From SF to New York: Notes from the Epicentre of Action
After attending Montgomery Summit in California in March, I wrote about the gap between what's being discussed in these rooms and what reaches Australian shores - and how that gap is closing.
In the weeks that followed, I returned to the USA to spend a fortnight in San Francisco and New York, providing an even clearer picture of what that actually looks like on the ground, amongst the action.
The honest summary is this: the pace is faster than Australians think, the expectations are higher than they were even two years ago, and the cost of being far from the centre is rising. Some notes and summaries of my conversations in that fortnight, are below.
— Anthony Merton, Co-Founder Merton Lawyers.
All Roads Leading To SF
There's genuine FOMO among US VCs about AI right now, and it's concentrated in one place. All roads lead to San Francisco. Not hyperbole, but instead what you actually feel when you're in those rooms.
The number of times I heard a founder describe building something in AI, only to learn that Claude or ChatGPT had shipped the same capability that week, was striking. Working backwards from that: if I were a founder today, I'd want to be at the epicentre - not just to chase capital, but to know what's coming before it arrives.
San Francisco is back, by the way. It has the energy of 2010 again. Young, ambitious founders everywhere.
On top of a packed schedule of meetings and strategic discussions, there was one moment for me that felt genuinely persona & nostalgic: hosting ‘A Round Before The Round’, a casual gathering for Australian founders who've landed in the US.
We held it at Balboa Cafe, which carries a bit of history for me.
Back in 2010, I came to San Francisco after my first venture - an ecommerce business called Melbourne Christmas Trees - and Balboa was part of that trip.
Instagram hadn't launched.
Facebook was still private.
There was a buzz of youth in the Bay Area that was infectious.
I've been back every year since. To find myself there again, now with three kids, an ambitious legal practice, and a very clear sense of where we're going with Merton - hosting a bunch of the most interesting founders, investors, and law firm partners in the world - provided some enjoyable moments of reflection.
CARTA
With Gracie Arnold - Strategic Partnerships & LATAM + Canada Expansion - Carta
Carta is the equity management platform that has become the operating system for the cap table - used by hundreds of thousands of companies, investors, and employees to manage ownership, valuations, and equity across the full company lifecycle. They were foundational sponsors of the Merton Lawyers Startup Board Conference 2025, and catching up with their team in SF was a natural extension of that relationship.
We organised a tour of the Carta offices and continued the conversation regarding cap table dynamics and our ongoing collaborations, reinforcing how aligned our networks are.
KKR
With Aaron Tan - KKR
Aaron Tan is originally from Melbourne - we actually attended the same school, many years apart - and he made his way to San Francisco to head up KKR's growth fund. KKR is a leading global investment firm that offers alternative asset management as well as capital markets and insurance solutions, and to visit their SF offices and dive deeper into their investment mandate was hugely valuable.
The single most instructive thing Aaron shared wasn't what KKR looks for, but instead, the aspect of ‘volume.’ Working in a similar role in Sydney, he might track twenty companies at any given time. In San Francisco, that number runs into the thousands.
There's a depth of the team and obvious infrastructure to match, but the sheer scale of deal flow means the default position for any investor is to find a reason to say no. An extraordinarily competitive market and real context setter for the difference in scale between the USA and Aus.
For Australian founders thinking about raising in the US: the question isn't whether you're good enough. It's whether you stand out clearly enough, fast enough, in a market where the competition is constant and the noise is deafening.
“A Round Before The Round” @ Balboa Cafe
Among those who joined us at Balboa: Grace Brown, Co-Founder and CEO of Andromeda Robotics - the Melbourne-based company that has built Abi, a humanoid companion robot for aged care that converses in 90 languages and builds genuine one-on-one connections with residents.
Andromeda raised $23 million in Series A funding last year at a $100 million valuation, with the round led by San Francisco-based Forerunner Ventures. Grace is one of the more compelling founder stories coming out of Australia right now, and the fact that she's actively expanding into the US market made her presence at the event entirely fitting.
To highlight a couple of names who joined us: Nikita Le Messier who just joined OpenAI in a GTM capacity, and Tristen Langley from Amalfi Capital Partners attended - repping the long-short technology-focused investment firm she co-runs alongside Paul Waide, with operations spanning four continents.
These gatherings matter. And I look forward to curating more each time we return to the USA, for many more Aus founders setting up their operations right in the heartbeat of technology and venture building.
Sand Hill Road
There are moments on these trips that are as much about the geography as the meeting itself.
Catching up with SVB’s Andy Tsao in Menlo Park was one of those. We're stationed right near Sand Hill Road - where Kleiner Perkins, KKR, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz all have offices. For anyone with even a passing interest in the history of venture capital, that stretch of road carries some significant weight.
Andy is Head of SVB's Global Gateway - the division specifically focused on helping innovation companies from emerging markets with their US and international expansion, managing SVB's relationships with venture capital and private equity firms outside the US, and supporting emerging market companies as they seek US market entry.
A great point of reference for us at Merton Lawyers when thinking through our (continually refined!) strategy for expanding the scope of our philosophically-aligned Project Frontier.
SVB were part of our inaugural Merton Lawyers Startup Board Conference 2025, and our conversation reminded and reinforced why that relationship matters. Andy brings over two decades of experience banking high-growth technology companies across global markets - and the perspective he carries on what Australian companies actually need to get right before.
I also caught up with Erik Edwards of Cooley’s: Erik is the head of their Palo Alto corporate group and a member of the firm's firmwide partnership nominating and pro bono committees. And he shared with me a story you don’t forget quickly…
He mentioned in passing that his father had once introduced him to their neighbour for some advice in the late nineties. That neighbour was Jensen Huang.
The Valley is full of stories like that. They're a reminder of what proximity to the right people, at the right time, actually produces.
Google HQ
I caught up with my old mate Joe Valente at Google - someone I met through the Melbourne Accelerator Program back in 2011, when we were both early in our respective journeys. Joe continued on to build something genuinely impressive: a legal, product, and engineering background that translated into a senior role (Director of Product Management) at one of the world's most consequential companies.
To go from Carlton meetups in the early days of Melbourne's startup scene, to sitting at the Google campus comparing notes on family and how far the careers have come, was a nice moment to share together. Enhanced nicely by the delicious burritos on offer at Google HQ.
Playground Global
I met up withJim Vieceli, Head of Legal at Playground Global - the deep-tech venture firm founded by Australian Peter Hall, whose story deserves to be far better known in Australia than it is.
We've worked on a number of deals together, including advising on both the Element Zero ($US10M) and Syenta ($US26M) deals. Jim is a former Sullivan & Cromwell attorney and an excellent operator. Conversations with him are always as much about how to lift the quality of the practice as they are about individual transactions - the exact feedback and intel I travel across the world for just to hear it face-to-face. Big fan of Playground Global.
A Dip in the Bay. Why Not?
I finished the San Francisco leg with a swim in the bay, out the front of Alcatraz. Dave, the boat master at the South End Rowing Club, was keen to let me know they have reciprocal rights with their counterpart in Australia - which happens to be Icebergs, Sydney. What a small world.
Had to take a photo with Dave
Onwards to the Big Apple
The New York leg had a different pace for me: less product, more strategy.
It was an immense pleasure to spend extended time with Steven Marshall AO - President of the American Australian Association and former Premier of South Australia - in New York.
Having the opportunity to discuss our formative work facilitating US expansion pathways for scores of Australian founders over the past seven-plus years, this was one important relationship to establish for our continued ambition to provide that pathway to many more.
The fact that the first official NFL game on Australian soil lands in September - the same week as our Startup Board Conference at the Sydney Opera House - gave us plenty of Australia-focused small talk alongside the bigger picture.
Sullivan & Cromwell
With and (R) Ben Fleming
Some extremely substantial time-spent in NY was hearing directly about the Sullivan & Cromwell focus and strategy, and what parallels our worldview at Merton Lawyers exhibits.
Ben Fleming was recently made Partner at Sullivan & Cromwell - and it has been a genuine pleasure to watch his development over the years, building a working relationship that now extends to his broader team including Paul Rotar. The collaboration we're developing together - building solutions for Australian companies both locally and in the US - is one of the more important threads we discussed, and a key focus in the Merton New York presence.
James M Shea Jr is also a Special Counsel at Sullivan & Cromwell, with a practice spanning capital markets, M&A, and cross-border transactions. His work includes advising on major redomiciliation matters - which is a particular point of interest for us as we help educate more companies seeking to expand to the USA. Specifically: what does it actually mean to move a company to Texas or Florida, what are the genuine tax residency implications, what’s the warts-and-all version that the headlines don't cover, and much more that can’t possibly be covered in just one lunch.
Founders hear "redomicile to the US" constantly. But what they hear less often is what it actually costs, what it requires, and what it doesn't solve. A conversation well worth having, most certainly with James!
Newlab Brooklyn
I visited Newlab in Brooklyn - a platform for critical technology - and I'll say plainly: it was one of the most energising physical spaces I've encountered in years. A repurposed industrial building that now houses some of the most serious deep-tech companies working today, with a culture of genuine cross-collaboration between residents that you rarely see manufactured anywhere.
Thanks to being hosted by Michelle Brechtelsbauer, Vice President of Strategy at Newlab, what struck me most about Newlab was the model itself.
Newlab operates strategically across multiple cities - Detroit in partnership with Ford, Japan, Portland - with government and industry partners co-located by design. It's a model for how you build a hardware and manufacturing ecosystem that thinks globally from day one.
And most definitely a model that should properly exist in Australia.
Following the Newlab operations discussion, it was time for a catchup and tour with a group based in Newlab itself, organised by the team at Vycarb, who made it impossible not to leave with a heightened sense of what's possible.
Vycarb is a technology company developing scalable carbon capture, removal, and storage - combining a novel carbon neutralisation process with first-of-its-kind carbon sensing technology to enable instant, permanent, and measurable CO₂ capture in any water.
Founder Garrett Boudinot and VP of Ops Greg Humphries were extremely generous hosts! (And regular visitors to Australia with a number of partnerships in motion)
Amazon, NYC
We've known Sameer Kenkare for a number of years - we first connected at an event Merton hosted - and he graciously opened up the Amazon offices for a visit and a conversation about the companies we're helping expand to America.
The most useful aspect of getting to know Sameer and the Amazon focus was the view into what is genuinely investable at this level of the market right now. Revenue, product, and team are table stakes, of course.
What's becoming increasingly decisive is board composition, scalability, competitive positioning, and - critically - the co-investment question: where does the next round come from, and who is on your cap table that can strategically open the next door?
That last point is something we're working to embed more deeply at the board level for the founders we advise. Investors of this calibre are not just writing cheques, but are assessing the whole architecture of how companies grow, and helping founders align their thinking the same way.
Pryor Cashman
Let's not forget that it's not only founders and investors who have made the Australia–US crossing successfully. Nick Saady, Counsel at Pryor Cashman in New York, is one of the most impressive Australian lawyers to have built a practice in the US - from both a knowledge and a work ethic standpoint.
His practice spans litigation, transactions, and IP, with a client base concentrated in music, entertainment, and sports, including outside counsel roles for two major US sports leagues. It's been a real pleasure watching it develop.
I didn’t buy the jacket btw. But go Knicks, fantastic to see them in the NBA Finals this year.
In Summary: What Australian Founders Need to Hear
By far the most impactful US trip I’ve had. And some of the most useful intel we've brought home.
The headline is straightforward, even if it's not comfortable: the expectations have shifted significantly, and the pace of that shift is accelerating.
Not long ago, $1M ARR was a reasonable baseline to land and expand in the US. Speaking to US VC clients across this trip, the floor has moved. The conversations are consistently landing around $5M ARR as a minimum - and $10–15M if you're looking at early-stage US institutional capital.
The reason is simple: it's now so easy to build a profitable company that competition has exploded. KKR captured this perfectly: deal flow in the thousands, team resources to match, and still the job is finding a reason to say no.
The CGT changes in Australia will accelerate this further. More founders will look at the numbers and make the move. And US investors are increasingly clear that they want companies to be US entities - not because they have anything against Australia, but because they want to minimise risk and proximity to their portfolio.
None of this is insurmountable. But it does mean that the cost of being unprepared - wrong structure, weak board, no network, no understanding of US market expectations - is now higher than it's ever been.
What we consistently see is that the founders who make it aren't necessarily the ones with the best product. They're the ones who treated their network, board, and legal infrastructure as strategic assets from day one. Mindset. Strategy. Network. All in strategic alignment.
That's the work. And it's the reason these trips matter - not as travelogues, but as the core intelligence that shapes the advice we give.
More to come - including the Merton Lawyers Startup Board Conference, Sydney Opera House, September 7, 2026.
We look forward to sharing details of that important activation in the coming days, but for now, you can read more about the work we do with founders expanding to the USA with our Project Frontier.
— AC. Follow me on LinkedIn HERE
