Hi SM Family,
Today is the Startmate Team’s last business day and we’re at our quarterly offsite, so I wanted to take this opportunity to update you on what happened in 2020 and is happening in 2021!
2021 is all about Team and Product Expansion.
Theme: Expansion and sustainability.
1. Sustainability - become profitable >> we are!
2. Expansion
In sum, it’s been a big year which worked out very differently than any of us imagined. For Startmate it presented opportunities to deliver our products (Accelerator, Fellowship, Fund) remotely with a wider reach.
Theme: Team and Product Expansion
Startmate is now truly expanding into a multi-product startup. We are always going to be a lean organisation with our community at its core who pay it forward and help each other.
Next years, we’ll be expanding our Product offerings into full-scale programs in this order:
This is the visual summary of what 2021 looks like for Startmate.
Of course, we can’t manage that with the 4 FTE we have at Startmate.
So, we’re hiring 6 FTE by March/April and most likely a couple more later that year.
You can think of most of us as Product Managers or Product CEOs who will be owning the programs holistically, with the Outreach roles sitting across all products.
This is what the Team will look like in 3 months.
Startmate already backs founders right from the beginning. But we want to go even earlier.
We want to be the First Believers (1) helping you find cofounders and (2) the ability to invest $25k all year around.
So we’ll be raising a $1m fund to back ambitious people who want to start a company and kick off a Founders Fellowship to surround them with the right people to start companies with.
Startmate is the epicentre of startup ambition in Australia and New Zealand.
Everything we’re doing at Startmate is to increase startups’ chances of success.
And we tell all of you to be ambitious.
We would be hypocrites if we weren’t ourselves.
In the next 10 years, we are building a million people city.
The 2021 plan creates more depth in Step 1 and 2 of the masterplan, whilst we’re building the foundation for Step 3.
Startups are building the future and our mission is to accelerate that future.
I hope you get a great holiday break!
Michael Batko
Startmate, CEO