July 2021 Monthly Update

August 1, 2021

Hi SM Family,

This month’s update comes with a bulletpoint list of numbers and stories.

Edrolo joined as a founding team in 2013 and now impacts the lives of 180k+ pupils in Australia.
Swoop Aero joined as a founding team in 2018 and is now delivering life-saving medication via drones to 2m people in 5 countries with a team of 50.
Amber joined with one founder in 2018 and now serves 10k+ households with cheaper and greener energy.
Carola Velasquez, Autumn21 Women Fellow from restaurants to her dream job as a Product Designer at Jigspace (SM alumni). Full story here.
Kiara Olrich, Autumn21 Women Fellow, from consulting to Head of Operations at Phantm.
Katherine Han, Winter21 Student Fellow, interning in the Investment Team at SquarePeg whilst still in uni.
William Kirkwood, Winter21 Student Fellow, dropping out of uni to join the Product team at Mycelium Ventures.
Christie Jenkins, Spring21 Women Fellow and First Believer Cohort 1, who has been number 1 in Australia and Top 10 in the world in 3 different sports and joined Athletic Ventures as a partner.

These are just a handful of hundreds of stories that drive Startmate every day.

This is the Startmate epicentre for startup ambition 🙏💫

Registrations for Liminal* are now open! If you, or someone you know, is curious about a career in startups, join us at Liminal* — an immersive week-long series of online talks, workshops and high-energy breakout sessions with leading startup operators and coaches. Register here!

Startmate Goals

1. Lay the Foundations - to set up Startmate for Long Term Success‍

2. Ambition Magnet - attract the most ambitious founders, operators and investors

We received 365x applications for our first cohort of the Founders Fellowship. Some incredibly ambitious people who are willing to experiment with us whether we can help start more companies.

3. Smooth Operator - set us up as the smoothest plug & play system to serve the team

Team Startmate has now transitioned onto Asana. As a team of 14 running 6x programs and dozens more projects this is a collaboration-game-changer.
Despite the team growth from 4 to 14, we’ve got a CultureAmp wellbeing score of 96.

The first phase of the Student Fellowship has wrapped up, but an exciting journey for the 175 amazing university students who took part begins. Thank you to the 130 Coaches and 35 guest speakers who enabled a great experience for all who took part and delivered an NPS of 78.
The W21 Accelerator Cohort officially kicked off on 19 July and we’re now deep into Week 2 of the program. It’s our biggest ever cohort with 19 companies, and the Founders have set their goals, are building relationships with each other and are starting to make some impressive progress!
We’ve officially moved into the first ever Startmate office and HQ in Melbourne. Come visit us at 15 Newton Street, Cremorne.

A superfund wanted to invest in the Startmate fund, but we had to push their commitment back to the next Summer22 cohort to get all of our reporting ducks in the row first (hence why our latest Financial Operations hire :)).
Surprise, surprise - with a bigger team, goal setting becomes harder. We were a 3 weeks late in locking in our H2 goals, but now they are all set up for us to do the 💎🚀 thing I covered in the last update.

We’ve committed a $1m Small Best Fund in May. BUT turns out I underestimated the effort to coordinate lawyers and tax advisors to set up an Information Memorandum. On the bright side, we can now use the same Information Memorandum for all our funds.

How Lucy Jedlin secured a job as Customer Success Manager at Yellow Canary - Blog
How Vanessa Iezzi landed her dream role as Head of People at Carted - Blog and Twitter
How Daisy Johnson scored a job as Marketing Coordinator at Baraja - Blog
Juliet Kirby’s four learnings from working at VCs and startups - Medium

Taranaki-based, non-for-profit suicide-prevention startup Live for Tomorrow accepted into our W21 cohort - Stuff
Opvia's takeaways from Open House 2021 - Blog

Kate Morris, Kylie Frazer back Milkdrop in seed round - Australian Financial Review
How Entry Level went from 7,000 to 28,000 sign-ups in 5 weeks - blog

Startmate Mentors Alfred Lo and Kristi Riordan and their Co-Founder Werner Fuggersberger have bagged $4.5 million for their plant-based meat startup Harvest B - SmartCompany, Green Queen
What Mahesh Muralidhar and Daniel Purchas look for when investing - Medium

Why grads routinely dismiss startups, and how we can flip the narrative: Learning from Blackbird's Niki Scevak - Blog
A noob’s guide to networking - Blog
The questions Niki didn’t get a chance to answer in his Student Fellowship session - Google Doc

How to find the perfect-founder, according to five of our Alumni who did just that - Startup Daily
Our Founders Fellowship making headlines again - B&T Magazine