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Hey Startmate Fam,

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Startmate is on a mission to make Australia and New Zealand the best place in the world to build a startup.

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Instead of waiting on the sidelines for ANZ to catch on, we choose to create the environment to unleash startup ambition right here - in Startmate Nation.

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This is Startmate now with a couple additions we’re releasing this year.

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You’ll notice that everything we’re working on supports founders.

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We’re bringing investors to the table by developing new angels (First Believers) and Family Offices (coming Q3 this year - hit me up if you want to get involved!) who go on to invest and mentor founders.

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We’re bringing operators into the startup world so you can build your team with diversity, passion and hungry, junior talent, and develop operators when they are in startups and leadership positions to become the best versions of themselves.

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Many of whom will eventually spark an idea to build their own company - for which we’re ready.

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Aspiring founders test their ideas in our Founders Challenge, get to build their MVP in our Launch Club, build alongside ambitious peers in our Buildmate, acquire customers and raise in the Accelerator and scale with ambitious peers in small groups in Growth Club (coming H2 this year - hit me up if you’re Series A+ as I’m doing customer interviews atm). Additionally, we’ve created fund vehicles to be able to invest in the most ambitious founders at any of the stages.

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We’ve created these flows to reduce the hurdles for founders to build successful business.

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And we’re seeing the payoff already:

• 55 Accelerator applications came from our early-stage programs (up from 35 last cohort)
• The founders of one of our fastest growing alumni Lyrebird Health (Winter23 cohort) met during the Student Fellowship, won the Founders Challenge, launched their company in Launch Club, grew in the Accelerator, raised a US Seed round and grew to $1m+ ARR within 12 months

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Startmate is on a mission.

And everything we’re building is to unleash the potential of Aussies and Kiwis.

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What’s coming up at Startmate?

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🙏 Invites & Asks

REFER to Startmate - HERE - know someone who should do Startmate?

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Programs - applications are open for:

• First Believers - here (by 28 July) - become an angel investor!
• Launch Club - here (by 21 July) - start your company with us!
• Women Fellowship - here (by 26 Aug) - get a job in a startup!

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Memberships - join and find peers - become a member of

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• Ladymates Leadership - here - exec coaching alongside peers.
• Ladymates Collective - here - are you already in a startup? surround yourself with peers.
• Buildmate - here - build alongside ambitious founders.

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🚀 GREAT alumni news

• Vertus Energy (W21) raises $14m to generate renewable energy from waste - here
• Psylo (W21) raises $12m to transform neuroscience through psychedelics - here
• Andromeda (W22) raises $3m to scale humanoid robot - here
• Aquilla (W22) raises $2m to beam energy into space - here
• Switchboard (Small Bet) raises $1.5m to bring supply chain integrations to the masses - here
• Surreal (SYD19) paid out $100m to artists worldwide - what a milestone! - here

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😀 Good

• 🐞Ladymates Leadership MVP is off to a soul-bonding start: Our first membership initiative for women leaders is proving to be invaluable. The relationships and trust built incredibly fast, coined “soulbonded” by one of the leaders.
• 🧱Buildmate successfully bonding founders: Buildmate is our second foray into memberships - long lasting peer communities. Founders loved building alongside other ambitious founders 88% wanting to continue after the initial trial of 3 months.
• 🧑‍🚀Pre-Acclerator Pitch Night with 8 of 9 companies that won being women co-founded: Launch Club has wrapped up with 50 startup pitches to some of the biggest VCs in Aus across Sydney, Melbourne, and virtually. 8 out of the Top 9 companies that won were founded by women.
• 🚀 As Startmate’s brand grows, so do our applications - 620+ for this cohort: 620 applications, 4,500+ votes and 51 interviews, we’re in the process of finalising the Winter 24 cohort. VERY EXCITED.
• 🧑‍🎓Our biggest Student Fellowship yet with 300+ students across Australia and New Zealand: Our biggest cohort ever kicks off next week. Shoutout to the army of 100 coaches who’ve signed up to help. Want a sneak peak? Meet two of our Fellows: Lulu & Luke (60 seconds which are 10000% worth watching).

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🥴 Bad

• Too many Startmate goals: We’ve just completed our H1 reflections. We got sloppy in setting our NCTs at the end of last year and ended up with 123 goals. Ironic, isn’t it? After everything I preach to startups. The corollary of this is that the goals, whilst useful as a rough oversight/accountability tool, failed to distinguish what was most important and create that focus for the team. We had achieved a huge amount this quarter, but didn’t necessarily progress in the most important areas. This will be front of mind for H2 goal setting.

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😵‍💫 Ugly

• Climate Tech Fellowship didn’t nail the experience to land a job: the latest cohort received an NPS of 0, which is an average score of 7.4 out of 10. The main insight from our postmortem was that the increased focus on ‘landing a job’ in the fellowship content (a decision made because a very high proportion of the community was actively looking for a job) detracted from the overall experience, as fellows would have preferred the deeper content to build out industry knowledge. As always, we’re taking this feedback on straight away and re-thinking our Climate Initiative from first principles… watch this space! (for the ones who paid attention you might have even noticed our thinking already in the first graphic at the top of this email :))

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👏 Kudos to the Community!

• Imche Veiga and the Stone & Chalk team for hosting our inaugural Buildmate cohort

• Zac Hardman for helping us think through our website rebuild. You know we 💗 you Zac

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Hope you enjoyed the read, fam!

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