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Hi SM family,

Startmate exists to make Australia and New Zealand the best place in the world to build a company.

We’re making this happen by attracting and investing in the most ambitious founders. We then surround them with founders who are a couple of steps ahead, investors to fund their companies and talent to build the companies.

Founders have a world full of problems stacked against them succeeding. At Startmate, our intention is to increase your chances of success for the most common problems: company-building, fundraising, hiring and customers. 

If we can increase the chances for success in each area by a couple of percentage points, it has a compounding effect on the success of each company and the entire system.

Let’s zoom in on fundraising for a second.

One of the key components of our mission is both connecting our alumni with investors and Startmate itself investing in our alumni. We’ve been building our investment vehicles to invest in founders all the way from the very beginning through to IPO.

Our first vehicle is the traditional 6-monthly Accelerator Fund which invests $120k in 10-15 companies every cohort.

The second vehicle we launched last year is our Small Bets Fund, which invests $25k all year round in founders at the earliest stages. Anyone in the Startmate community who recommends a founder we invest in gets carry in the Small Bets Fund. If you know someone at the earliest stage of building something great, please introduce them to me or Brady directly. Our First Believers are the final decision-makers.

The third vehicle is the Continuity Fund we’re raising at the moment.* This fund will automatically invest all Startmate pro-rata for our alumni from 2011 all the way to our current cohorts. It’s a true competitive advantage for all of our alumni because it means they can go into their fundraising conversations already knowing they have the Startmate pro-rata committed, giving them an automatic boost, increasing their chances of a successful fundraise.**

As it stands, investors have committed $8m to the $10m first close on the Continuity Fund. We’re almost there, so if you want to hear more, hit me up!

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Announcements 

🙋 Hiring? Want to get hired?

We've opened up the waitlist for the Startmate Talent Engine, gearing up for the public release very soon! If you’re an employer, this means you get access to our incredible talent network and can find great candidates who are already interested in your company. If you’re looking for a startup job, this will streamline job hunting by giving you direct access to the best startups in Australia and New Zealand.. And if you’re as excited about this product as we are, we’d love it if you could help us spread the word to anyone looking to hire or be hired that would be greatly appreciated. You can share either this Linkedin or Twitter post.

🎟️ Save the date

IRL Melbourne Demo Day! You heard it here first folks. Demo Day is back IRL and bigger than ever (we’re talking live pitches). The event will be held on October 12th at the State Library of Victoria. Put it in your calendars! Tickets on sale soon.

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Startmate goals

We’re back babyyyyy!

We’ve spent a huge amount of time over the last few months mapping out our long-term and short term winning strategy.

Reminder: our mission is to make Australia and New Zealand the best places in the world to build a company.

We have 4 key streams that we’re leaning into in order to move towards this. The next 6 months are all about building focus, momentum and integration in these streams.

🦄 Founders: find the best early-stage founders and help them grow into unicorns.

💸 Investments: surround these founders with the investors to back their wild ideas.

🚀 Careers: build the richest community of operators in ANZ and supercharge their careers.

🔈 Media: build Startmate into a beacon for ANZ’s most ambitious people.

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Good

🚀 Accelerator: We’re just ticked over halfway through the W22 cohort. The teams are tracking towards some huge goals and the founders, Startmate team and mentors were treated to an internal mini demo day last week to highlight some of the epic progress for this cohort so far! The cohort will wrap up with our first IRL Demo Day since COVID. Check details up top. 👆 

👑 First Believers: After 180 interviews, 52 epic angel investors have been added to the First Believers family for cohort 4. We have founders, CTOs, Heads of People at startups and scale-ups such as Canva, TikTok and Tesla. From mums and dads to pet-parents, from First Nations and immigrants to the rural outback, from professional athletes to elite podcasters. We can’t wait to kick off September 13th.

🤝 Women Fellowship coaches: Have had an incredible influx of epic coaches for the Women Fellowship… 138 of them, to be exact. We are so excited to welcome these people to our community and watch them unlock our women fellows.

💯 Product Management 101: We’ll wrap up this epic program next week. 🚀Over the past 6 weeks, product fellows have followed the journey of a product manager and have heard from guest speakers from Dovetail, Atlassian, Pet Circle and more! They also collaborated with the Accelerator for a mini-hackathon and we were blown away by the pitches. Our founders were super impressed and fellows have been able to speak to the experience in PM interviews!  

💜 New team member: We’re beyond thrilled to welcome our newest Startmate, Akshat, into the team as Finance Manager. He is competent, insightful and delightful. Stoked to have you on board!

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Bad

🧐 Lack of feedback: We ran Liminal, a week-long virtual event series designed to demystify startup jobs, earlier in the month. Whilst in some ways this was a really successful initiative, we got barely any responses to the post-session feedback emails, so we’re missing a lot of really useful customer feedback.

👀 Women Fellowship: Applications were a slow burn initially for Women’s Fellowship. With some epic teamwork and pivoting of strategies it picked up and we’re stoked with where they landed, but need to approach this from a fresh angle next time.

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Ugly

😭 Farewell: We are so sad to be saying goodbye to Ben Vickers, our Head of Finance. Ben is taking some time off to be with his family (including a new baby girl). Ben, we will have plenty of time to say thank you and goodbye over the next month, but thank you for all the care, ingenuity, humour and kindness you have brought to the team over the past 12 months.

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As always open for any questions. Hit me up or post into #ama on Slack!

Thanks, Team!

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*Sophisticated investors in Australia only. This invitation is intended for 'sophisticated investors' (as that term is defined in the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth)) in Australia only.  Distribution of this invitation to any person who is not a sophisticated investor, or outside Australia, may be restricted by law.  This email/post does not constitute an offer or invitation to any person who is not a 'sophisticated investor', or in any jurisdiction in which or to whom it would be unlawful to offer or invite a person to invest in the Continuity Fund.

**General information only. This information set out in this [email/post] is general in nature. By making this post, Startmate does not intend to provide financial product advice or any financial recommendations. It has been prepared without taking into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. A unit in the Continuity Fund is a sophisticated financial product and may not be appropriate for you if you are not familiar with fund products and the associated risks. Before acting on this information, you should consider its appropriateness, having regard to your objectives, financial situation and needs.  You should seek independent expert financial, legal and tax advice before making a decision about whether or not to invest in the Continuity Fund.

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