Hi SM Family,

Happy New Year!

The Startmate team was able to get an appreciated 3 week break over the holidays and is back in action.

We kicked the year off with the S21 accelerator cohort of 18 companies, 15 First Believers started their journey, the Student Summer Fellowship is now slowly finishing AND we lined up some unbelievable speakers for you for the Liminal Conference next week!

Ask

• Sign up for the Liminal conference - Monday to Friday 8am every day with incredible speakers!
• In late Feb, we’ll start raising a $1m small bets fund to write founders a $25k cheque even before they have a company and all year round. If you’d like to hear more - hit reply!

Startmate Goals

New Year, New Startmate Goals.

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

• We’re hiring for 6x roles and are (almost) finished reviewing the hundreds of Applied applications and fingers crossed making our first two offers this Friday.
• The Liminal conference which is the Fellowship precursor is underway with 2,000+ registrations.
• S21 accelerator cohort kickstarted with drinks in all major cities across Australia + NZ.
• We’ve published a breakdown of how our cohort selection process looked at each stage from an intersectional diversity perspective and continue to develop an overarching company-wide approach to Equitable Design
• Kicked off segmenting our email database (so you don’t get all of our emails if they are irrelevant to you!)

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

• Blackbird is not coinvesting anymore alongside Startmate as the Startmate fund is now large enough to do the full $75k investment + pro-rata (a big milestone for SM) >> this comes with simplified investment docs for the founders because we don’t have to comply with ESVCLP restrictions any longer
• Website redesign on the way - watch this space

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

• S21 kicked off with 18 companies
• The Student Fellowship with 20 students working in SM alumni (ie Perx, Vexev, Bellish, Jigspace, LawOnEarth, etc) is slowly coming to an end
• Our 15 First Believers are off to a good start

Good

• Crista / Euwyn joined the SM Team 🥳
• Initial good signs of promising candidates in the pipeline for the 6 roles we’re hiring for.
• We’ve introduced Tribes across the Accelerator to tie alumni closer together with the latest cohort
• Investment Docs - As promised in my Uglies a couple of months back we had to improve the mentor and team investment document process - we were able to streamline the process for both to get the documents to everyone pre-cohort, BUT #SeeBad

Bad

• The accelerator squads received more love than ever (mentors wanting to be directly supporting teams), but unfortunately we didn’t have space for everyone >> which doesn’t mean they can’t still get involved
• Investments Docs - turns out that if you send the docs out ahead of time, you get them all back at the same time (:P), so the SM team ran into resource constraints to review them all, so we’ve been slow on getting back to mentors AND #SeeUgly

Ugly

• Investment Docs - that meant further resource constraints with the legal team being stretched, which means we’re looking into getting a Legal Firm to help us out getting the investment docs back to founders asap which will drive more of #SeeGood :)

Startmate in the News

Startmate

• Sophia writes about the Fellowship Evolution and Experimenting at Scale

NZ20

• Zerojet in the NBR

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

Thanks Team!