Just as Techstars Sydney MD Christie Jenkins was about to go hiking in Patagonia, taking her offline for 10 days, she got a call from Sir Richard Branson’s Caribbean retreat, Necker Island.
They wanted the acclaimed athlete to speak there.
It was “a pinch me moment to be on stage talking about investing in women’s sport” and Branson is in the front row taking notes while she was speaking.
She hung out with the entrepreneur for the rest of the week and found out just how competitive he is, as Christie recounts on episode 16 of Startup 360 this week.
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Having risen to the top of three sports – trampolining, CrossFit, and beach volleyball – Jenkins went to cut her chops on investing at Blackbird, before going on to help build Athletic Ventures.
She remains passionate about sport and the lessons it can bring to being a successful founder, which is one of the reasons why she returned from the US to run Techstars Tech Central Sydney, which closes applications for its next cohort of 12 early-stage startups on June 11.
Christie explained to cohosts Majella Campbell and Simon Thomsen that standards are more important than the goals you set yourself.
“We set goals and they’re aspirational and that’s lovely and they’re exciting and they give us that juice of motivation at the beginning. But when it’s 4am and your alarm goes off and 2 degrees outside, you don’t feel like going to the gym, standards are much more powerful,” she said.
“Standards are the minimum level that we would tolerate.”
Christie talked about her passion for supporting early stage founders to succeed, and shared her tips on everything presenting successfully to taking on new challenges.
Simon and Majella also talked about a Kiwi report on how much founders are paid, gathered from anonymous responses, for the New Zealand Founder Pay Report 2025.
Their guest for 10x, the rapid-fire questions, this week is Justin Wastnage, founder of Vloggi, although they spent several minutes talking about his remarkable career, including trans fats in Silicon Valley, being a aviation reporter accidentally breaking things on the private jets of famous people and coining the term vlogger 20 years ago.
Vloggi is video submission software for collecting user-generated content at scale that makes it easy to crowdsource video from customerss and others.
There’s plenty to digest this long weekend on Startup 360.
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