He’s one of the godfathers of the Australian start-up sector. So why isn’t he a billionaire?

Start-up culture glorifies taking risks to chase big rewards. Most new businesses fail, but those stories are rarely told.

Mick Liubinskas knows this better than most. “I have 12 friends who are billionaires, but I am not one,” he says.

“I am probably the most famous underachiever in tech in Australia,” he tells me over a long lunch at sustainable seafood restaurant love.fish in Barangaroo. “I’ve had more shots on goal than anybody, and I don’t have a big success to show for it.”

Sometimes described as one of the “godfathers of the Australian start-up industry”, Liubinskas is best known for his multiple roles at the so-called accelerators and incubators that help nurture founders and their fledgling companies. He has also started several technology companies and been a “very small-scale investor” in a few early-stage start-ups.

Since 2021 he has followed his passion for tackling the crisis of global warming with Climate Salad, which started as a monthly newsletter about climate start-ups and has morphed into an accelerator-cum-industry organisation with national reach.

At 51, Liubinskas has a Sydney mortgage and three children at home, and he expects to work for another 20 years. Climate Salad is more for purpose than profit and “definitely doesn’t pay the bills,” he says. He supplements his income with consulting work, his wife’s marketing career keeps the family afloat.

He knows it’s not a “poor, hard luck story” to not be a billionaire, but he would not be human if he did not sometimes reflect on what might have been.

“I’ve had so much opportunity, and sometimes I question what I’ve done with it,” Liubinskas says. “But I feel like I’ve made good choices.”

He reminds himself that he has “chosen integrity over money many times”, worked on interesting projects that give him a sense of purpose, that he is “wonderfully, happily married to a beautiful woman with three great kids”, and is lucky to live in Australia and to have travelled widely.

He started Climate Salad with his wife during the COVID-19 pandemic. I am curious about the name. “I just had this view that salad is something we should have more of,” he says. “It’s green, it’s leafy, it’s actually multicultural, and it was a monthly newsletter, like ‘don’t overthink it’.”

Four and a half years later, Climate Salad supports more than 800 companies and 1400 members around Australia, offers two nine-month start-up mentoring programs funded by the states, and has run 10 trade missions and more than 20 events for 10,000 people.

The concept of salad is reflective of Liubinskas’ “little bit of everything” approach to life. We follow the same model for lunch, ordering several small plates to share.

We start with oysters with lemon dressing, followed by salmon tartare, scallops, octopus, zucchini flowers, and green beans. It is al fresco dining by the harbour on a Friday afternoon, so I indulge in a glass of rose. Liubinskas starts with a non-alcoholic beer before deciding it’s a special occasion and joining me for wine.

The food is delicious, and the conversation is free flowing. After two hours, we order tea and coffee, and a round of desserts – Eton mess and tarte tatin.

Liubinskas’ career history reveals a similar hankering for variety. He founded a computer sales company called Dynamic Realm in 1993, at age 19, which he closed when he finished his undergraduate degree at the University of Newcastle and started working at IBM. He then started a web development company called eCoast in 1998, which crashed in the dotcom boom. He helped start file sharing company Zapr in 2005 and community discussion platform Tangler in 2007, both of which eventually closed.

He was co-chief executive of Sydney-based incubator Pollenizer from 2008, which attracted a who’s who of Australian technology investors including the Melbourne-based founders of SEEK and Carsales.

He also co-founded national accelerator program Startmate in 2010, alongside Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, venture capitalist Niki Scevak from Blackbird Ventures, and several others.

In 2013, he was head-hunted to run Telstra’s national accelerator muru-D with Annie Parker, where he remained until 2016 when he was lured to Silicon Valley to mentor for programs at Berkeley and Stanford.

In start-up parlance, Liubinskas explains, an “incubator” puts huge effort into a small set of companies, while an “accelerator” gives a little help to many companies.

One of the biggest success stories from these programs, Liubinskas says, is Amber Electric, which lets households access wholesale electricity prices in real time. The company came through Startmate’s Melbourne program in 2018, and went on to raise about $90 million and expand internationally.

Twenty years ago Liubinskas also spent a formative four months in Tanzania working for a charity helping people get educational loans.

“I got malaria twice, I got really badly mugged and thrown into the back of the car by police and driven out on the back road and robbed, but we also walked with elephants and giraffes, learned Swahili and played soccer with local friends,” Liubinskas says.

I ask about the robbery. He explains he was standing outside a bar in Dar es Salaam in broad daylight when five men grabbed him and threw him in the back of a car. They claimed to be police and said they were arresting him, but Liubinskas knew he was being robbed.

So he started getting money out bit by bit, asking to pay the fine. Every time he mentioned a number, the driver divided by 10, so Liubinskas figured the money would be split 10 ways. Eventually, the driver agreed to the equivalent of $400.

“He said ‘sawa sawa’, which is OK, and pulled over to the bus stop, and I to my negotiating credit said ‘you’ve got all my money, I can’t get the bus back’, so they gave me 500 shillings for the bus,” Liubinskas says.

“They dumped me out on the road with my backpack and 500 shillings, and then all the adrenaline came through my body, and I just started crying, and I’m like, ‘oh my god’ because no one in the world knew where I was.”

This is only the second-scariest moment in Liubinskas’ life. It was topped by his son losing 20 per cent of his body weight at three weeks old. “I thought he was going to die,” he says.

That son is now 15, and Liubinskas has two daughters, 13 and 11. Their wellbeing is one of the big reasons he and his wife returned to Australia in 2019.

In the US, the Liubinskas children had to do active shooter training from kindergarten. When his daughter hurt her finger in the playground and wound up in hospital, Liubinskas spent the night worrying about money. The next morning, he told his wife he wanted to go home.

Liubinskas is Scottish on his mother’s side and Lithuanian on his father’s. His parents met in Sydney, had a stint in Bathurst, then settled on the Central Coast. His family is still based there, including his Lithuanian grandmother, the “grand matriarch” of the clan, who is still living independently at 102.

His family was sporty – the McKenzies on his mother’s side played soccer, including an uncle who was Socceroos captain, and the Lithuanian side played basketball. Liubinskas played basketball “every waking moment” as a teenager, making it to state league level, before realising that he had finished growing at five foot, 11 inches (1.8m) and was too short to be a star.

Many years later, television presenter and technology investor David Koch invited him to watch the Sydney Kings play. In a moment Liubinskas still relishes, the coach came over and said, “hey Mick, how’re you going?”

“I used to play with him,” Liubinskas says. “David Koch was looking at me like, ‘why is he saying hello to you and not to me?’ I’m like, ‘well, he put an elbow in my head and gave me some stitches’.”

A big part of the motivation for his work are his children’s fears about climate change. “I’ll do whatever I can, as much as I can, to go as fast as I can for Australia to understand those climate tech opportunities, rather than seeing it as a big negative of lost jobs and change,” Liubinskas says.

He believes climate technology is a $20 billion opportunity in Australia and the sector will “really pop” in the next couple of years. The war in Iran could significantly accelerate this by highlighting the role of electric vehicles and renewable power in achieving energy independence, he says. It is more complicated than the software industry because it addresses physical challenges – for example, Canberra-based Goterra breeds maggots to eat food waste, producing proteins for chicken feed, fertiliser and carbon credits.

Since our lunch, Liubinskas has finished his masters in sustainable development and gone to Antarctica to belatedly celebrate turning 50.

“I had an incredible experience – I saw hundreds of whales, thousands of penguins, glaciers the size of countries and icebergs the size of cities,” Liubinskas says. “I’ve come back motivated to do another 10 years of hard work to get the world back to sustainability.”

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