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What a way to end the season! Amanda Price is one person I have been dying to connect with for such a long time. To my absolute delight she shared so much of her journey and importantly herself, one I think so many in this space will resonate with and perhaps share her lived experience.
Amanda’s background as a startup operator put her at the forefront of the nascent Australian startup world back in the 2000s. Amanda was the CEO of AirWORKS Media in 2003, before relocating to Los Angeles to become EYE Corp’s Vice President of Business Development, Partner Relations and Operations.
Amanda then founded Ausemerge in 2010 representing Australian-based ventures, working with 80 high growth technology-enabled companies to accelerate their entry into the US.
Along with Advance, Amanda developed the elevate61accelerator and ran it for 3 years before joining KPMG as the Head of High Growth Ventures in late 2016, a role she continues to hold today.
Amanda not only shares so much of herself in this episode but also some fantastic tips on the importance of self awareness, working with people NOT like you, coaching and the icebox concept on staying focused.
If you loved this season and our Connect to Capital podcast, let us know and send an email to ceo@scaleinvestors.com.au on who you want to hear from in 2024. If there is enough interest, we will run season 3.
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Tracey Warren has busted into the startup scene like a lotus flower, currently flourishing at significant speed! If you didn’t know, Tracey is the CEO at F5 Collective, the newest women focused fund to enter the Aussie market. Her energy is infectious and I vibed her passion and conviction on backing women founders.
F5 Collective invests in women building high-growth tech ventures at early stage from Seed through to Series A. There on a mission to catalyse change for 1 BILLION women across the Asia Pacific region.
Trace talks to me about her recent trip to India for Startup20 in Delhi. Completing an Executive private equity and venture capital course dominated by men at Harvard business school and the work she is doing across the ecosystem including the Female Founder Circle a partnership with The Startup Network. As well as her lived experience as a Founder.
The alignment with Scale Investors is electric as is the conversation. We always say picking apart early stage businesses is easy, building conviction however, is, what sets apart the best in the biz. Tracey's institutional grade business development background really shines through in her articulate high conviction in women founders and I loved every single moment!
Links and Resources
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We, and by we I mean my business partners co-CEO Chelsea Newell and CIO Roo Harris always say, if we could clone Phil Dolan we would do it in a heartbeat. He is our number one advocate and supporter.
Phil Dolan’s list of credentials are akin to the super long list of credits at the end of a great movie. He has played a multitude of roles over his illustrious career and is at the cutting edge of how the latest tech can permanently and fundamentally shift ways of working. This is particularly evident in his current role as Executive Director of the Institute for the Future of Business at The University of Melbourne.
Phil begun his foray into academia after running the research team at Macquarie for 15 years, an extremely prestigious role in the world of finance. He then transitioned into Professor life, starting in the role of Professor at Macquarie University. He completed his PhD from Stanford University under Bill Sharp, was the Dean at The University of Western Australia and adjunct Professor at both Monash and La Trobe Universities.
Phil talks to me about some of extensive angel portfolio of Scale companies and why he invested in them. Phil is also a member of our inaugural Investment Committee for our new fund, The Scaling Women’s Fund. We couldn’t be more honoured to have him.
I am sure you will find this conversation as intriguing and insightful as I always find my conversations with Phil. Thank you Phil for being our number one fan and most loyal advocate. Carol would be so proud.
Resources and Links
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Shift
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Jodie is the co-CEO and co-founder at Tractor Ventures, I was really looking forward to learning more about Jodie to better understand how she got to where she is today. I find Jodie one of the most interesting people in the startup ecosystem, she has a humility about her and a voice I could listen to all day!
Jodie’s passion for helping businesses start and grow is evident throughout our conversation. Before founding Tractor Ventures with Matt and Aprill Allen she was the General Manager at SBE Australia, she also set up the Innovation Bay community in Melbourne and is an advisor to multiple startups and mentor at Statemate.
Jodie also has experience as a founder of Occasional Butler, a two-sided marketplace that was acquired by rival Airtasker, and founded depo8 a coworking space.
In this chat you will hear about how knowing your strengths, trying something new and what you focus on expands are all mantras Jodie lives by, not to mention learning who inspires her most. Truly a humbling and super fun chat!
Links and Resources
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Born in South Africa and living in the Middle East in his formative years, instilled a level of risk management and always having a plan B. This alongside sailing and the philosophy of water clarity has translated into Neil’s investment style.
Neil Stanford is a highly accomplished executive and currently the Executive Director of heading up the Venture Capital team at Breakthrough Victoria. A $2 billion initiative to invest in innovative startups that make a positive impact in Victoria.
Neil’s impressive career spans across his role as the Head of Private Equity and Venture Capital at HostPlus, where he led a remarkable investment team. Over the past decade, Neil's team has provided backing and support to a greater number of Australian venture managers than any other group in the industry.
Notably, Neil played a crucial role in introducing venture investing to Hostplus in 2014, initiating a wave of early-stage investments into superfund portfolios across the country. His visionary approach and unwavering support have been instrumental in driving the success of The Female Leaders Fund, a series A and B fund Scale investors has partnered with Artesian VC on with HostPlus serving as one of the cornerstone investors.
Neil consistently seeks out untapped opportunities and unconventional strategies. His ability to identify overlooked prospects has been key to his track record of success.
I am sure you will enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I did hearing it.
Links and Resources
Against the Odds: An Autobiography
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Michelle Deaker loves doing hard things. She has a first class honours degree in science, a masters majoring in physics and chemistry, a PHD in applied science and has represented her country in a super demanding sport.
But Michelle is best known for her outstanding contribution to innovation that can make a real difference in people’s lives. Michelle co-founded OneVentures one of Australia's leading Venture Capital firms (with 600M in funds under management). Michelle brings unique insight to the healthcare and technology companies in which she invests, having herself built and successfully exited a global technology business in arguably the most difficult environment of the early 2000’s dot com bubble.
Michelle’s passion for innovation, entrepreneurship, women in business, diversity and ethical leadership are clear in everything she does.
Links and Resources
Interested in learning more about Scale? Head to our website to find learn more!
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Yish Koh is the managing director at Kit, a smart money app for kids and their parents, which is part of x15ventures, CBA’s innovative corporate venture operation.
Despite having 1st Class Honours and University Medal in Chemical engineering and commerce from Sydney University and being described by those she works with as an inspiring leader, Yish is a recovering insecure overachiever who has had to work hard to find balance.
Her road to founder CEO took a circuitous path via management consulting, not for profit and venture investing. She is a passionate believer in the power of diversity and is a shining demonstration that it is possible to do well by doing good.
Links and Resources
Academic Research In Your Hands
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After growing up in Texas, Hannah Parton Cyr studied chemical engineering and nanotechnology at the University of Southern California. Following that, she began her career in the Transportation sector in Australia where she worked across corporate strategy, safety and supply chain. After completing her Masters of International Economics and Finance from the University of Queensland, she joined the Black Sheep investment team.
At Black Sheep, Hannah is involved in all parts of the investment life cycle, from taking first meetings with startups, progressing due diligence and post-investment engagement and bespoke project work with portfolio companies. She is an active member of the local Queensland ecosystem, organising the Women in VC SEQ events and conducting regular office hours with local startups. She has a love for all things early stage, particularly companies with an impact lens.
Links
The Gist (Podcast)
Comments by Celebs (Podcast)
Dune (novel)
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Tracie Clark GAICD CPA is an active Angel investor and investment professional with over 25 years’ experience in investment management, financial services, accounting and business strategy.
After early roles in accounting and investment banking she founded two successful financial services companies. She is heavily involved in Perth’s startup community and has a passion for supporting innovation and mentoring future entrepreneurs.
In addition to investment, Tracie brings invaluable tools for financial discipline but she is all about delivering benefit not creating bureaucracy. At Scale we are delighted that Tracie will be an inaugural member of the Scaling Women’s Fund Investment Committee.
Links and Resources
Interested in learning more about Scale? Head to our website to find learn more!
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Melissa Widner is the CEO of Lighter Capital, the pioneer and leading provider of revenue based financing to SAAS companies. She has a deep understanding of the entrepreneur's journey and the importance of growth capital.
Previously, she was the Managing Director of NAB Ventures, the venture capital arm of National Australia Bank, where she invested in and served as a director for several global fintech companies. This was preceded by her role as a general partner at SeaPoint ventures, a US based venture capital firm focused on mobile technologies and SaaS enterprise software solutions. She is an active angel investor who served on the board of US based Alliance of Angels, one of the longest running and most active angel groups in the world. She was a lecturer in the subjects of Venture Capital and Entrepreneurship at University of Washington’s MBA program.
Melissa is a classic example of founder turned funder, having led two companies to successful acquisitions that provided over a 10X return to investors, including enterprise software company, 7Software (acquired by Nasdaq listed Concur Technologies.
Melissa has helped transform the Australian startup sector since her relocation here with her Australian husband in 2009. Passionate about female entrepreneurship, Melissa co-founded and now chairs of Heads Over Heels, an organization that works with women entrepreneurs leading high growth companies. And at Scale investors, we are thrilled that she has recently joined our investment committee.
Links/Resources/Companies
Wave to be acquired by H&R Block for $537 million
Car Next Door acquired by Uber
Books
Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big
Podcast
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Noga Edelstein is a corporate lawyer turned entrepreneur and investor, who has experienced every stage of the startup lifecycle from inception and launch, to funding and exit. She co-founded on-demand home services startup UrbanYou, which scaled rapidly Australia-wide to secure leadership of one of the largest technology-disrupted markets, consolidated the industry with three M&As, and successfully exited via trade sale.
Now an early stage investor, Noga is a Venture Partner at Black Nova VC and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Tractor Ventures. Her insight into the startup journey and ability to work hands-on with early-stage founders has seen her mentor 100s of startups at Australia’s leading accelerators including Startmate and Founders Institute. She has served on the Board of SBE Australia which supports women-led business and boasts a proven track record of 85% of alumni going on to raise capital.
Before founding UrbanYou, Noga worked at top-tier law firms in Sydney and London, and was General Counsel at Yahoo! during its reign as internet pioneer. She has Board experience across a diverse range of corporate, startup and not-for-profit organisations.
Noga is an MC and keynote speaker, which might be a result of her teenage experience as a professional actor.
Links and Resources
Podcasts
Startup School by Seth Godin
Books
The Hard Thing about Hard Things
More on Scale Investors
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Kerri Lee Sinclair is an Investor, operator, entrepreneur, and global citizen exclusively focused on driving positive outcomes for those dedicated to building the new world, or transforming the broken.
She has spent over 20 years working across the high-growth eco-system, from co-founding her own start-up which sold to Microsoft in 2007, through to working in some of Australia’s leading technology businesses, including Intelematics and Aconex. For over 5 years Kerri-Lee led technical investment and venture capital deployment in one of Australia’s leading family offices, and sits on the Boards of several high-growth companies, including agridigital, conserving beauty and Spee3D.
An alumnae of the transformational SBE Australia Program, Kerri-Lee has been the Chair of the female-focused entrepreneurs network since 2018 having been involved since the early days of the program in Australia. She is engaged with hundreds of female entrepreneurs across the country helping them with the investment and strategic acquisition. She is an advisory board member of invest victoria and is a member of the investment committee for the Alice Anderson Fund, the Victoria’s government’s pioneering angel sidecar fund which co-invests with private sector investors in outstanding women-led startups.
Links and Resources
The Hard Thing and Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
The Thing About Men and Women George Carlin
More on Scale Investors
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Les Szekely has a bit of a cult following as an angel investor. After multiple successful exit, he has a reputation for finding great founders, then backing them with boundless energy, creativity and the humility to know when to get out of the way.
Les’ path to investing is unusual. He got a taste for power of business when he established a thriving clothes retailing operation at Paddys Market in the 1980s. He used his savings to backpack around the world for 18 months then returned to teach commercial law at UNSW and Revenue law at Syd U. From 1987 he became a tax consulting partner with Horwaths and then Deloitte. He wrote several books, gave lectures and took a lead role in marketing through financial media PR. Over 20 years as a partner taught me a great deal about business, and in particular how to structure transactions.
In his heart Les has remained a businessman and deal doer. He started angel investing in 1999 and since a substantial exit in 2004 he has increasingly involved himself in the world of angel and VC investment. In 2009 he left Deloitte to dedicate his efforts entirely to angel and VC investing.
Whilst continuing to angel invest personally, Les co-founded the VC funds manager EVP in 2014. And now actively manages $130M of VC funds. In addition to Chairing the EVP Investment Committee his time is spent as a non-executive director of several startups and mentoring Founders.
LINKS AND RESOURCES
Les Szekely on LinkedIn
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
SiteMinder debuts on the ASX with oversubscribed AU$627M IPO and AU$1.36B market capitalisation
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James Crowe is a partner of law firm Norton Rose Fulbright and one of the few lawyers who is equally as passionate about technology and all of its transformational potential, as he is about the law.
With a degree in computer science majoring in Artificial Intelligence, in addition to his honours degree in law, James has over 25 years' experience assisting companies in Australia and around the world with acquisitions, investments and joint ventures for strategically important technologies.
James is an enthusiastic angel investor and co-founder of Skalata Ventures - Australia’s first fully-integrated seed investment program, designed to help early stage companies prepare to scale and grow into significant, sustainable and global businesses.
In addition to all this, James is also committed to Legal Innovation and his award-winning work in this area has received global recognition by Harvard University, the US Association of Corporate Counsel and the Financial Times.
While James recognises the importance of academic credentials, he reckons for those new to the startup technology scene, you can learn just as much from hit comedy TV show Silicon Valley.
LINKS AND RESOURCES
Australian Investment Council (formally AVCAL) templates
The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
How Google Crushed My Company (Unlockd co-founder Matt Berriman)
Unlockd advertising start-up blames Google as it goes into voluntary administration
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Georgie Turner is excited about the potential of Aussie startups. Partly because she has been entrepreneurial since she was a child, and partly because Australians have plenty of first hand experience of the world’s most pressing problems, Georgie believes nothing motivates quite like a mission to save the world!
Described by her fellow investing partners at Tidal Ventures, as a go-to-market guru and a fundraising gun. Georgie has extensive experience in investment banking as well as enterprise sales, working closely alongside founders to develop successful go-to-market strategies. She brings wisdom and dedication to help founders optimise their business and prepare for the next round of fundraising. Formerly Bailador, Rackspace, Lazard.
Books:
Klara and the Sun: by Kazuo Ishiguro
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Lisa Fedorenko is passionate about helping create a fairer world through increased diversity and sustainability. After completing a triple major in Advanced mathematics, computer science and econometrics in her combined Commerce/Science degree, she began her career in equity research sales at Credit Suisse before moving into a range of finance roles spanning value investing (at Montgomery Investment Management), venture capital (at Reinventure), and venture debt (at Marshall Investment Management). Lisa is now the investment manager at Alberts, a unique family business with over 130 years of history and a commitment culturally rich, inclusive, healthy and sustainable world.
Lisa is fluent in English, Russian and French and as a raging extrovert never stops being inspired by the entrepreneurs she works with.
Companies mentioned
Books:
Anyone looking to get into VC should read:
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Sam Sicilia is Chief Investment Officer at Hostplus, one of Australia’s largest and most successful superannuation funds. With its roots serving the hospitality and related industries, Hostplus has a unique member profile with an average member age of just 37.
As the leader of the investment team, Sam is also quite unique. Described by some as a polymath, Sam loves numbers, finds human behaviour fascinating and has a special affection for the beauty and precision of well-crafted language.
While he certainly would not include this on his business card, Sam has a PhD in mathematical modelling and theoretical physics and really stumbled into finance by accident via academia in 1994. 12 years later found himself establishing what would become one of the most successful investment teams in the country, and key supporter of Australia’s then nascent venture capital ecosystem.
What I really liked when researching Sam’s background, is that he is much less interested in listing his qualifications and much more interested in talking about the skills that have helped him achieve success:
• Lateral Thinking.
• Intuitive Reasoning.
• Problem Resolution.
• and Decision-making under uncertainty.
All of which have been required in very good measure over the last decade and a half in financial markets.
Companies
Zoox - acquired by Amazon for well more than $1 billion
Vaxxas – Vaccine delivery patches
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Kristin Vaughn is managing partner of Virescent Ventures, where Cleantech Innovation Meets Commercial Ambition. An offshoot of Australia’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation, Virescent invests in founders, technologies, and businesses that help achieve zero emissions and beyond. Kristin beleives there's no need to choose between emissions impact and commercial outcomes. Along with her team at Vircent, Kristin invests from pre-seed all the way to late-stage growth companies across 4 main areas Clean Energy; Mobility And; Smart Cities; Food And; Agriculture; the Circular Economy.
Prior to joining the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, Kristin spent more than a decade at top tier Australian private equity firm CHAMP Ventures and prior to that was a consultant at leading management consulting firm AT Kearney. Kristin holds a first class honours degree in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney and the energy she has for her work is palpable.
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It is an extra special episode this week with 2 great investors sharing their passion for agtech and the specialist fund they co-founded Tenacious Ventures.
The first half of today’s duo is Sarah Nolet, an internationally recognized food systems innovation expert who has been instrumental in building the early stage agtech ecosystem in Australia - from advising dozens of startups, designing accelerator programs and consulting to established agribusinesses, all the way to helping industry, universities and government develop and implement forward-looking initiatives in food system innovation.
Sarah is also the host of the AgTech...So What? podcast, telling stories of innovators building the food systems of the future. Sarah holds a Masters in System Design and Management from MIT, and a Bachelor of Computer Science and Human Factors Engineering from Tufts University in the US.
Matthew Pryor is the other half of the co-founder team at Tenacious Ventures and a Partner at AgThentic. He was previously co-founder of Observant, an Australian agtech pioneer acquired by Jain in 2017. He was the founding chair of Rocket Seeder, a food & agriculture innovation accelerator, and having achieved multiple significant exits himself, Matthew is dedicated to promoting Australian agri-food innovation globally. Both Sarah and Matthew are passionate about helping Australia take its rightful place as a leader in the technologies which will solve global food and environmental challenges. Its such an important mission.
Companies
Geora - https://www.geora.io/ Simple and secure technology for farmer networks to track and finance global agri-supply chains. Founder Bridie Ohlsson
Rapid Aim - https://rapidaim.io/ A precision pest management tool for today’s farmer. Founder Nancy Schellhorn, PhD
Goterra - https://goterra.com.au/ Modular, autonomous waste management units using insects to consume food waste, directly where waste is produced or at a central site. Founder Olympia Yarger
Resources
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss & Tahl Raz
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Annie Duke
Other
Karyn West is the founder and managing director of Apostle Funds Management. I think of her as the fund whisperer, with a seemingly mystical ability to connect institutional investors, like the big Australian super funds, with the exact specialist investment management capability they maybe didn’t even realise they needed.
Karyn left the security of a great job at Rothschild, to single handedly launch an unknown American manager in Australia and then when on to established Apostle in 2008.
Now with over 30 years of experience in the finance sector, Karyn refutes that her success is anything magical, it is just the outworking of years of honing her skills, network and always being able to see things from her client’s perspective.
Links
United National Principals for Responsible Investment UNPRI
Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson
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