The Hive calls it a day

Start-up networking group The Hive is to disband, nearly four years after bringing its mix of entrepreneurial talks and socialising to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

The Hive was created by a group of then-RMIT students, including Ross Hill, James Sanders and Luke McCormack, in 2008.

Since then, it has held more than 70 events, attracting crowds of up to 200 people at a time, across Australia.

The last Hive event in Melbourne took place last night, with Heath Kilgour, founder of Footytips.com.au, attending as the guest speaker. There will also be a further, final event in Brisbane.

The Hive is run on a non-profit basis, with help from a network of volunteers. The aim of the network was to boost entrepreneurship, especially in the tech sector, by providing start-ups a forum to interact and get advice.

Since the group’s foundation, its founders have forged their own start-up careers. Hill, for example, has taken a leading role for Yammer, a US internal social networking tool for businesses, in its quest to expand its global presence.

“We’re all doing other things now and we thought we’d rather wrap it up now, while it’s still hot, rather than watch it die slowly,” Hill says.

“We started it when we were students, in order to meet people. We’ve now got those networks ourselves.”

“It takes a lot of time to put together these events. The reality is that anyone entrepreneurial in nature who wants to get involved will always have another business that takes precedence. That’s the catch 22.”

“We maybe provided the first place for people to come and meet, but now there’s lots of different events. It’s a different market now.”