Hi SM Family,

Ryan joins the team in New Zealand! The Student Fellowship MVP cohort of 20 students ends on a high with 3x hired and 10x who will continue with their internships post-holidays. The Accelerator and First Believer cohorts are halfway and we’re excited for you to meet them at Demo Day in April!

Ask

• If you will be hiring lots this year - hit reply!

• We will have 200x women, 200x students and 50x engineers go through our Fellowships who are ready to jump into startups.

Startmate Goals

1. Extend our reach - team, outreach, events, equitable design, segmented database

• Liminal had 838 unique and 3,733 total registrations for the 5 incredible sessions with Robyn Denholm, Kirist Riordan, Assem Ongarbayeva, Brianne Kimmel and Crystal Boyden.
• We segmented our entire database 🙌 No more mass emails to everyone, from now on we can write targeted emails / newsletters on Mailchimp
• We’re on Clubhouse - join us every Thursday 9pm (AEDT) at Startmate After Dark 🌚

2. Explicit infrastructure - copy paste program infrastructure, dashboards, FinOps

• We’re on Hubspot - yep we went for 10 years without having a CRM 😬
• We’ve gone with LegalVision, who are working on all of our investment docs and they’ve been great help already

3. Experiment with products - Accelerator, Fellowship (Women, Student, Eng, Founders), First Believers, City

• The Student Fellowship which had 20 students work in 20 Startmate alumni ended with a Student NPS of 74 and company NPS of 67. 3x were hired and 10x are continuing with their internships post holidays - successful MVP, next step: full scale product in June
• Accelerator cohort is in Week 5
• First Believers are halfway through the program

Good

• Ryan started with us last Monday expanding the whole Startmate stack to NZ >> if you’re in Auckland hit him up and say Hi 👋
• We made 3 more employee offers, who will be starting over the course of March - more on this front soon!
• Elevio was bought by Dixa - congrats Chris and Matt! - for Startmate mentors that means our 2016 fund is now at 2.2x cash on cash

Bad

• We were not able to find the right person for the Talent Outreach role, so we’ll be recruiting that role and reposting soon - once that happens, pls help us find the right person for the team!
• Robyn Denholm (Tesla Chair) gave an epic talk at Liminal, sadly media completely derailed the angle of what could have been an awesome story of a great talk
• Have you ever missed a Zoom meeting? Well, we did. Our own Fellowship AMA during Liminal. We sent sincere apologies to everyone who we disappointed and ran an even better one a couple of days later. Sorry!

Ugly

• We had a conflict within the Startmate Family. These things always suck. There’s often no right or wrong and no way of pleasing everyone, but we’re confident that everyone lived up to our Startmate values.
• Going through our Mailchimp segmentation exercise we realised our Zap was broken which meant that for months new newsletter sign ups were not syncing to Mailchimp, so they never received any emails from us 🤯 On the bright side - we now have 4k more subscribers.

Startmate in the News

Startmate

• The big Fellowship questions de-mythed
• Startmate Fellowship open for applications - Smartcompany, Which-50 and Idealog

S21

• GGWP announces their seed round - Newcastle Herald

MEL18

• Swoop Aero’s drones taking off in Australia - Age

2016

• Elevio’s acquisition - Techcrunch, AFR, Blog

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

Thanks Team!

Michael Batko, CEO

PS: Here are a couple of bits of feedback that warmed out heart this month 🥰

Some names blurred out, as I didn’t have time to ask whether they were ok to be mentioned.

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