Startmate's unusual directive to founders: don't talk to VCs
Startmate is one of Australia's longest running and most successful accelerator programs. It wants its latest batch of founders to focus on customers, not investors.
Startmate, the closest thing Australia has to Y Combinator, gave the startups in its recent winter cohort an unusual directive: “No talking to VCs.” It was, explains Startmate CEO Michael Batko, an experiment in returning to "first principles" of building innovative companies.
“I literally told our founders, you're not fundraising for 10 weeks, you're not talking to a single investor,” Batko says. “You're just talking to customers.”
His reasoning was simple. “If you're having customer conversations and investor conversations in parallel, you're doing both things kind of half-heartedly and you're always getting distracted,” he says.
Startup investor and long-time Startmate mentor Alan Jones says Startmate has always run as a classic ‘lean startup experiment’ over its last decade. “[There’s] an ever-evolving hypothesis around what kind of advice and support might improve the odds of startup success,” says Jones.
