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Hey Startmate Fam,

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We’re thrilled to see many of you at Demo Day tomorrow.

Particularly, excited for you to meet the current Summer24 Accelerator founders!

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Startmate will live or die based on our reputation, which is built on the experience of everyone going through or contributing to Startmate.

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The best measure of your experience is NPS (Net Promoter Score), whether our community promote Startmate to their friends and colleagues.

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In the truest sense of the word: promoter, is a reflection when others join the community because of you.

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7 out of 10 of the Summer24 companies were referred by the Startmate Community.

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We LOVE your recommendations for future Startmates.

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Historically, they have been coming in sporadically through emails and slack messages.

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We finally made it possible for you to refer Startmates all year around (for any of our programs)!

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Since we launched it 11 days ago we had 55 recommendations 🤯

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Massive kudos to everyone who is telling their friends!

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You have our promise that we’ll (1) reach out to each one of them individually, (2) help ahead of the program and (3) loop back with you wether they made it into the program!

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If there is someone on your mind, who has to do Startmate 👉tell us here.

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🙏 Invites & Asks

• REFER to Startmate - HERE!
  • Do you know a Founder, Investor, Operator who has to do a Startmate program?
  • Refer them to Startmate, and we’ll give them all the info, help + loop back with you if/when they get into Startmate!
• W24 Accelerator applications are open!
  • 12 weeks laser-focused on your customer and building the best product.
  • Apply by 26th May - here
  • Refer someone here
• W24 Student Fellowship applications are open!
  • Are you (or do you know of) a student keen on exploring startups as a career? In 2 weeks you'll gain all the knowledge, practice and connections to get started.
  • Apply by 27th May - here
  • Refer someone here
• Climate Tech Co-Founder Speed Networking. | 16 May
  • Join Sydney Climate Action Week to connect with other climate founders and/or find a co-founder. We’ll be at Forrester’s with the crew from EnergyLab. 
  • Get your tickets here.
• Hiring? Speed Interview Night | 27 May
  • Are you currently hiring? Register for Speed Interview Night (virtual) to speak to some of our emerging Fellows across the Women Fellowship and Climate Tech Fellowship. Sign up here.

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🚀 GREAT alumni news

• Kapture (S23) - 99.5% CO2 emissions reduction in their lab scale bench testing (post)
• Bygen (SYD20) - Raised $2.6M including from Startmate (post)
• VXT (W21) - Raised $1.65M including from Startmate (post)
• Sicona (S21) - Announces US expansion plans (post)
  
  

😀 Good

• 🪩 Demo day SOLD OUT: Wild. Within 10 days of promoting Demo Day tickets and 3 weeks before the event, we sold out. A new record. Thursday is going to be epic with over 1000+ seats in carriageworks. We can’t wait. 
• 💸 Investor Demo Day FULL HOUSE: Also wild. We also have a special investor-only demo day that happens 2 weeks pre-big Demo Day. We maxed the number of attendees on Zoom webinar with the S24 Cohort. Some companies have already closed their Seed Rounds. A few with remaining allocation available at Demo Day tomorrow. 
• 🤝 Talent Engine revival: We’ve been rolling out some major upgrades to Talent Engine and the people are loving it. If you’re looking to hire, you can now filter and browse 3000+ recently active users actively looking for jobs in startups (!!). If you’re looking to land a startup gig, directly connect with 400+ employers on there looking for their newest hire. CHECK IT OUT!
• 🐞Ladymate Leadership pilot cohort: We saw unprecedented demand for this newest offering for women in leadership. The quality and quantity of applications was bonkers, and we were only able to select ~15% of applicants. We now have 25 incredible women hyped, onboarded, and ready to start Cohort 1 next week!
•  💅 Interview Night for our Fellowships! We held our first interview night for 2024, with 20 roles, 13 tables, and 90 speed interview slots all up!
• 💃Women Fellowship: We’re 3 weeks into our latest Women Fellowship cohort, and our Fellows are seriously killing it - we have over 60 incredible women exploring startups for the first time.  
• 🌱Climate Tech Fellowship update: We’re halfway through the current cohort! With 90% of the cohort out searching for jobs in climate tech, we’ve been raising ambition and connecting them to the community for 4 weeks - another 4 more to go!
• 🐝First Believers update: We are five weeks in to our 14 week angel investing course, and the cohort are truly demonstrating why they’re going to be amazing first believers in AusNZ’s next wave of ambitious founders.  So excited for what’s to come from this group.
• 🎨New brand update: We spent H2 of 2023 developing our brand strategy. H1 of 2024 working closely with the brand designer to visualise it… and we anticipate by H2 of 2024 we will well and truly have a fully fledged rebrand launched. PSA: It looks SICK. (Note from me: I went a bit rogue with the above graphic to give you a sneakpeak 🤫 this was not marketing approved, nor am I a very good designer)

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🥴 Bad

• 👋Farewell Ewa: we were sad to say goodbye to the one and only Ewa, our Head of Partnerships, last week. Ewa has been part of Startmate since completing the Autumn ‘21 Women Fellowship and joining the team not long after. She has bought an enormous amount of warmth, energy and capability to the role and we will miss her dearly - but wish her all the best in her next role!
• 🥂A new era for Startmate events: with the end of the month upon us, you might be wondering where our usual Startmate Monthly Drinks went. We’ve made the decision to put these on hold on big monthly drinks which kept blowing out of proportion with hundreds of attendees and focus on curated events for specific subsections of our community. While this is sad for our regulars at the open events, we’re excited about what this will mean for our community! 

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😵‍💫 Ugly

• 🤒Sickness, stingrays and wisdom teeth taking the team by storm: it’s been a rough few weeks in Startmate land. That said, we’re all grateful it happened in the weeks prior to Demo Day week, so we’re all rearing to go this week!

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👏 Kudos to the Community!

• Josephine Dayco (Women Fellowship Coach) for 9 (!!!) referrals across the Accelerator to Fellowships!
• To our Demo Day sponsors: Investment NSW, Microsoft, Zendesk, Scendar, LegalVision and Kinde!
• Mark Rowland (Climate Tech Fellowship speaker) for not one, but TWO fantastic workshop sessions for our current cohort! Fan favourites.

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Hope you enjoyed the read, fam!

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