Startmate is hiring a General Manager in Melbourne.
If you don’t know about Startmate, we are Australia’s best startup accelerator.
Startmate has been running since 2011, and was founded by Niki Scevak who went on to co-found Blackbird Ventures.
We give Startmate companies $75k for 7.5% ownership in their company. If they’ve already raised more than $250k in funding, we match their last round valuation.
Startmate provides intensive mentoring for 4 months and then a lifelong network. We give our founders resources, advice, connections, and perks, but it’s the relationships that have the deepest and most profound impact.
Our mentor network is Australia’s best: Mike Cannon-Brookes & Scott Farquhar, Susan Wu, Niki Scevak, Sam Mostyn, Warren Hogarth, Sam Chandler, Jodie Auster, Rachael Neumann, and many more awesome people including a bunch of successful Startmate alumni.
As of 2017, we’ll run Startmate twice a year, once in Sydney and once in Melbourne, with a goal of funding 6–8 companies per batch.
Melbourne is an incredible startup hub. Aconex, Envato, Seek, Carsales, Realeastate.com.au, 99Designs, Inspire9, Redbubble, Culture Amp, Edrolo and so many more.
This role will put you at the centre of the community. You will contribute to making it even better.
What we need in a General Manager.
Startmate is still small and unknown.
For the 100 or so people who are on the inside, Startmate is a wonderful thing. But we’re under no illusions. No-one really knows about us.
Startmate is 150 metres into a marathon.
Our new GM is going to pick up the pace and move us forward.
You can think of each Startmate batch as a mini venture fund. The teams are our portfolio companies, the mentors are our LPs.
Being Startmate GM is the perfect role for someone who thinks they’ll make a great investor. You’ll have access to dealflow, to networks, to capital and most importantly to the real work of startups.
This is not about a bunch of bullshit conference panels paying lip service to startups, or some desperate corporate innovation gig.
This is in-the-weeds, nothing’s-working, we-might-not-make-it-out-alive, all-we-have-is-the-three-of-us-and-a-handful-of-customers version of startups that people idolise yet rarely do.
Your job as GM will be to help us find and fund as many early stage companies as you can and help accelerate them to being Australia’s next Upguard, Bugcrowd, Propeller, Edrolo or HappyCo!
What a General Manager will do.
As GM, only two outputs will matter:
Do we fund founders that go on to build valuable companies?
Do those founders recommend us unreservedly to other founders?
To achieve those outputs, the inputs will include:
Meeting with lots of founders and trying to be helpful to them every time.
Helping founders directly for the duration of each program (either 1:1, or by connecting them with someone in the network) and then ongoing, as they grow.
Finding and recruiting the best possible mentors to help our teams.
Running the selection process amongst the mentors to find our top companies for each batch.
Strategy: Specifically how do we build a bigger pipeline of amazing founders.
Fund Operations: Managing legals and accounting and the process of getting the money to the teams each batch (for this, you’ll need more hustle and grit than you might realise).
Program operations: Coordinating demo days, mentor roulettes, keynote speakers, perks, our website and comms strategy, our SF immersion trips and any other events/introductions the teams might need.
An open mind: The truth is, we don’t know for sure how Startmate might evolve in the coming years. The Startmate GM will help us chart the course for what Startmate becomes.
And that’s just the beginning. You will make of this role what you want. It can be as big as you can imagine it.
Details
This is the kind of role that should inflect your career.
The role comes with competitive salary, super, equity and most important, significant mentorship, coaching and feedback from smart, passionate colleagues at Startmate and Blackbird Ventures.
The Startmate community will become your life, and that will be an amazing thing.
Send your LinkedIn URL and no more than 250 words on what makes you a compelling Startmate GM to nick+gm@startmate.com.au and we can meet for coffee to discuss.
Good luck!