Mission Statement for Role

Startmate exists to make Australia and New Zealand the best place in the world to build a startup. 

For us to do this, we need to pull in the most talented and ambitious people into the ecosystem and engage/support them. Unfortunately, the current state of play is that women are under-represented and under-supported at almost every level. Gender diversity is essential for success; the most gender-diverse companies are 48% more likely to outperform the least gender-diverse companies. 

That’s why we started Ladymates: both the most powerful community in ANZ’s startup ecosystem, and a vehicle for systematic change. We’re here to break down the barriers women currently face on their career paths. 

In the same vein, for us to pull in the best people into the startup ecosystem, we need to be attracting people at the beginning of their career journeys; when they’re at university.

In this role, you will lead our two core initiatives focused on bringing in the best talent into tech - the Women Fellowship and Student Fellowship. The Women Fellowship is an 8-week program designed to demystify the world of startups and empower more women to pursue a career they love. The Student Fellowship is a two week bootcamp designed to launch students into the world of startups and give them the opportunity to ideate their own startup - some of our very best founders have come out of this program! These two initiatives target people at different stages in their career and have different formats accordingly, but both serve the greater purpose of flooding the startup ecosystem with ambitious & diverse talent. The specifics of the initiatives will change as our strategy around how to best achieve these outcomes continually evolves, and you’ll get to be a part of determining this as well! 

The best way to understand our community is through the stories of the people within it: meet Kai and Linus, Tsamara, Emily, Carola, Vanessa and Oli ❤️

You will own the planning, sequencing and delivery of these initiatives, and be the custodian of the communities, both those aspiring to join and those already within.

Role Scope: Your Responsibilities

• Responsibility 1: Program Design & Delivery 

  • Description: Annually, you’ll lead 2 intakes of both the Women Fellowship and Student Fellowship, from iterating the initiatives to facilitating sessions to helping Fellows supercharge their career in startups. You will ensure the initiatives are delivered to a high standard, keeping the community experience and program objectives top of mind. You will be managing multiple programs across the year, which requires diligent planning and managing competing demands. You’ll need to pre-plan your workflow and engage adjacent team members to complete their part of the program tasks with adequate time for them to prepare. 

  • Example: Within a program setting, the efficient and effective execution of program set-up, selection, onboarding, program facilitation, community engagement, and ongoing program iteration will be owned by you. 

    • Pre-program: Before kicking off a program, you should have iterated the program plan with any changes you’re making, locked in sessions/events and speakers, executed the selection and onboarding of all applicants and contributors, and liaised with marketing, finance and operations to complete tasks.

    • During program: You’ll facilitate sessions, develop and execute events to help women achieve their goals, liaise with relevant stakeholders such as Coaches, and critically evaluate program progress and success through collecting regular feedback from customer group and contributors.

    • Post-program/ongoing: make iterations to the initiatives based on feedback, and help engage women and students in future pathways at Startmate (i.e. membership renewals, founder opportunities, etc)

• Responsibility 2: Community management & engagement

  • Description: You’ll be responsible for engaging, managing and growing the Women and Student communities and championing these customer bases within Startmate. Additionally, this includes the acquisition, selection and ongoing engagement of any secondary customer groups, such as contributor groups, for your project. 

Example: This will involve helping these communities engage with the broader Startmate activities, running ongoing engagement initiatives and activation activities with your communities, written communications on Slack, unearthing their stories to be distributed and actively sharing community activities on socials. 

Position Requirements

• Community Superhero - You are the custodian of these communities, and have a deep understanding of their pain points/the roadblocks that exist that prevent them from accelerating or growing within their career. You have a high EQ, are able to build trust and relationships, have exceptional people skills, and bring an engaging and inspiring energy to your communities. 

• Organised: You plan your workflows and projects effectively, and set up personal systems so that nothing slips through the cracks. This allows you to anticipate what needs to be done in advance so you are proactive and give other team members plenty of notice for requests.

• Get-Shit-Done: You work efficiently, are keen to jump in and get started. You thrive under pressure and in situations with high ambiguity, and can actively manage competing demands and deadlines with a cool head. 

• Creative problem-solver: You’re able to prevent and manage problems as they arise, iterate these solutions based on learnings, and troubleshoot on the fly.

Additional Requirements:

• Full working rights in Australia

• Ability to host and attend out of hours events

Working at Startmate

We believe that building a diverse and inclusive team is critical to Startmate’s success. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or marital, veteran, or disability status. We use Applied to ensure every applicant gets an equal chance of success.

We offer:

• Community: The Startmate community is a unique mix of founders, operators and investors — the one thing everyone has in common is ambition. Startmate is much more than just our team, it’s a community built on paying it forward.

• Autonomy: You will have very high autonomy to realise your dreams within your area

• Flexibility: We are a remote-first team with coverage across Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Byron, plus usually a few people working remotely at any point in time. We currently have an office in Melbourne with satellite offices in Sydney and Auckland.

• Access: You get to work with every well known and less well-known Australian and Kiwi startup, VC and angel — Canva, Safety Culture, Propeller, Vend, Xero, Blackbird, Square Peg, AirTree, rampersand, Folklore — you name it!

• Great vibes: Being able to bring your best self to work is really important to us. We index heavily on wellbeing and engagement to make sure that you’re able to turn up with energy and resilience each day.

• A share of Startmate’s success: We think it is important to share successes with the whole team. All Startmate employees receive carry in our funds and are owners in the management company.

About Startmate

We’re making Australia and New Zealand the best place in the world to build a startup. We’re achieving that through building a platform that unleashes startup ambition and accelerates exceptional companies.

At our core, we’re a community of the most ambitious founders, operators and investors propelled by a highly-trusted mentor-driven community, and backed by the best angels, venture funds and tech startups in the region.

Over the past decade we have invested in 230+ startups, with a combined value of $3 billion.

We’ve written a lot about what we love at Startmate, so check out our blog if you want some more information about us, and check out our mission, values, and team, and some of our most ambitious goals...