Phoebe Pincus: You never forget your first yes.

0:00So the CEO job's yours, Phoebe. What's your big grand ambition for Startmate? It's your opportunity to put the Phoebe Pincus stamp on this institution. What's it going to look like? It's such a scary question and I really want to create space for this answer to change because I'm two months into the job. And I think the most brave and ambitious version of Startmate is actually one that does less and does it much, much better than we're doing now. So I think what we're continually figuring out right now is how do we be the best pre-seed seed investor in the world. We've had a recent theme on Wild Hearts around what it's like to step back as a CEO and founder.

0:45We had Charlie from Eucalyptus, we had Didier from CultureAmp. But what about the person who takes over? This next episode is with Phoebe Pincus, the newly minted CEO of Startmate. Now, for anyone who doesn't know what StartMate is, it was founded in 2011 by Nikki Shavak, with the belief that Australia, and later New Zealand, really sorely lacked the founder-to-founder connections, which were such a part of the lifeblood of other successful startup communities worldwide. Since then, the organizations run a highly competitive accelerator program and countless programs designed to showcase the myriad opportunities that exist in the world of tech.

1:23Through the accelerator, they've invested$50 million into more than 300 very early stage companies that are now collectively worth over$4.5 billion. Phoebe's coming to the seat at a fascinating time. As we were recording this interview, the sector was reeling from several closures of startup institutions due to lack of government funding. StartMate itself, as you'll hear, is redefining its own offering in the market after years of relentless experimentation. But Phoebe's also a remarkably well-positioned person to take all of this on. In fact, she came up through the ranks of the organisation, first joining the Women Fellowship, one of its own programs, and then applying directly to become the company's first ever chief of staff.

2:04She was then promoted to its COO and then its CEO. Beyond the walls of Startmate, she's also co-founded her own wildly successful podcast, Cheeky Run Club, and has learned a heap about what community looks like and how to foster a niche. She brings all of that to her vision for the next chapter of Startmate. And in this episode, you'll hear about it all, just a few months into her tenure. How she found the downside of one of Startmate's best values. How she wants to foster a different form of inclusion in technology. How she grappled with a personality test that didn't go the way that she imagined.

2:39What she believes authenticity actually looks like in leadership. and why she created a community principally for women but deliberately didn't refer to women in the name. I know you'll love it. Over to Phoebe.

2:56Phoebe, I am just stoked to interview you today. You are the new CEO of Startmate and there's actually loads to unpack there but I don't want to start there. I actually want to start with your other adventure, Cheeky Run Club. For anyone in our audience who doesn't know what it is, could you really quickly explain what it is? Yes and thank you so much for having me on. It's a privilege to be asked, long time listener of the pod. So Cheeky Run Club is a podcast and community for the everyday amateur runner that I started about two years ago with my friend Anna and the reason that we started it was because we both love running and are very very passionate about it and we both had this like frustration with particularly friends that we had in our lives, women in our lives who would like continuously come back to this idea of like oh I'm not a runner yes even though yeah yeah yeah I'm not a runner I don't identify as a runner even if they did run regularly um or if they didn't run at all and we really felt like there was this like identity issue here where people felt like they had to justify when then no one like felt like they belonged as a runner and we're kind of talking about this and unpacking this on a run one day and then we kind of identified that maybe part of that was because they didn't have many examples or like there weren't that many examples in the media at the time I think it's changed a lot of like that a runner can just be someone who does it for fun and socially and for their mental health not for performance like I think that's less of a radical idea these days but it genuinely was a few years ago and so we started Cheeky Runner Club which was at the time like the first like only kind of like women-led amateur running podcast and it's been going well well it has been going well because the last time I checked on your stats you'd had a million downloads in the last two years yeah yeah that's no mean feat I also heard a stat that really stuck with me which is that 70 % of your listeners said that it quote made them feel like they belong as a runner that doesn't feel accidental you kind of went went into it with that intent what did you specifically do to create that sense of belonging yeah it's a really interesting question so before we even thought about recording our first episode I think we had a very like first principles approach to this podcast we really thought about what is our goal our goal is to help more women fall in love with running and as we said like we had really identified that there was a bit of an identity issue where you know they just didn't feel like they belonged or identified as runners and so we kind of started with like well if that's the goal of the podcast then how do we solve from there in terms of like who is our intended audience um then everything from like what is the brand what is the tone um what kind of content um are we creating how are we specifically targeting that idea that they may not feel like they belong as a as a runner and then like how can they see themselves reflected in other runners around them or you know in in Australia I suppose I feel like it was that it was the combination of that kind of like starting from really first principles like what do you want to achieve from from this and building out that initial kind of white paper which is held really true to what we've ended up creating and then also I think part of it is that like Anna and I bring a lot of like passion and care to what we do like it's so important to us and I feel like that that's that's what helps you take something from like an idea on a piece of paper to like force yourself to step out of your comfort zone and record a podcast and like bring it to life and launch these events and these different partnerships and all that sort of thing and feel like we've had to have both and lean on both at different times.

6:39One thing I think is super interesting about Cheeky Run Club well it's two things one is you didn't put like women or female in the title that was obviously intentional and I'd love your take on why that is the other thing is that you like balance this idea of like anyone can be a runner and you provide all of this sort of feedback on like how should I start thinking about my gait and how should I think about training, but you also have content that goes all the way up to like cheeky run nights. And like, you have these track nights that you create for the like hyper competitive runner. Like, what does it mean to create community that spans the like, I've just started doing a couch to 5k to, I've been running a lot of my life and I just want to find community and people who want to build their capacity to do long runs or trail runs or whatever the case may be.

7:22Yeah. Yeah. Both such good questions. First one, actually really interesting. We debated a lot about whether we should include women in the title or even in the tagline. Like we just say for the everyday amateur runner, we don't say for like the female runner. And I think at the end of the day, what we came down to was we're obviously both women. We're more interested in women's, you know, the challenges that women face and that side of things. Like our content was always going to be really heavily tailored towards women, but we didn't feel the need to like upfront brand it that way and I don't know whether part of that is like a fear thing of like not wanting to have like been too bold with like our beliefs because absolutely it's targeted at women and like that's not a surprise to anyone but I think there was almost maybe a piece of it was like oh will some people be like um oh this isn't for me or this is this is trying to you know make a point we knew that it would naturally attract that um listenership and it definitely has but I suppose we were like maybe we weren't brave enough even to and I'm not actually saying it was the wrong decision like I think it's worked out really well for us the branding but um maybe like we weren't quite brave enough to be like this is who it's for and this is who we're designing it for but also not sure maybe that wasn't necessary um and then the second part of your question was oh yeah the range of yeah okay it's a really good question so like some people are like right at the beginning of their runner's journey and a lot of our in fact all our episodes we have those people front of mind like how can we make sure that no one sits here and feels excluded and like they don't understand the language we're using or the people we're referring to but I think that our belief was that there really wasn't much difference between those people at either ends of those spectrums I would say Anna and I both have run our whole lives we are you know we've raced marathons like we've we've run really we've got coaches like we're quite like intense about our running and yet that we really didn't see ourselves as any different from people like starting out on their running journey.

9:25And I think that's because the motives are the same. Like we run to make friends, we run for our mental health, we run because it brings us this structure and joy in our life. Like we really believe that there just like wasn't that difference between like someone just starting on their running journey and someone who'd like already gained so much from it. And I think that belief has held, has proven to be true in the kind of people that we see engaging with our content. Completely. And I think, you know, I mean, it's kind of obvious, actually, when you think about it, the way you've described it, that a lot of the challenges you were trying to overcome are also challenges that exist in the tech ecosystem, right?

9:59So, so much of the discussion is that, you know, this isn't an ecosystem that was made for me or people like me. I don't identify as a founder. That's a thing that we hear from a lot of people. You know, it's not a badge I wear on my own. So I'm really, really interested to start to unpack like, what are you learning from Cheeky Run Club that you are now taking back into Startmate where you've been for several years, but now have this role of CEO. I know a lot of these issues are things you care about as well. So I want to kind of get into that. So the first one is kind of like picking up on this theme of belonging, like lots of accusations in the tech ecosystem that it's exclusionary.

10:36There's even language that's used. People don't understand the acronyms, you know, equivalent to not understanding what you mean by certain kind of run terminology or shoe types or whatever the case may be um and many people feel that it's kind of a closed community despite in many cases lots of efforts by lots of programs to make it not thus first of all do you agree that the tech ecosystem has an exclusion problem I think yes I do I think it's changing and it depends which part of the ecosystem you're engaging with but like I'll speak for myself like when I first wanted to get a job in startups I was listening to all the podcasts I was so interested in the space and I applied for so many jobs and most of them like it wasn't even that I got rejected like I just would never hear back from and I'd write these like long cover letters like because I went so it goes so deep into like who the founders were and what they were trying to do and like why it resonated with me and then I would just never hear back and it was crazy because I was like I really felt like I'd be good good at working in a startup but it was clearly like I was I was too far on the outside and no one wanted like in the way that I was trying to get in there was no entry in or it certainly felt that way because you didn't have a warm intro do you think I had no woman yeah I didn't I would have had not a single mutual connection with these people and and I think I was using all the wrong words I was probably applying for the wrong jobs like I didn't understand what any of the like what the roles were in startups I didn't really I didn't understand And yeah, anything about the complexity and the jargon that sits around startups, I was probably, yeah, so I was probably doing a lot of things wrong in how I was applying for those jobs, despite my intention being very pure.

12:16And then it wasn't until a friend told me about the Women Fellowship, which is a program that Startmate used to run. And the whole purpose of that is to help women from the outside, like get jobs in startups. And I did that. And not only did I learn like a lot of fundamentals that would then really help with applying for the right kind of job and pitching myself and how my skills could translate for that job but also I just had like the brand of Startmate and the community of Startmate to make those introductions for me like I never had to apply for a role cold again and that is a problem because like why do we need it's a shame that the ecosystem still really relies on that and like that's the piece I do think now like there are you know there are pathways that exist if you can find them for sure that help you build those communities however I think the ideal state is that you don't need them and that there's infrastructure that exists on its own that anyone can kind of make their way in so I still think we're not we're not like fully there yet definitely.

13:19So you said earlier like that it is still a problem that there are programs out there do you think that this is a problem that everyone in the ecosystem feels a sense of ownership over or do you think there's not a sense of ownership held by all the powers that be? Well okay I guess it depends when you look at like the powers in the ecosystem. I definitely think that from like a venture capital perspective like the VCs I think that people I think that most of the funds do feel a sense of ownership and like care about this and there is a clear incentive for them too because the health of the ecosystem is better the more great talent we can attract into it.

13:55I don't know, I'm not sure whether at like a government level, I know it's a priority, like look at the Tech Council Australia, they always talk about how we need to create more pathways into tech, but I don't know that we're necessarily seeing like amazing initiatives yet, spin out off the back of that. You came into Startmate, you said you did the Women Fellowship, which is actually one of Startmate's programs, then discovered that there was a role going within Startmate. You came in as Chief of Staff, you then pivoted into COO and now into CEO. Tell me a bit about the journey that you've had at Startmate.

14:25So yes, nearly five years now. And my roles have changed a lot across that time period, but there are still really core elements. There's things that I own for my first day at Startmate that I still kind of own today. I think I was so lucky to start in that chief of staff role because it's just like the most amazing way to find your feet in a business. Like you immediately are in every single conversation in every single room and sort of privy to all those things that only the senior leaders might have been privy to. And it has meant that throughout that time I've gotten, you know, the whole time I've worked so closely with Batco and who was the previous CEO of Startmate.

15:04And through that, like, gotten, I think, to like really deeply understand the mechanisms of Startmate and like how it works and what makes it, you know, the place that it is. And obviously had front receipts to like bad decisions that we've made and all that side of things as well. So maybe let me put it to you this way. You've described yourself as an outsider before you came into Startmate. Yeah. Batco, your predecessor said the same. What do you hold on to that like still informs the way you want to lead Startmate that keeps that outsider perspective? So it's actually interesting because I'm like, oh, do I even feel like an insider now?

15:40Which is maybe crazy because Startmate is definitely inside. And in some rooms I do. Take the bracket to you, you're inside. I think within the startup community, I do. I think there are definitely rooms, which I don't. I feel like a complete outsider in. What are they? Oh, like fundraising rooms. And probably like around other VCs, I would say I still feel like, yeah, Startmate plays in its lane. And my role has never been to work with people in those levels of the ecosystem. And I don't necessarily see myself reflected in a lot of those people and I think that's a big part of this is like am I seeing lots of other women in these roles or not even women but maybe people who I'm friends with or I have some like lots in common with and I don't know many of those people yet but but to your question about like the outsider piece because largely I feel like an insider in the startup community but I think you never forget what it feels like when you've been an outsider and someone finally like believes in you and gives you that like okay or that yes and I feel like for me coming in for one it was getting into the women fellowship and for two it was being hired for the chief of staff role at Startmate and and really back her like my entire time at Startmate like but from that first yes of like we we see something in you and we want you here and we no way you ever forget that the impact that that has on you and so you just so deeply believe in like the power of like how can we be that first yes to more people I think that's a big part of that is what Startmate is grounded in has always been grounded in and continues to be grounded in like from when Startmate was very first founded when there just weren't people saying yes in the ecosystem um through to when Batco took over and you know he definitely had come from a position of feeling like he was an outsider.

17:40So that was a big driver for him and I'm obviously the exact same. So I think if you've experienced it, you know how powerful that first belief is. I'm going to press you on this because, you know, you've built this incredible community disproportionately female. You've identified a gap. You went after it. You found that there was a tapping into a form of identity that wasn't being served before. Is your experience that creating that sense of belonging and community is in fact gendered? Like, have you seen through Cheeky Run Club that you've gone about it in a different way than you would go about it either at Startmate, which is not gendered, you know, of course you serve all people.

18:18Or indeed, if you were advising a founder who wants to build a like really rich, deep, engaged community. I don't think it has to be gendered by any means. I think it's more about identifying what is that common identity that you're, or value set or whatever it is that you are creating or building a community around, which doesn't need to it can include gender is like an easy one because I think people it's just easier for them to relate to people of their own gender so so I think I think gender you'd see that cropping up a lot as something that communities may have an element of focus around but I just don't think in and of itself that's ever the it's not the only like there has to be something beyond that that is like bringing these people together and then the gender is almost just like an easy layer to add to that I feel like you really need to ask yourself like why are you building this community because I think it's such a buzzword and I just think community for community's sake or to serve your own purpose I don't think will ever really land or work in the way that you might want it to I think there has to be a true like a true almost philanthropic reason or a true like mission driven reason for wanting to create that community and there has to be some sort of benefit to the people within it.

19:33I say, okay, to talk about it from a cheeky perspective, I think I see brands trying to do this all the time in the running space, but they're like, community is really important to us. So we, let's do an event about community. And it's like, you can't just do an event. Like what, why is, why are we doing an event? Like why do we want to bring people together? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's missing the point really. Community was the product that made sense to solve the problem we were trying to solve, which is, was this identity problem in both circumstances really if we're taking the women fellowship and cheeky like women a big part of this was like how do we um help women get jobs and like feel like they belong within the startup ecosystem and cheeky how do we help women um feel like they belong as runners and community is a great way to do that because of the links between community and identity you just I think brands founders whoever it is do need to ask themselves like what is my motive for wanting to create a community is it something that the community would also be excited like does the community care about that motive because I think when those things are unaligned then that's no good and then the other one is probably thinking about scale I feel like everyone thinks bigger is better the bigger the community the better how big can we grow this and and I would be much more interested and care more about like how engaged what's the engagement and depth of that community um then and and then naturally again if you're really solving a meaningful problem for them or if you're really rallying them around some shared goal or purpose, then I think it will grow of its own accord.

21:05So I want to kind of turn to like the meta community that we're all operating in at the moment is undergoing loads of change, particularly at early stage and thinking about the ways that we convene the tech ecosystem. So, you know, in the last couple of months, we've seen South by Southwest be discontinued, launch fic, tech stars. There's a lot of change happening. I'm really interested in what you think the signal amongst all that noise actually is what's that telling us about what's happening in our ecosystem do you think people have lost faith like that we have the vibrancy in the ecosystem what what's the message they're sending I don't think so I mean certainly from our perspective like there's never been more vibrancy and more happening in the ecosystem but it's tough because a lot of it depends on what the the narrative that the media is telling and you look at launch vic like all these headlines being like launch vic is dead and then then they're actually not they're just being combined with breakthrough vic and hopefully hopefully uh um what will end up as an organization that's even better than it was before because it's combining like the big fund with the kind of ecosystem initiatives and south by southwest like i'm not convinced that was necessarily having an amazing impact on the ecosystem so i feel like it's part of it is this like what is it declinism that like fallacy that everything's getting worse all the time and like maybe there's a tendency to focus on those headlines in the media but I don't think anything anyone anyone in the ecosystem is seeing would show anything other than like this is a really exciting time to be in the space I don't know that I would say the government's figured out like the best ways for them to help drive impact and and help the ecosystem?

22:45So Startmate's 15 years old. It's no mean feat to sort of survive through many, many iterations of the tech ecosystem. We've gone from like an ecosystem with like, you know, what everyone said was like a Darth of VCs, Darth of cash, Darth of founders to back very few unicorns to, you know, the universe we now know now. We have lots of funds competing for early stage deals. And as you said, like a remarkably vibrant ecosystem. You've talked about like, what is the role of an accelerator like Startmate through the ages? Like what has made it survive when others haven't? And where have you needed to like adapt the model to meet these new conditions?

23:27Yeah, yeah, yeah. The cockroaches startup accelerators. yeah so it's a really good question so I think Startmate has always been a mentor driven seed fund and you can read that now as like a community driven seed fund like we are able to operate at the scale and have the impact we do because our model is based on like giving the community a job and giving the entire ecosystem a way to basically reinvest in the ecosystem whether that's their money or their time or whatever that whatever that looks like a huge part of our success has always and will always be because we've been able to be so attached to the ecosystem and and be this sort of um yeah be that kind of heartbeat where people know they can come to and know they're welcome and and can play a role and and give back and so I think that I want to acknowledge that so much of our ability to do anything we've done has been only because of the people who have given to start made along the way.

24:28And that is an amazing thing the ecosystem has here. That sense of like wanting to give back and like wanting that goodwill to exist. And I don't know that that exists in like the US, for example. Like I think maybe it's a little bit more cutthroat there or it is more competitive. But I love, I love this about the ecosystem here that it's like a rite of passage to give back. And it's something founders are really proud of when they can get to the stage and maybe it comes back to what we were saying before when like you're an outsider and someone gives you that first check and you want to, you then want to be that person for other people and we see that with our accelerator all the time.

25:06Founders go on, they raise more money and then eventually they come back and mentor and I just think it's the best thing. So I think that's part of it and then the other part of how like Startmate has survived and actually like grown is that I just think we've thought outside the box in terms of our role and how to get creative around growth. it wasn't a done thing to create these programs that we've created over the years which generated revenue for us and allowed us to hire more roles and grow and have more impact because we didn't just treat ourselves as a fund like there was a point in time where the fund was only about 30 percent of our revenue and then you know other big parts of our revenue were from our programs or from grants from the government to allow us to run those programs and so I think particularly when things have been unstable, we've been a more resilient business because we've sort of experimented with these other sort of business models as well.

25:59Yeah, I want to pick up this sort of concept of experimentation because I think it's kind of one of the most abiding things about Startmate is this just like culture of just try it. Like I think at one point you were running something like seven different programs for engineers, students, women, people interested in climate tech on top of the accelerator, on top of the programs that you run for investors and to bring new investors in, which is the sort of first believers program. Like it would seem to me over the 15 years, there's almost nothing Startmate hasn't tried at some stage and had a crack at.

26:33First of all, I want you to talk a little bit about like building that culture of experimentation and sustaining it in the face of failed experiment. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Well, yeah, one of our core values is just start, mate, which is all about this, like, reducing the barrier to starting something and the burden of, like, having to, like, prove something works before you start it. It's more like start it in order to prove that it will work. And I think that in a lot of ways has been, like, one of the best things that we've had at start, mate, is that attitude. I think maybe the shadow of that value that, like, we needed more of was, like, just stop, mate.

27:12because I think what we've actually struggled with, if I was to like sit a hand at heart and be like, we are amazing at experiments at Startmate, then I think we would have had to be better at calling it when those experiments didn't work. I think because we cared so much about these initiatives that we were running, we would like hold onto them. Search for the metric that shows there's still hope. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100 % and like really do everything we could and like find like one more grant to help support it for another year because maybe then you know we could we could xyz like make changes and around 2020 just before I joined Startmate we started launching these like fellowships that sat outside of the accelerator so it started off you know with one in the angel investor space which is first believers and the student fellowship and the women fellowship and they all started doing really well and COVID hit and then they started doing really well because everyone was bored and everyone wanted to quit their jobs and everyone wanted community and connection in a time when like that really didn't exist and so these programs started doing really really well because they were online right they were online yep yep and we'd organize like catch-ups in each city when we could and so on like we did really care about trying to facilitate in-person connection as well but like largely I mean you could access them from anywhere in Australia or New Zealand so yeah so as you said we would have experimented with like 15 different programs in that time like every different space that we feasibly could run a program in like we would run a program in and the vast majority of them do not live on today and as I said like maybe some of them we probably should have wrapped up earlier I think in terms of like why they didn't work out and then I'll talk about the ones that did and like why overall like I'm still so glad we had that approach but the ones that didn't work out like it was a combination of that first mistake I spoke about is like are you creating a community because it serves the people or it serves you and not that we were ever like just trying to serve us but they needed to generate like quite a bit of revenue from day one for us to like hire someone to run them and so on like these aren't productized communities like these are people run communities and I think when you have that burden of like needing to immediately be able to charge people money to do it it yeah you're overall trying to add value to them I just think that was a really hard balance to strike and then I think part of it as well was like COVID ended and we probably didn't adapt quickly enough to the fact that very quickly the idea of sitting on a zoom call at 6 p.m became people's worst nightmares like they got so sick of it and I think we've really the programs that live on today we think so intentionally about like in person and that is like so much more important but we probably were too slow to adapt on on that front so the long story short is we shut down a heap of these programs we went through like a few identity crisis along the way of like what are we are we a VC are we an accelerator are we an education business um and I think probably the community has like lived that confusion with us um a little bit as well like anyone again who's followed this journey will be like oh yeah like there were times where I was like what is happening at Startmate.

30:26But where it's landed us now that we have gotten much, much better at the Just Startmate part of it is the pieces of that experimental puzzle that survive are making us such a better business. So we still do work with earlier stage founders. So like a pre-accelerator space that we launched that first in 2021. That's one of our most popular programs today. We still do work with students. The student fellowship now called Student Founder Bootcamp lives on always will we still do work with angel investors first believers has become an absolute cornerstone to how we are able to operate at startmate you know it helps us fundraise the first believer community help us select our startups they help mentor those startups like there's such an amazing flywheel there and then in the women's space as well like we don't run the women fellowship anymore and we've changed our initiative so much but we now know that doing work with not even necessarily women founders but like women in the startup ecosystem is an amazing thing for our brand that helps us invest in more women which is an amazing thing for our our portfolio and our ability to make great investments so being able to do all that experimentation fail a lot and at times that was really really hard but has now like created this business that is super healthy and is differentiated and like competitive in its own way and I think in such a better position now than we were in like 2019 before we'd launched any of these.

31:53The best founders experiment all the way through what do you reckon your just stop mate like add-on would look like yeah like what is it is it that you you know you now believe that you'll know the answer faster than you believe you will and so you've got to call it early or is it you're focusing on the wrong measures of success yeah like what's your what's your take there yeah I think there's a level of like intellectual honesty that you need to have I think founders would struggle with this as well because you care so much about the things that you're launching and you're so excited and to be able to almost separate like the emotion of the fact that you care about these things and the fact that you're excited about them and that it's it's hard to feel like you failed at anything from then like the as I say the intellectual honesty of being like this did not achieve these three metrics that we said were critical at the outset I think it's just a it's like a discipline it's like you have to practice killing your babies yeah yeah yeah definitely and I think yeah I'm sure as with anything yeah you practice it and and you get used to it and all of a sudden you realize how much easier it makes your life if you can do that piece really well but yeah it's it's all well and good to spin off an experiment and try something but you have to be so rigorous in cutting it if it doesn't work.

33:13So you've been doing this 15 years as an organisation. You've seen thousands. How many thousands of founders have come through your program in that time? Yeah, I think, well, in our Airtable base, which has like everyone who's come through our programs and all the like mentors and coaches and people who have been involved, it's like over 10 ,000 people. So that's a huge proportion of the startup ecosystem. Right, yeah, like you'd be surprised if there weren't many people that have been around for a while that aren't sitting on their table, right? So I'm interested in like what you've learned over those 15 years and in your time of about the last five, in what Startmate looks for in founders.

33:52Like is it basically the same over that time, even as different waves of what's cool and what's not in technology has come and gone? We went through crypto, we've gone through a climate phase, we've gone through obviously in a big AI phase at the moment. but do you think that the kind of characteristics of founders that you're looking for are basically the same across that time or have they changed radically? I think they've stayed remarkably similar. We've probably got more clarity on what they look like and you know how they might show up and I think we've also I mean I wasn't here 15 years ago but looking at like who we invest in now I think we've gotten a lot better at looking for those qualities in different places and recognizing that those qualities can come from all sorts of different places but I still think the the core of what Startmate cares about is the same like that customer obsession that um I don't know anyone from Startmate you hear speaking anywhere will talk about like how much they care about their customer and how much they interact with their customer like that's always so important there's always something there about like the the grit or the hunger that was there when Startmate um was first created and it definitely exists still today.

35:02I'm trying to think about what has changed even in like I can probably better speak to like my time at Startmate. I know over the last five years we have gotten a lot more clarity on like our framework for like what great looks like in like a very early stage investment. And what is it? I can talk you through the framework. Yeah. Okay. So it's called the spike. We call it the spikes framework. And so basically the theory is that and you know this won't be a novel idea to people who work in venture investing but the idea is that we're looking for spikes not smoothness in the companies that apply so at the very earliest stage we're not expecting that they're really really strong on a whole heap of criteria and I'll talk you through what those five spikes are but we're not looking for companies to like tick tick tick tick each box it's of people who are like incredibly strong on one of those areas so have like one really strong spike maybe they've got two like that's amazing but that's also super rare when people are like just starting out on their journey so the five spikes we look at one um is the founding team and who are they and again that we might look at like maybe they've got some um like insane background that we believe means that they're unfairly well positioned to solve this problem maybe they have some like insane level of hustle or grit or ambition or whatever that looks like like something about the founder and the founding team we need to think is like exceptional and it needs to like resonate with us more than than you know the 850 other founders applying in that cohort so founders one of them the next one is traction so are we are we seeing some some sort of indication that like there's like an uptick in the uptake of this product and often that's not yet revenue at start mate but it might be it might be like you can get creative with how you're thinking about like where else are we seeing traction in their growth and and what that could look like um the next one would be like a unique invention.

36:58So like something that has never existed before and they've managed, they've like patented something or like it's a completely new invention. Another one is 10x better product. So is this like a 10x better solution than anything else that exists on the market? And then the final one is like vision. Did they have a vision of the world or some sort of like insight that is just like so different from anything else that we've ever heard? And so what we're looking for is like we want a founder to be off the charts on one of those we do not care if they're failing on the rest of them like it's not about yeah trying to be smooth across all five and like okay across all five it's being really sparky on one of them have you ever run the back stats on like which of the five actually in the end of the day are best predictors of performance uh like ability to raise after the accelerator you just can't they can't not have the founder they can't not have the founder spike like and it to be fair if they have one of the other four spikes they've pretty much always got a founder spike because they have this like clarity of thought or pace of movement or whatever it is that has allowed them to get that traction or create that vision so the founder piece is the one that like you can't if you don't believe that those founders are going to be the the ones to somehow solve this problem if there's not part of you that believes that then I just think the other ones may be full down so I'm interested in at the moment where obviously there's lots of chat about coding tools and commoditizing what was previously really tightly held skill sets around you know ability to build product it's now you know radically democratized through what is often like free tools yeah so a lot of people a question was asked of me recently is like is that changing co-founding teams because we've suddenly collapsed a skill set into a SaaS tool or a SACE tool yeah allowing founders of any type to kind of build and mock up product.

38:46Are you starting to see, you know, co-founding teams that don't have any technical, you know, co-founders in them emerge? Is that changing the shape and nature and maybe even the diversity of the teams that you see? Yeah, great question. And it's so exciting. Like it's such a huge shift. That is, it's really, I'll be really interested to see how it's reflected in this next upcoming cohort. Because I even think six months ago when we advertised for the last cohort or when applications opened, like we - Claude Code hadn't taken off. No, Claude Code hadn't taken off. And like they were there, but was the belief that they were anywhere near as good as like a, you know, trained software engineer, maybe not quite.

39:25Whereas like now I think the whole team really believes that like very soon that will be the case, which is awesome. Like it's so, it's such an exciting time to be investing in the companies. And I definitely think like there have been companies we've said no to before because we didn't believe that the founding team had the ability to build the product that we would now be able to say yes to. especially because again when the stage at which we're investing really they need to be able to build the mvp to get the first early customers using it like it's not you know obviously you want to know that like they're then going to be able to solve the next problem the next problem but it's like can you get to that first stage to prove that you have something yes or no and I think that's changing I think the challenge with it is that we're also seeing with the democratization of like the ability to build people building just for the sake of building it used to be I think because it's so hard to build you maybe would be more likely to think so carefully it was going to take so much effort so you really want to be thinking about do I care so much about this is this really a problem how have I validated this is a problem whereas now I just think people like have an idea and build it and they haven't ticked any of those proof points and so I think we're seeing more we call them like cisp at startmate which means solution in search of problem which we just see like people building things and then the question is like yeah but what's what problem are you solving like is this actually a problem the fundamentals of needing to solve a problem for a customer haven't changed it's just that it's so much easier to build regardless back I did an episode yeah years ago on wild hearts with Mason and one of the things he talked about as being a red flag for him as a founder coming through the accelerator was the founders that just spent the whole time you know staring into their computer screens and building product and not speaking to customers and I think what I'm hearing from you is actually there's a high risk of that happening right now you can do it faster than you used to be able to do it before but you can certainly hide from customers and build more beautiful product more easily more cheaply than was the case before and so that sort of discipline of standing in front of a bunch of people you think might be in your, you know, ideal customer profile and actually putting your feet to the fire and being like, is it, do you care?

41:41You're going to buy it. You're going to spend money. Exactly. No, I think it was funny. I really listened to that podcast as well. It was such a trip down memory lane because that was when I very first started Startmate was when I think I'd just been hired. And so it was actually really cool to go back and listen to like what Startmate was doing then and how we thought about things then. What feels most different to you? this just the it was kind of cool listening to it because so many of the things I was like oh we've now learned that like we were just starting on these fellowships for example and we had this whole theory around you know we need to basically work in all these different fields for us to like create the environment to help founders succeed and I think you know as a result of all those experimentation we just like lost so much focus and we were so stretched across so many areas and I think now Startmate is like so much more focused on like who are we what do we do that's different from everyone else like what is that role that we're playing what value do we provide to our customer how can we be focused on providing that value first and foremost beyond solving every problem that maybe could be solved so yeah it's something that we the customer piece it's something that we really look out for when screening founders because we want to know maybe they're not doing it yet because they don't know but are they showing instincts that they're like going to be comfortable with doing it every single cohort there is one or two founders who really struggle to speak to customers and it is the biggest handbrake on their growth is it is it sort of fear that the thing they care so much about no one else will care about they almost don't want to know or is it like a personality trait of just being like they're the sort of person who loves to be behind the screen yeah I think it's both it's awkward there's a natural awkwardness to reaching out to people a lot of the time it involves literally cold calling law firms or whoever it is and and you just it's the constant rejection and so I think you need that that like fearlessness to just like relentlessly put yourself out there and so that's something that we try and screen for but again every accelerator there are companies who who are able to lean into that so much and they learn so much faster and they they maybe make really big pivots early on in the program because they realized that their initial maybe like founding hypothesis wasn't exactly spot on and actually maybe it's a slightly different pain point that's that they should be solving or whatever that looks like and then the traction they can get and the pace that they can move is so much greater so yeah that that I know Batco focused a lot on customers in that Wild Hearts interview and I think that remains so true today to what we think is as like incredibly important at start mate.

44:14So I want to talk to you about two other developments that are happening in the ecosystem and I'm curious about whether frankly they are a threat to a model that you represent which is sort of for the most part like an accelerator model. The first is hacker houses so obviously you know last year we'd started to see loads of them crop up in SF and parts of Europe. We started to see a bunch emerge in in Australia and New Zealand. What's your take on the hacker house model and like how does it intersect with or not the way that Startmate thinks about building community. Yeah, it's so cool. Like, it's been so exciting to watch those crop up and I'm excited about the opportunity that affords to like really early stage builders and the support that they can get.

44:56I don't know, maybe this is overly optimistic of me, but I'm so firmly of the belief that Startmate really benefits from anything that's good for the ecosystem. I think those hacker houses are great for the ecosystem. I think there's a world, there was a previous version of Startmate that would have panicked to have been like, we need a hacker house. I actually think we've had that conversation on Slack before. And I think we've gotten - Startmate city, Startmate house. Yeah, yeah, which, yeah, exactly. Which I think we've now gotten better at, yeah, coming back to the focus point at being like, no, what's the value that we provide?

45:30And are we doing the best job possible at providing that value? And does that value still have a place in the ecosystem? Or does that need to continue to evolve? And so I think there are so many different ways to feed the ecosystem and hacker houses are a great one. And I'm sure we'll, I'm sure we probably already have invested in companies that have come out of them and will continue to. And so there's an important like partnerships role there of like, how can you plug in and, and, you know, show up and can we provide mentors to them or like whatever that looks like. but then recognising that Startmate has its own role and what we need to do is do that role really, really well rather than try and be, try and serve every founder and every kind of founder at every stage.