I recently moderated a session for the Australian Chamber of Commerce on Australians in Venture Capital, together with Warren Hogarth, Tristan Langley and Spencer Maughan.

One of the interesting discussion topics was how important it is for software to be designed with aesthetic interfaces. Whilst driving home from the session held at the San Francisco Fairmont Hotel, I began to think about how software entrepreneurs today must build interfaces that are slick, polished, frictionless and all things you’d expect to see as a default application experience on any Apple device.

In the 1990s, Jürgen Schmidhuber described an algorithmic theory of beauty where aesthetically the most pleasing one is the one with the shortest description. Are we saying Twitter is beautiful or the simplicity is elegance. What is important is that VCs today expect applications to be not only disruptive in technology but the interface to be touchy, feely and beautiful in design.

I like my coffee and find inspiration in sitting with iPhone in one hand, double expresso in the other, flipping the NewYorkTimes.com or other websites around the Content Revenue Strategies Conference we run twice a year - looking for new start ups that need help.

Raised in the coffee capital of Melbourne, Australia, its easy to consume 3-4 cups per day. So now I find myself in cafes from the famous Buck’s of Wooside to Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto to Peets in Menlo Park. Whilst the coffee is different, there is the familiar site of two guys sitting around talking about their start up company. So I’ve noticed that often, the same people go to these cafes and are often talking to different people. They have a knack for striking up conversations with others and so welcome to Silicon Valley, where coffee is helping - as it has done for centuries - people pitch ideas to each other.

Recently, I’ve recently become an advisor to Parallel Capital Ltd. - a $10 million early stage venture fund.

Last week, I listened to Scott McNealey, co-founder & Chairman of Sun Microsystems, address a small room of 50 or so start ups in Sunnyvale, CA. talk about open source.  I learned that there are 68,000 downloads of MySQL a day. 4 years ago I made the decision to build SearchForecast with MySQL believing open source is the way forward.  With over millions of records now, the decision was a right one as it costs zero in licence fees. My advice to start ups is to watch and listen to guys like Scott McNealey who in 1982 began thinking differently about computer networks. Today, he’s giving back at www.sun.com/startups !