Come to San Francisco with me

I recently sold River City Labs to Australian Computer Society (ACS) but those that thought I might be taking a back seat might be mistaken. I still believe in the need to push this sector from all levels.

I started this crazy thing called StartUp Catalyst a few years back, I became frustrated with technically non capable people attempting a tech startup. Unless you you have inherent tech ability in your team to deliver on the problem you are trying to solve you are up against it. Catalyst is trying to culturally transform our tech sector, to get future tech co-founders to think bigger and braver. This typically takes the form of a trade mission for 20 under 30 years olds to SF for tours of Google, Facebook, VCs, data centres, funded startups and more — the program has been successful in getting these young people to engage in entrepreneurship. 

Startup Catalyst also does missions for future tech co-founders, funded startups, community organisers and investors.

I am doing a mission to San Francisco in February 2019 (10th to 15th) with at least 12 high net worth (HNW) individuals and current investors. We did one of these in November 2017 and it was highly successful — I wrote about it here . The problem I am trying to solve is to help activate and educate early stage investors. We see a lot of people wanting to invest in early stage but really either hurting themselves or their investee or both. This typically finishes with broken startups due dumb equity deals and/or disengaged investors telling their story about how bad early stage investment is.

This is usually because they either use no portfolio approach, do a bad deal (shit terms, horrid valuation etc) or do not trust the founders they invest in (they take board seats to ‘watch their money’!). The goal is to change the approach to investing by taking over a crew of Aussie HNW and investors and put them into sessions with SF area angels, VC, funded startups, corporate venture etc and get them thinking portfolio, more founder friendly and doing smarter deals. [many founders do not help themselves with insistence of terms that are really bad for the investor!]

On the last mission we had sessions with YC, Pay Pal Ventures, Accel, a16z as well as founders from Gigster and Equinix. We try to get a good balance of sessions in order to convey the right width and level of detail to the participants. So far we have arranged for sessions with :

• Andrew Braccia from Accel;
• Patrick Eggen and Joe Saijo from CounterPart Ventures;
• Health Tech VC panel including RockHealth, MatchPoint Partners (Health Tech M&A advisory) and more;
• Boris Silver from Funders Club;
• Michael Binder from Angel List;
• Corporate Venture reps from Toyota-AI, Salesforce, Comcast and more;
• non deal team panel led by Marian Pond from Lightspeed Venture Partners with others such as Head of Talent at Khosla Ventures, Norwest, General Catalyst and more;
• representatives from Bull Pen Capital, PipeLine Capital, secondary funds and more; and
• a full day briefing from local venture and legal executives fom DLA Piper on the difference between the US and Australian investing scenes (term sheets, SAFEs, deal taxonomy, flip ups etc).

So why come on a trip like this ? For me it is not just the sessions with people from amazing backgrounds doing things in a wide variety of ways that we just do not get to see in Australia. Just as important is the network, not just those we meet but the fellow travellers you experience this with. From our last mission the group still stays in touch on WhatsApp, in person and some have even invested together.

So if you are investing in startups or want to — take a look at this mission. 

If you want to come along check out https://tinyurl.com/SC-INV-19 , you can register at https://startup-catalyst.forms.fm/investor-mission-feb-2019/forms/4482 or by emailing [email protected]