Folks, since Geoff has been such a mainstay on this list and feature of the
Australian startup community I thought there is none better a group to ask
him intelligent questions!
Our AMA is live at 1pm and come and join us:
http://blackbird.vc/ama-geoff-mcqueen
[image: photo]
*Niki Scevak*
Co
to an
entrepreneurial charity on Chuffed.org.
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/a-fireside-chat-with-sean-ellis-qualaroogrowthhackersdropbox-tickets-19177483369
[image: photo]
*Niki Scevak*
Co-Founder, Blackbird Ventures
m:0400 321 551
<http://ws-stats.appspot.com
Beachers, I wanted to let you know that The Sunrise conference is on again
this year on Monday, May 25th as part of the Vivid Festival.
The aim of The Sunrise is the same as Blackbird and Startmate: founders
helping founders.
The day is a series of sessions with our most successful founders
(comp
Folks, I wanted to invite everyone along to the Startmate demo day on
Thursday, April 9th at the Cell Block Theatre in Darlinghurst.
Register here:
http://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/startmate-2015-demo-day-tickets-15970876321
(tickets are $5 and we donate the proceeds to charity/Kiva).
We've all tal
Folks, I'd love for you to come along to our Startmate 2015 applications
launch, where we have John Collison, co-founder of Stripe keynoting. Also,
hear from founders of LifX, Vero, Flightfox and Chuffed on how they are
building the next generation of great startups in Australia.
Where/when: Thurs
Was about to be introduced and then frozen at last minute because of budget
message of cuts. Latest update is to be introduced 'later this year'.
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AMEN BROTHER!
On Thursday, 8 May 2014 01:41:23 UTC+10, Geoff McQueen wrote:
>
> I've been thinking about this a bit, and I think there's a lot to be said
> for the idealism of having a body representing startups which is truly
> democratic and driven by current entrepreneurs who are in the trenc
n in-dial).
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* silicon-bea...@googlegroups.com [mailto:
> silicon-beach-australia@googlegroups.com ] *On Behalf Of *Niki
> Scevak
> *Sent:* Wednesday, March 26, 2014 2:55 AM
> *To:* silicon-bea...@googlegroups.com
> *Subject:* [SiliconBeach] Come
Hey folks!
Just a quick note to invite all of you in Sydney next Thursday along to our
demo day: https://weteachme.com/startmate/startmate-community-demo-day
For those not familiar, StartMate is a leading Australian accelerator
program that has invested in 29 startups in the last four years. We w
Probably $300k+
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Forum rules
1) No lurkers! It is expected that you introduce yourself.
2) No jobs postings. You can use http://siliconbeachaust
If it's a full seed round (vs a $50k friends and family round) I'd fully expect
the investment to pay founder salaries. Usually $60-80k is normal. In fact 80%+
of a rounds proceeds at that stage are salary related for early employees.
People are the only input cost for a startup.
Also peoples l
e
> IP I create outside work hours? In other words what's the IP side of that
> contract going to look like?
>
> Cheers,
> Rich
>
> On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Niki Scevak
> > wrote:
>
>> Folks, I wanted to let you know about a program we've launc
Folks, I wanted to let you know about a program we've launched today at
Startmate that is designed to get more people to consider working in
startups.
Trump Cards is a short three month paid program for exceptional developers
and designers who want to do startups but don't know where to start. You
Folks, applications for Startmate 2013 are now open.
We're doubling the investment to $50k and keeping the equity the same
(7.5%). The program is also now five months, with three in Sydney and two
in Silicon Valley.
More information
here: http://www.startmate.com.au/applications-for-startmate-
Moo.com are ~$50 for 200 cards and are of such high quality. Highly
recommend and they do free shipping.
On Wednesday, 1 August 2012 23:28:01 UTC+10, b...@bensand.com wrote:
>
> Cheapest and best I've found is expresscards.com.au Very happy with their
> quality. I recommend going double sided fo
This is just my take on things and so I'll be specific rather than the
frustratingly inane answer of 'speak to a lawyer or accountant" (but
obviously your situation will be different and so you should).
I'd go with an AU pty ltd as a one share subsidiary of the US corp. You
want the IP to be ow
Sorry just weighing in now.
The cost is nominal and less than a pty ltd company - I think a Delaware
C-Corp costs $300 from memory. There are tons of incorporation sites in the
US that will do this if you are optimizing against cost.
Law firms can do it too and Richard Horton from DLA Piper is
Michael, thanks firstly for kicking this thread off.
I'll jot down a few thoughts and also get the guys at DLA Piper to
take a look and some friends elsewhere as well (Deloitte for e.g.) and
then circle back.
@Adrian: Yes this was just for founder stock and every person had over
5%
@Michael: Re:
Yes it definitely should not take $15k to get this done at all. I
would say $2-5k is more the price. Richard Horton, a partner at DLA
Piper, is very startup friendly and a great guy (fees deferred until a
round closes etc.) His email is richard.hor...@dlapiper.com
In terms of the Startmate docs, t
I just spoke with the venue and opened up another block of tickets but
be quick!
On Oct 27, 9:50 pm, Justin Tauber wrote:
> Hi Nick,
>
> Looks like the event has already sold out. Is that right?
>
> Justin
>
> On 27/10/2011, at 1:18 PM, Niki Scevak wrote:
>
&g
Folks, the applications for our second season of Startmate are now
open and we're running a Q&A event next Monday night in Sydney with
some mentors and founders from the first season. If you're considering
applying come along: http://startmate-qa-syd.eventbrite.com/
Also, you can apply to Startmat
Google Maps have a free api that includes 2,500 geocoder calls a day:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/
Geocoding, although slightly different, also includes scrubbing and
cleaning address inputs.
On Jul 28, 9:06 pm, cij wrote:
> hi folks,
>
> ok, so my downgraded require
+1 to what Alan said.
Also, here is another take on online dating/social networking that has
an interesting biz model (adwords for people):
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/05/features/sexual-network.
It's nothing against social networks, the criteria is against
businesses that requir
There is already the early stage venture capital partnerships (http://
www.ausindustry.gov.au/VentureCapital/EarlyStageVentureCapitalLimitedPartnershipsESVCLP/Pages/EarlyStageVentureCapitalLimitedPartnership(ESVCLP).aspx)
that offer tax shielding.
Sydney Angels are trying to get a fund off the gro
I think it all misses the point as soon as you try to sum things up in
a top-down way. The way to build a community is block by block and the
only really thing that matters is that successful companies get built
with a certain culture which then spawn other startups. Also those
type of companies do
Isaak I don't show an email from you but you can email me directly at
niki.sce...@gmail.com?
Dimaz, I did reply to an email on October 21, the same day you sent it
and I re-forwarded the response. Was that the email string?
I'll look into if there is a problem with the relay address now as
well.
Hey Marko, we're planning on doing this very thing via Startmate.
DLA Phillips Fox are putting together the suite of documents as we
speak and as well as using them for the initial investment in
Startmate companies, we'll also be open-sourcing them to all who are
interested in the Australian start
Folks, we've opened up the applications for the inaugural wave of
Startmate. You can find out more here:
http://www.startmate.com.au/application-process
and apply here: http://hirehive.com/apps/488RSG
Applications will close at the end of November and the final round
interviews will be held in ea
Hey Brendan, that is a key part of the program for sure. Ryan is the
only SF-based mentor but a key part of StartMate will be the 2 weeks
in the valley at the end and a bunch of Aussie startup people are keen
to help out already (Elias!) with a mix of "CouchCamp" (Aussies in the
valley offering acc
Earthclassmail scans in the mail received and you can forward it on to
Australian when you need and if you don't need the mail you can shred
it etc. They also have automatic cheque depositing (surprisingly
common in the US is people paying large amount by cheque)
On Aug 1, 3:39 pm, Michael Guilfoy
Firstly, holding the investment for 1-3 years? Yeah right. Try 5-8
years at the minimum - especially if they are the seed investor.
On Apr 16, 10:18 am, "rgh@gmail.com" wrote:
> Dear SBA,
>
> Yesterday I was with one of the new Early Stage Venture Capital
> Limited Partnership groups and we h
The biggest point I would say is vesting. You don't want to just give
the .5% upfront and that's it. Relationships are always great in the
beginning but you should structure the agreement so that it vests
either over time or on certain events (e.g. intro that leads to hire/
investment/sales). That
Justin, there is one book you absolutely must read:
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/0976470705
Steve also has a blog. Start here: http://steveblank.com/2009/02/ and
start working your way forward through the archives.
Another excellent blog is from Eric Ries: http://www.
I'd recommend you stay from the really large ones as they tend to be
the worst for any sort of focused discussion.
The best in my opinion for web startups are FoWA in London (http://
events.carsonified.com/fowa/2009/london/) and SXSW Interactive in
Austin (http://sxsw.com/interactive).
On Dec 2,
Just a point of clarification: Atlassian's customers were never in
Australia and never made up more than a miniscule percentage. There is
no reason why you can't be in Australia and sell to overseas customers
but targeting Australian customers would need a huge mainstream need
(e.g. Accounting) ot
Hendro, on the impact of vesting on an Angel investor's perception, I
don't know what investors you have been talking to but any sane/
rational one will look at vesting extremely favorably. Their
investment is only protected with founder vesting (if one of you
leaves his/her stake is increased as
I think one common thread amongst startup transactions (or non-
financially valued transactions) is that the acquiree company is
bought and not sold. That is, a larger company decides to buy the
startup for whatever strategic rationale versus a startup deciding it
will like to sell at time X and t
If you're looking for developers then search for the department of
computer science at each University (they usually have their own web
site) and then each tends to have their own mailing list that you can
forward intern/grad jobs to for free.
On Nov 3, 11:36 pm, Trindaz wrote:
> Hi Mike,
>
> I'
If you are going to use your bank accounts in the US (i.e. are looking
for ATM coverage) then Chase in New York or Wells Fargo in Silicon
Valley are probably best.
The best international account to have is Bank of America. You can
withdraw money fee-free from Westpac ATMs in Australia (or BNP in
I would say seeking legal advice at this stage is completely useless.
Unless of course the lawyer handles early stage financings on a day to
day basis and is happy to share recent valuation data.
It's very hard to say if 85/15 or 50/50 split is fair to either side
because you've declined to discl
Richard, well I believe Feld's suggestion was that the visa be in
perpituity: So the startup will more than likely to fail but the US
should let the person stay permanently with the view that they will
more than likely start another company if that is the case.
On the requirements, I think it wou
Just on the general idea you might want to speak with the guys who did
YorZ (essentially the same idea 5 years ago):
http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/08/06/profile-yorz/
They are ex-Looksmart so am sure they would be more than willing to
share their experiences (since they've closed down).
On Sep
Honestly, Australia has nothing compared to the US or even London.
The problem I have is that approaching problems like this in a top
down fashion is that it's easy to pontificate (Government should do
something! X city has beaches! Y city has a University!) and give the
person a warm and fuzzy f
Scott, from running a site where people leave reviews of others
(homethinking.com) I can say that I have probably been threatened with
legal action 20-30 times and not one of them has actually followed
through and sued. It is used as a threat and usually is just borne
from a frustration.
In your
The free and easy way is to look up public companies in the space. Is
there a company that is public that is a leader in the space? If so,
search for them on edgar.sec.gov and look up either their 10-K (annual
report) or S-1.
If the line of business you are trying to measure isn't their primary
b
Legend Geoff! This is fantastic. I posted on
http://www.startup-australia.org/option-grants-in-australia so that we
all can refer back to it in the future.
On Mar 31, 11:31 pm, Geoff McQueen - Hiive Systems
wrote:
> Hi Alan,
>
> Thanks for taking the time to reply - those two articles were up th
Amen Mike! +1 to everything you have said.
Having moved back from the US to Sydney and still being on similar
entrepreneurial lists the biggest difference I can see about Australia
is the obsession with the Government doing something to help them. The
US has exactly the opposite attitude: anythin
I didn't migrate my Australian startup to a US one, but I did start a
fresh US one and had, up until recently, an E-3 visa.
Basically you can get an E-2 founder visa that lasts 7 years but you
need to show an investment of more than US$100k (preferably from
yourself) and a business plan to show m
Jonathan, if you'd like to be connected to the guys (zvents) behind
http://hypertable.com/ I can provide an intro. The CEO is also a
fairly prolific angel and partner at Net Service Ventures (http://
onotech.blogspot.com/).
On Feb 6, 4:21 am, Viki wrote:
> If you are looking for networking oppor
+1 for Founders at Work and also Little Charlie's Almanac as well
I'd also throw in Atlas Shrugged. The single best book I have read
(it's a monster at 1,000 pages though) and particularly relevant given
today's world of doing business with government bailouts.
On Jan 29, 11:38 pm, Sherif wrote
I use odesk.com religiously (I have 9 developers, spend hundreds of
thousands of dollars each year) and swear by it. For the coder side,
odesk offers competitive rates and tends to more of a long term
relationship vs elance/rentacoder/scriptlance which seem suited for
small one off jobs.
On Dec
This is not exactly what you want but having read the book it is at
the same time brilliant and a little dry. One alternative before the
book is to listen/watch the speech from the author:
http://venturehacks.com/articles/customer-development which give you a
great intro to customer development pr
Another brilliant resource for this is: http://www.sequoiacap.com/ideas/
My business plan was basically built off first a one-two sentence on
each point and then a deeper 2-3 paragraphs on each. And still the
document comes in at 8 pages.
On Nov 21, 1:38 pm, Geoff McQueen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wro
I agree in principle with what Phil is saying: That ESOP for
Australian web companies are not as great as motivator for employees
as for American employees, but that to me is a sad state of where we
are, rather the way it will always be.
To be more specific on your questions:
Phrasing: Be comple
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