The Sunrise is a startup conference presented by founders, for founders. It brings together Australia’s most successful tech leaders to tell stories from their beginnings. They talk about the pivotal decisions, the big mistakes, the near misses and the ah-ha moments. Their tales are embarrassing, exhilarating and inspiring.

Learn first hand what it takes to build a successful startup here in Australia, and get to hang out with a bunch of founders at all stages of their own journeys.

This year’s Sunrise speakers are a diverse group of people. They come from all walks of life but are all on the same mission to build the next generation’s most relevant technology companies.

Mike Cannon-Brookes is co-founder and CEO of Atlassian, which recently listed on NASDAQ. He began his journey out of university hoping to match the $48,000 starting salary the IT consulting firms were offering. Almost accidentally, he became a billionaire. Learn how he did it, and what comes next after world domination.

Melanie Perkins is the co-founder and CEO of online design platform Canva, one of Australia's fastest growing startups that now serves over 10 million users all over the world. She started working out of her Mum’s kitchen in suburban Perth and went on to attract investment from Silicon Valley heavyweights and even Hollywood actors Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson. She’ll share her lessons on how to take on incumbent Goliaths and building a world-class team from Australia.

Andre Eikmeier founded Vinomofo with his brother-in-law, Justin Dry, in 2011 as a ‘Facebook for Wine-lovers’, after a career that included half an accounting degree and an acting career in four out of five of Australia's worst TV shows. Vinomofo is now one of Australia’s fastest growing tech companies with more than 400,000 members, over $50m in revenue and a grand vision to change the way people all over the world buy and drink wine.

Craig Barratt Craig Barratt is head of Google Fiber where he’s helping to extend global internet access via fibre-optic lines, satellites and drones and essentially is building NBN-sized networks at Google-speed. The co-inventor of 34 US patents, Craig was previously President and CEO of Atheros, one of the semiconductor pioneers of Wi-Fi, where he led its public offering on NASDAQ in 2004 and sale to Qualcomm for US$3.6 billion in 2011.

Chris Boshuizen co-founded Planet Labs, whose mission is to image the entire Earth every day, and provide universal access to that data. He was also recently a Space Mission Architect at NASA Ames Research Centre.

Julie Stevanja quit her job at fast growing London based tech startup MUBI and moved back to Sydney to co-found her own startup, the world's first activewear e-commerce site, Stylerunner. It only took them three months to launch and three years later their company is selling millions of dollars of goods to customers in 103 countries.

With more speakers to be announced, The Sunrise is the best founders conference in Australia. By founders, for founders.

The Sunrise is presented by Blackbird Ventures and Startmate.