Mission Statement for Role

Startmate is the epicentre of startup ambition in Australia and New Zealand and exists to make ANZ the best place in the world to build a startup.

One of the core pillars of this vision is to build a thriving community of investors in ANZ and empower them to believe in and back the next generation of early stage founders. This is the pillar that you will help us build.

This role is designed for someone hungry, not proven, and excited by the opportunity to grow and learn from the investments team. There is no formal investment experience required. This role will give you the opportunity to… 

• 🧠 rapidly build your investing frameworks and knowledge,

• ✨ form a network of ANZ’s brightest minds,

• 🌏 build world-unique products 

• 🧐 assess ambitious startup ideas, 

• 🚀 find the next generational startup, and 

• 🧑‍🚀 work at the centre of the startup ecosystem

Startmate has a different investing approach to most traditional venture capital (VC) firms. Most VCs are limited by the capacity of a small team of investment partners and associates to find and select startups. Startmate leverages our powerful community of thousands of founders, investors, and operators to enable us to make great investments at scale. We see over 1,000 startups every year and are the most active early-stage investor in ANZ.

In this role, you'll work closely with the investment team to run and enhance products and processes across 2 key areas:

• Startup investing program

  • The beating heart of our investor community, First Believers. The program has an average rating of 9.3/10. Over 200 high-flying and diverse angels have been upskilled and onboarded into our community through this angel investing program. These include founders of iconic Australian companies, Managing Engineers from Tesla, the Head of marketing from AirBnB and many, many more.

• Investment processes

  • Accelerator & Spark Fund: Support our unique, community-led selection processes. For our Accelerator, we select the top 3% of startups from over 1,000 applications. For Spark Fund, you’ll help connect early-stage founders with their first investors using innovative portals powered by tools like Airtable and Softr

Our investor community supercharges our ability to find and invest in the most ambitious founders in ANZ. Many of them have become core parts of our ecosystem, investing directly into early-stage startups and becoming invaluable mentors to founders.

Role Scope: Your Responsibilities

• Responsibility 1: Investment products & processes

  • Description: Continue to enhance and build our unique investment products and processes with low/no code tools.

  • Example: Manage and build investment portals and processes for Accelerator and Spark selection. The portals run using Airtable & Softr.

• Responsibility 2: Investment Program Ops

  • Description: Improve and manage the processes that enable us to run a trajectory-changing Start-up Investments program (First Believers) 

  • Example: Participant selection, onboarding, community building

• Responsibility 3: Communication/community management

  • Description: Effectively manage comms and build relationships with investors and founders across multiple projects. 

  • Example: Email and slack comms, stakeholder management across multiple projects, in-person & virtual events.

What you won’t do

• Establish investment funds

• Investor reporting

• Deliver expert content to First Believers (although there is a growth path towards this)

Position Requirements

Your background is less important than your key skills, which might include:

• Builder - You love staying up to date with the latest tools to be able to build beautiful and scalable products and processes. You  bring structure to chaos.

• Problem Solving - You thrive in situations of high ambiguity where structured, decisive, and creative thinking is required. You’re resourceful, have a learn-it-all attitude, and do what you need to drive a problem from identification through to resolution.

• Relationships & Communication - You get energy from building relationships with interesting people. You can build trust, listen, understand what our investors and founders want and need, and action that feedback accordingly. You are a clear verbal and written communicator at scale.