Before you start pitching, roleplay the investor perspective Pitches need to be given from the perspective of the investor. These things are too often forgotten The investor’s job is to make a financial return for their investors. They get thousands of pitches per year. This means they are distracted and also that they’ve probably heard… Read more »
At the start of August, more than a dozen Australian companies began a six-month trial of a four-day working week. It’s part of a growing trend, led by tech companies, of shortening the work week without a reduction in pay, with hopes of maintaining the same level of productivity. And it’s picking up steam across… Read more »
The goal of customer research at the earliest stages of a startup journey is to help us validate/ invalidate the assumptions we have made when believing we that we know what customers want. Chances are, in the first few years, your tech startup is more based on a hypothesis than the satisfied paying customers you’re… Read more »
The role of the city is changing. To find out how, we surveyed more than 2,000 Victorians living in Melbourne, its suburbs and regional centres in April 2022. The survey is the first of its kind in Australia and documents a pivotal point in Melbourne of social and economic reopening after long and stringent COVID… Read more »
It’s an exciting time in your startup – you have just successfully raised $1 million in your first formal seed round. Now attention goes to spending that investment capital to pursue your growth objective. It is easy to get giddy with excitement about deploying this capital. But what about the rights of your new shareholders?… Read more »
Growing a startup in any country takes a certain set of skills, but sometimes having a different perspective can be an advantage. When I founded my first software startup in the United States, I found that my Australian roots provided some unique insights. I’m currently co-founder and CEO of WellSaid Labs, the industry’s leader in AI… Read more »
Want to create a perception that you’re a leader in the customer community your startup serves, or in the professional startup field you work in? It’s not rocket surgery: become the person who creates a regular meetup and community about it. Say you’re a [professional] in [startup category], like [product manager] in [aged care SAAS].… Read more »
Three years ago in June 2019, I founded Adatree with my long-time colleague and friend Shane Doolan. It was the perfect storm of new data sharing regulations being introduced in Australia, our shared vision of the economy-wide global applications for data sharing, our shared experience of building – not one, but two! – highly regulated… Read more »
Tick tock – can others hear your clock? Recently I introduced a startup to a potential investor and they followed up in 4 minutes. How a startup works with time is a clear indicator of their culture and can be an indicator of their future success. Why time matters Time is everything in a startup. The… Read more »
I recently took part in a one-day workshop on business strategy. Run by Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee, he outlined a framework for how companies can achieve more by doing less and argues whether you’re a large business with multiple product lines or a startup that’s chasing a burgeoning market opportunity, by following a… Read more »
When we seek advice on startup success, we tend to turn to the winners. We buy books by business gurus and power through podcasts by major corporate players. But why do we feel their advice is more valuable than the inventors and innovators who didn’t make it? What if we could learn more from their… Read more »
(Author’s note: This story begins with the death of a friend and mentor. It is also about something I only just figured out last week — unusual for a ‘wise old sage’ of the Aussie tech startup community. Please bear with me and I promise it’ll be worth your time.) Last week I was on… Read more »
For founders, the day that someone comes to buy their startup can be bittersweet. Whilst many startups and scaleups forge their own independent path by continuing to grow their market share, for others, a successful exit will be a huge validation of what the whole team has built over the years. Given the hard work… Read more »
Last week we completed our end of financial year valuations for the Blackbird portfolio and communicated them to our investors. They’re down as you would expect in light of the public markets but with this blog post, we wanted to share in greater detail the process that we used to come to the valuations. The… Read more »
We’ve all seen it: the devastated face of a founder in the Shark Tank being told their business model isn’t viable after spending hundreds of thousands of their own money on it. It’s always a mixture of pain and horrible, horrible clarity. They knew they should have quit, or pivoted, or reiterated a long time… Read more »
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