Kate Glazebrook

The author of this opinion piece in Startupdaily is incorrect when including Stone & Chalk and Fishburners as either incubators or accelerators — they're neither. They're both startup-focused coworking spaces that run community events. The vast majority of their government support over the years has been in-kind, in the form of concessional lease arrangements on idle and difficult-to-commercialise office space. Both now pay full commercial rates and operate as for-profit ventures. Sometimes they have government as sponsorship clients, but why can't the public sector have marketing goals? To my knowledge there aren't any incubators in Australia. An incubator as a coworking space that takes a bit of equity instead of charging rent. Have I forgotten any? When it comes to accelerators, good luck collecting good data in Australia! Like a venture fund, the effectiveness of an accelerator program operator is only really measurable over a period of 10-15 years — enough time for a pre-seed stage startup to get to market, scale up and seek an exit. Until then, paper valuations aren't nothing, but neither are they proof. And where would you source the control group data? NSW government has supported the Startup Muster annual research project for 2023 but after a five year absence, Startup Muster will now have to be supported until 2033 before there's enough data to draw conclusions from its work in relation to the success or failure of our accelerators. Unlike a lot of other SE Asian markets, Australia's accelerators aren't government-led initiatives or hand-out addicts; they're commercial operators working hard to make a living at achieving outcomes the entire rest of the economy increasingly relies upon for future economic growth. This kind of misjudged criticism grinds my gears! https://lnkd.in/gaXXP2U5

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Huge news in the business and climate reporting space for those that missed it last week. Mandatory climate reporting is here! Our founder Catherine (Cat) Long shared her thoughts on what this means for business with Startup Daily #climateaction #netzero #reporting #esg #carbonfootprint #climaterisk #financialreporting

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A Climate Solutions opportunity roadmap

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📢 (SEDI) Social Enterpise Development Initiative Grants  – Applications now open!! ✍ Are you a social enterprise looking to grow your impact? ⭐ Social Enterprise Development Initiative (SEDI) capability building grants, valued at up to $120,000 each, are available to eligible social enterprises, including Indigenous owned or controlled organisations with a defined social benefit, working to support Australians experiencing entrenched disadvantage. ⭐ Grant funds are to be used to purchase business and impact capability building services provided by intermediaries, such as financial services, evaluation and impact measurement, business consulting and legal advice. ⭐ The SEDI Grants program will run through to June 2026.  ⭐ There will be rolling grant rounds, ensuring ample time for submissions by eligible social enterprises.  ⭐ Grants will be awarded based on the merit of the enterprises/projects, not on the order of application.   SEDI Grants are administered by Impact Investing Australia and funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services. For details and to submit an expression of interest go to: https://lnkd.in/eAxj6KqC 📌 Important to note While we're thrilled to pass on this information, it's important to clarify that this grant program is not administered or controlled by SECNA. Any inquiries or applications regarding this opportunity should be directed to IIA’s SEDI Grants Team available at: [email protected] Good luck with your applications!   Team SECNA #SEDIGrants #SocialEnterprise #ImpactInvesting #Grants #FundingOpportunities Department of Social Services (DSS) Impact Investing Australia

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📢 Vote for my panel at SXSW Sydney before voting closes on Monday 22nd! It's called: "Rethinking the Status Quo: Alternative Funding for the Disruptors." 😍 I truly love Australia's #startup ecosystem. And funding is its lifeblood. Nothing dismays me more than seeing Founders do bad deals ... that potentially make them uninvestable ... ever again. 🤷‍♀️ But if you've never trodden this path before, how are you supposed to know that in advance? As a former investment banker, an active angel investor, an experienced startup mentor, and a #PR pro who specialises in startups and scaleups, let me just say that "I've seen things." 🙄 I've got three amazing expert guests lined up for this panel - Jonny Wilkinson Frank Greeff and Jodie Imam - and I guarantee you won't be disappointed! We're going to ditch the old playbook and flip the script, exploring non-VC funding options that empower #startups to get the right funding, at the right time, in the right way. (Detailed voting instructions in Comments). #SXSWSydney Equitise Realbase Tractor Ventures Reputation Edge

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A little over five months ago, I wrote a post about the mission behind Electrifi Ventures (see link in comments), a Climate Tech-focused angel syndicate I’m running alongside GrowthStream, an advisory business in the energy transition space. By sharing my time and knowledge with both seasoned and aspiring investors, I aim to amplify our collective climate impact through angel investing. Fast forward to today, I am thrilled to share with you our incredible journey to being one of the largest independent Angel Syndicates, with over 250 Angel Investors / LP’s across ANZ! In less than a year since starting Electrifi Ventures, we are proud to have invested in seven industry-transforming climate startups, and we are backing these companies with conviction: Sicona Battery Technologies: a game changer for the uptake of Electric Vehicles, is a deep tech company creating advanced materials that improves the overall performance of lithium-ion batteries. Sicona believes it is able to increase charging speed by 40% and deliver 20% more range on EVs.  GOTERRA: an autonomous circular food waste management infrastructure that is integrated with existing systems to create enduring industry solutions.  Harvest B: a food technology business that develops and manufactures plant proteins with animal protein-like textures that are easier to consume and more affordable for everyone.  NRN - National Renewable Network: a connected network of solar and storage systems that radically changes the way renewable energy is delivered for energy retailers. Stealth DAC Innovator: an innovative technology that is removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, at scale, in a cost-effective way, via Direct Air Capture (DAC). Threadlet: an energy efficiency platform that aims to automatically identify SME energy usage and switch business energy accounts to the best energy rate provider for every venue, every month. 📣 Would love to invite anyone interested to learn more (or invest) in innovative solutions tackling the climate crisis to join the Electrifi Ventures angel syndicate (link in comments).

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Asia can show the West how to integrate tech with societal needs "E. Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang are co-authors of "Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy." Weyl is founder of the RadicalxChange Foundation and the Plurality Institute. Tang was the first Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan. Slow economic growth. Inflation. Geopolitical decline. Disinformation and polarization. So many of the West's leading problems are partly traceable to the fraying relationship between technology and society. Concerns seem to be contradictory, with some arguing for technological acceleration and others suggesting technology has become reckless and destructive. Yet if we look on these events from the remove of Asia, the maladies seem like symptoms of the same underlying problem: the alienation between the people and cultures developing technology in the West today from the societies they serve. This alienation helps fuel both the regulatory backlash against technology and the lackluster investment in tech development by Western governments, as well as the irresponsible and antisocial ways many technologies are developed today. One of the authors of this piece grew up and spent most of his career within the segment of Western culture that overwhelmingly develops the world's technologies. It's a culture that revolves around a small number of coastal, cosmopolitan geographies (Silicon Valley, the Puget Sound, Boston, New York, London) and is grounded in a radical secularism and scientism, dominated by young, white, globalist, nerdy men and pervaded by a mix of libertarian and technocratic ideologies that venerate technologists as the rugged heroes and/or planners of the future. This forms a sharp contrast to the societies these technologists supposedly serve. Even in the West, and especially globally, most people are far more distributed, religious, nationalistic, rainbow colored, female and grounded in more traditional political attachments than the aforementioned cohort. Most people on Earth consider religion important to their lives, half are women, less than a fifth are white, less than 1% live near one of the tech hubs, and while nerdiness is a bit harder to define precisely, it is likely the most minority trait of all these. On the other hand, the group from which most tech leaders are drawn constitutes probably less than 1% of the population of the West and 0.1% of the global population. Furthermore, as recent reporting by journalists such as Linda Kinstler and Meghan O'Gieblyn highlights -- and as the "closeting" of Christians in the popular television series Silicon Valley dramatizes -- the dominant atmosphere of the tech world is to suppresses traditional religiosity, often resulting in technologists themselves holding their worldviews close to their chests."

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Recently I was asked for some input on running a startup accelerator. Since I don't live in NZ, and I now work in growth capital not VC, that freed me up to be pretty candid. Here's what I wrote: Aus and NZ are innovative nations by nature, yet the incubator and accelerator model has been a copy&paste of American/Cambridge and Israeli models that have done nothing to stem the 80% fail rate. Rather than address this systemic failure, we have normalised failure by saying “well startups are just inherently high risk” That’s partially true, they are like high performance motorcycles : deadly in the hands of a rider who does not know how to ride it. But there's a big caveat: that's only true if you don't train the rider (founder) VCs meanwhile simply go unicorn hunting and stack more companies in their portfolio so that the binomial equation has more chance of yielding a return rather than address systemic failure. And so the façade continues: 80% fail. Of the 20% who “succeed”: 80% scrape themselves over the finish line saying “never again”. The 20% of the 20% then get rockstar-entrepreneur gigs lecturing to novice entrepreneur about how to succeed by copying their “sacrifice everything” model, no knowledge is actually passed on, because they are not skilled in knowledge transfer, and not able to abstract out what caused them to succeed vs what causes other entrepreneurs in a different context to succeed. Compare that to what happens in sports: ex-players value the art of learning to pass on knowledge, going through a long apprenticeship before they emerge, sometimes a decade later, as a successful coach of others. By contrast, in the world of tech startups, we have no ecosystem-wide emphasis on skill development of the founder, or helping them cultivate the mindset and habits they will need to run a company, grow a company, pitch, sell, lead, and scale the next generation of leadership so that they don’t become the bottleneck to growth. In short, we have a culture of complete neglect of growing the most important assets: the founders, even though Bill Campbell transparently demonstrated in his coaching of Steve jobs, Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt that treating founders like high performance athletes and giving them real coaching, not light touch mentoring that you’d be chastised for giving a 5th grade soccer team, was the recipe for scaleable success. So if your accelerator simply seeks to answer the question “how would I treat my founders if they were high performance athletes I wanted to win on the global stage” it will be better than 99.5% of the world’s incubators and accelerators.

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🌟 Australian Startups 2023: A Year of Strategic Shifts and Emerging Opportunities 🚀 In 2023, the Australian startup landscape navigated a cautious investment climate, recording a total of 413 deals with an overall investment value of $3.5 billion. Despite a significant drop in deal value from previous years, there was a notable shift towards robust activity in the early stages of investment. Angel and Pre-Seed rounds not only resisted the broader downturn but actually increased, highlighting a vibrant seed funding environment that underpins a dynamic market for emerging technologies. This heightened competition at the entry-level indicates a strategic pivot within our ecosystem, investing in the foundational potential of new ventures. Such insights are crucial as we steer towards nurturing a resilient and innovative startup community ready to tackle future challenges. Dive deeper into the full analysis and explore how these shifts are shaping the future of Australian innovation. https://lnkd.in/gc4gNtGc #AustralianStartups #VentureCapital #StartupEcosystem #Innovation

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