If you’re a founder who sends monthly or quarterly investor updates, I have some uncomfortable news. They probably aren’t being read in depth, and your investors don’t care deeply about them. I don’t mean they’re skimming them while checking email. I mean they’re genuinely not retaining anything of value from the carefully curated bullet points… Read more »
Every founder I meet these days, looking for PR, begins with the same line: “We’ve built something great.” Yet the question that matters most is often overlooked: will that “something” become a story worth telling? This is especially true in tech, where AI is reshaping the landscape so quickly that nearly every startup is launching… Read more »
I’ve spoken to over 100 founders over the past 18 months about the pros and cons of moving to San Francisco (SF), so I decided to compile everything into this post. Why it’s worth moving to SF? Firstly, SF is not for everyone. SF is for the most ambitious and driven people in the world.… Read more »
When Jim Cooper, CEO of Blue-X, a California-based innovation services company for startups, moved to the US three decades ago, he had some trepidations. Now he loves it, but the former Sydneysider is back “home” for Christmas and in his shorts, to share his experiences on the final Startup 360 episode for 2025. Jim, who… Read more »
Back in 2016, around the time LaunchVic was kicking off in Melbourne, Dave McManus left the city for Silicon Valley, determined to become a startup founder. Now he’s back in Victorian capital and the founder of Lightning Ventures has plenty of stories to tell and advice to share on episode 40 of Startup 360. Explaining… Read more »
Alex Miller was having rapid success with his subscription management platform Hudled when he spotted a nugget of insight in that startup and launched a second, Rechargly. Like a Marvel movie spinoff, he’s now enjoying even more success, as Alex explains on episode 39 of Startup 360. Listen here Cohosts Simon Thomsen and Majella Campbell… Read more »
For 60 years, Warren Buffett has written an annual letter to shareholders of the company he’s run since 1965, Berkshire Hathaway. He acquired the small textile company for US$18 a share to fire the CEO. Buffett subsequently described it as “the dumbest stock I ever bought” despite the fact that today, Berkshire Hathaway Class A… Read more »
Charlie Chan’s musical career began at age 3 with a ukulele. It broke. But growing up in the ’70s, Charlie was part of the dawn of consumer electronics and computers, experimenting with home electronics kits, and by the ’90s as the internet age began, they went online to share their music with the world. Now… Read more »
It’s been a few months now since WhyHive wrapped up. And I was talking to lead engineer, Simon Grant, recently about what his next mission might be. This got me reflecting on a core question I often got asked by other founders – what do you look for in your first dev hire? Whyhive may not… Read more »
If you haven’t met Labubu yet, you’re missing the blueprint for the next wave of consumer brand virality. Born from Hong Kong’s Pop Mart, Labubu is an oddly adorable toy that’s more than merch. It’s a cultural phenomenon. Labubu is triggering global sellouts, fuelling resale frenzies and building a fanbase with near-religious devotion. Fans camp… Read more »
As a founder who has successfully navigated the choppy waters of fundraising through the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the Covid-19 pandemic, I find myself facing yet another storm, this time, stirred by Trump’s recent trade policies. The current funding environment bears an uncanny resemblance to those past crises, and the implications for early-stage startups… Read more »
So you’ve e-signed the docs, transferred the funds (nobody writes an actual cheque these days when they say “I’ve written a cheque”). You’ve joined the cap table. You’ve posted the obligatory celebratory LinkedIn update. Congratulations — you’re officially An Angel Investor™. But now what? If you’re a new angel investor, the post-investment phase can feel…… Read more »
In April 2024, I started my eighth business, CapXcentric, a pre-seed to Series A capital raising coaching business. And I made a deliberate decision: I’m not scaling it. I know, it sounds ironic. CapXcentric exists to guide founders through the capital raise process, often for high-growth, hyper-scale startups. But despite working in a space that’s… Read more »
As a developer at DataStax, I often find myself trying to explain what I do for a living. For people working in tech and using AI tools or coding copilots, telling them I work with generative AI is often well understood. Sitting around the table at Christmas lunch with the family can be a different… Read more »
This time last year, Chaz and I were in the closing stages of our $7m Seed round. From the outside, raising capital may seem… exciting and sexy? That’s the Instagram version, you know it well. The reality is it’s an all-consuming and exhausting grind with zero margin for failure and the potential of changing an… Read more »
Daily startup news and insights, delivered to your inbox.
