"I'm not sure an anchor tenant that is a 105-year old company is going to attract start-ups and venture capital to create a tech hub."
That 's what a bitterly disappointed Scott Farquhar, co-founder of tech start-up success story Atlassian, told me a couple of weeks ago when his software company lost out on rights to develop an office site on the fringes of Sydney to the Commonwealth Bank. 
That decision was probably a huge missed opportunity, and speaks volumes about this country's economic priorities. But what Farquhar said got me thinking. 
Corporate Australia is pretty old. Certainly our biggest companies are, like CBA (which is actually 103 years old). 
Take a look at the ten biggest companies on the ASX 200 index:
They are all quite ancient. The youngest member of the top 10 is Telstra, and we are being generous with its founding date. You could say the telecom giant's history really stretches back to 1901 when the Postmaster General's Department was created. 
Being old isn't a problem per se. But what's more concerning is the level of inertia among the our big aged companies. Eight of today's ten biggest companies were already in the top 10 a decade ago. The two that have fallen out - Westfield (founded in 1960) and Woodside Petroleum (founded in 1954) - are also quite old. And the two companies that replaced them are even older: CSL started out in 1916, and Wesfarmers in 1914. 
Now, let's take a look at the ten biggest companies on the main stock index in the US.
As you can see, it's evenly split between very old 19th-century corporations, and tech companies founded in more recent times, with the three biggest no older than forty. 
Only four of those ten companies (and only one of them in tech, Microsoft) were among the ten biggest companies on the country's main index a decade ago 
This illustrates the incredible changes that have happened in that short period.  
Just a decade ago, there was no iPhone. Google had only just completed its IPO. Facebook had only just moved out of a Harvard dorm room. Amazon was still considered a bookseller. 
This is admittedly a limited analysis, using a small sample of companies. But it still speaks to one of the biggest issues facing this country's corporate scene, which Fairfax Media's Jessica Irvine recently described as "deeply risk-averse" and "dominated by rent-seeking oligopolists". 
While there are some wonderful companies in Australia, it's hard to find any really big ones on the local stockmarket that were founded this millennium. (Spin-offs from bigger entities, like BHP's South32  and Westfield's Scentre Group don't count.)  
We are not alone here, either. The youngest company in France's main stock index was founded in 1967. 
There are many, many things to dislike about the US economic system. But the dynamism of its biggest companies isn't one of them. A 2012 analysis by researcher Innosight found that the average tenure of a company in the US S&P 500 benchmark index had shrunk to just 18 years, from about 61 years in the 1950s. According to this analysis, three out of four companies on the index would be replaced by 2027. Every few years a Facebook seems to emerge, while a Kodak goes by the wayside. 
That type of creative destruction is not happening here, at least not at the very top. Our domestic oligopolies, which tend to charge consumers relatively high prices and pay shareholders (often the same people) relatively high dividends, seem, on face value, to be in a pretty safe position. But look at what's happened to retail giant Woolworths over the past few years, which has been rocked by the entrance of German discounter Aldi. Or how the big four banks are facing new threats from smaller, internet-technology based competitors. 
Business is moving at a rapid pace and technology is rendering many of the advantages local companies have enjoyed for years increasingly obsolete. So whether our biggest companies avoid creative destruction over the next decade or two remains to be seen.