still have carry from dot com 1.0.

• Paul Wilson (Bailador) — Shared powerful lessons on investing via a detailed history of the Indian Cricket League. Whether it was a metaphor or a tangent, no one’s sure, but we all left knowing more about cricket than term sheets.

  
  

• Elaine Stead (Main Sequence) — Delivered hands-down the best due diligence story of the festival. The Rocket can’t print it (X-rated commentary, ask her yourself), but rest assured it raised more eyebrows than a SAFE note with no cap.

  
  

• Mark Sowerby (Blue Sky) — Usually a low-key figure these days, Mark stepped up with a story so genuine and inspiring that it became the headline of the week. Founders couldn’t stop talking about it. VCs tried not to cry.

  
  

• Aaron Birkby (Tribe Global Ventures) — Founder-turned-investor and panel host, kept the ship steady between the occasional cricket stat and off-the-record war story. His flow-state facilitation almost made us forget we were all getting sunburnt.

Main Takeaway

The main learning? Investing is fucking hard. The panel was open, vulnerable, and refreshingly honest about how tough it is to back the right founders, how often you’re wrong, and how much of this game is storytelling backed by spreadsheets.

Of course, it was all under Chatham House Rule, so this article is mostly fluff about who was there and what they wore.

The Rocket: reporting on Tropical Innovation Festival, where the cap tables weren’t the only things underwater.