March 2021 Monthly Update

Hi SM Family,

‍

Things are in full swing!

The Women Fellowship cohort V kicked off. Demo Day for the Accelerator is in 2 weeks.

We had 3 new Startmates join the team - pls welcome:

1. Cameron >> Student Fellowship Associate - running our Student Fellowship Program
2. Bronte >> Outreach & Events Associate - running all things comms and events
3. Brady >> Senior Investor Associate - running our First Believers Program

We will also be receiving funding from LaunchVic of $1.8m and $1.25m in the SM funds over the next 2-3 years to further expand our Victorian operations.

Ask

• Hiring - We’re hiring two more roles - Product Manager (Victoria) and Chief of Staff >> applications are due on Sunday! Send this to your favourite person or reshare this pls 🙏
• Demo Day - Join Demo Day - HERE - 15th April 4pm (Sydney time)
• Small Bets Fund - we’re raising $1m to invest in 21 Founders all year around - if you want to hear more - hit reply and I’ll forward you the full write up!

Startmate Goals

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

1. Clubhouse “Startmate After Dark” has become a weekly event
2. We’ve started raising a Small Bets Fund >> hit reply if you want to hear more!

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

1. We’ve started creating the infrastructure to launch 10+ programs a year and find 1,000+ Fellows a year their sweet spot in startups
2. We’ve had one of the biggest operational endeavours at Startmate happen this month with 3x interview nights with 150x Fellows and 150x interviewers

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

1. Women Fellowship kicked off on Monday with 100 Fellows and 100+ Coaches + 54 Buddies (alumni!)

Good

• We’ve finally met the full Startmate Team in person 😬We had our Startmate offsite, which means so much to our Team as we work fully remotely.
• The Victorian funding is 100% confirmed and public - we’ve got some big goals to hit, which will truly shape the ecosystem
• S21 fund is our largest fund yet with $1.95m. Even better - 31 mentors have signed up for what we call our SaaS (Startmate as a Subscription) pre-committing $4.5m in funds for the next 3 years.
• We’ve got 11 awesome sponsors for our Women Fellowship for this cohort: 

• Brighte💥
• Folklore Ventures🌀
• Square Peg🥳
• x15ventures🎉
• Upswell VC😃
• Josef🚀
• Qualtrics🤟
• 5B🌏
• Secure Code Warrior💃🏼
• Who Gives A Crap 💫
• Blackbird Ventures 💚

Bad

• MVP First Believers cohort mid-program NPS of 45 and excited about all the feedback of things we can easily improve on
• Mentor mid-program NPS of 58, slowly getting better cohort on cohort (vs last cohort NPS 50) and also great feedback we’ll be leaning into
• Founder mid-program NPS of 76 - full feedback here - lots of goods, but there’s a big opportunity for us to create stronger intra-cohort relationships
• We’ve finally transferred the management fee for the NZ20 fund - an operational hiccup, just meant that we had to manage Startmate’s cash flow better

Ugly

• We love experimenting and trying new MVP software - unfortunately this month it was to our detriment - we run our interview nights and ran our International Women’s Day event on a tool called VideoFacilitator which we’ve always loved, this time the tech really struggled
• Unable to find the right candidates for our Engineering and Talent Associate roles
• We’ve only had 10 applications for our Product Manager role >> hence we extended the deadline to Sunday >> reshare this pls!

Startmate in the News

Startmate

• LaunchVic funds Startmate - AFR here
• Startmate serendipity - Blogpost by Sascha
• Founder Mid-program feedback - full breakdown by Sascha
• Read about our next Student Fellowship - here by Cameron

S21 

• Milestone Pay in the Australian here 

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

Thanks Team!