Connect to Capital

Noga Edelstein is a corporate lawyer turned entrepreneur and investor, who has experienced every stage of the startup lifecycle from inception and launch, to funding and exit. She co-founded on-demand home services startup UrbanYou, which scaled rapidly Australia-wide to secure leadership of one of the largest technology-disrupted markets, consolidated the industry with three M&As, and successfully exited via trade sale.

Now an early stage investor, Noga is a Venture Partner at Black Nova VC and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Tractor Ventures. Her insight into the startup journey and ability to work hands-on with early-stage founders has seen her mentor 100s of startups at Australia’s leading accelerators including Startmate and Founders Institute. She has served on the Board of SBE Australia which supports women-led business and boasts a proven track record of 85% of alumni going on to raise capital.

Before founding UrbanYou, Noga worked at top-tier law firms in Sydney and London, and was General Counsel at Yahoo!  during its reign as internet pioneer. She has Board experience across a diverse range of corporate, startup and not-for-profit organisations.

Noga is an MC and keynote speaker, which might be a result of her teenage experience as a professional actor.

Links and Resources

Podcasts

Startup School by Seth Godin

Masters of Scale

The 20 Minute VC

Books

The Hard Thing about Hard Things

Play Bigger

More on Scale Investors

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Kerri Lee Sinclair  is an Investor, operator, entrepreneur, and global citizen exclusively focused on driving positive outcomes for those dedicated to building the new world, or transforming the broken.

She has spent over 20 years working across the high-growth eco-system, from co-founding her own start-up which sold to Microsoft in 2007, through to working in some of Australia’s leading technology businesses, including Intelematics and Aconex. For over 5 years Kerri-Lee led technical investment and venture capital deployment in one of Australia’s leading family offices, and sits on the Boards of several high-growth companies, including agridigital, conserving beauty and Spee3D.

An alumnae of the transformational SBE Australia Program, Kerri-Lee has been the Chair of the female-focused entrepreneurs network since 2018 having been involved since the early days of the program in Australia. She is engaged with hundreds of female entrepreneurs across the country helping them with the investment and strategic acquisition.  She is an advisory board member of invest victoria and is a member of the investment committee for the Alice Anderson Fund, the Victoria’s government’s pioneering angel sidecar fund which co-invests with private sector investors in outstanding women-led startups.

Links and Resources

SBE Impact Reports

The Hard Thing and Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

The Thing About Men and Women George Carlin

The Challenger Sale: How To Take Control of the Customer Conversation by Matthew Dixon  and Brent Adamson 

More on Scale Investors

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Les Szekely has a bit of a cult following as an angel investor. After multiple successful exit, he has a reputation for finding great founders, then backing them with boundless energy, creativity and the humility to know when to get out of the way.

Les’ path to investing is unusual. He got a taste for power of business when he established a thriving clothes retailing operation at Paddys Market in the 1980s. He used his savings to backpack around the world for 18 months then returned to teach commercial law at UNSW and Revenue law at Syd U. From 1987 he became a tax consulting partner with Horwaths and then Deloitte. He wrote several books, gave lectures and took a lead role in marketing through financial media PR. Over 20 years as a partner taught me a great deal about business, and in particular how to structure transactions.

In his heart Les has remained a businessman and deal doer. He started angel investing in 1999 and since a substantial exit in 2004 he has increasingly involved himself in the world of angel and VC investment. In 2009 he left Deloitte to dedicate his efforts entirely to angel and VC investing.

Whilst continuing to angel invest personally, Les co-founded the VC funds manager EVP in 2014. And now actively manages $130M of VC funds. In addition to Chairing the EVP Investment Committee his time is spent as a non-executive director of several startups and mentoring Founders.

LINKS AND RESOURCES

Les Szekely on LinkedIn

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

SiteMinder debuts on the ASX with oversubscribed AU$627M IPO and AU$1.36B market capitalisation

Compare Club

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James Crowe is a partner of law firm Norton Rose Fulbright and one of the few lawyers who is equally as passionate about technology and all of its transformational potential, as he is about the law. 

With a degree in computer science majoring in Artificial Intelligence, in addition to his honours degree in law, James has over 25 years' experience assisting companies in Australia and around the world with acquisitions, investments and joint ventures for strategically important technologies. 

James is an enthusiastic angel investor and co-founder of Skalata Ventures - Australia’s first fully-integrated seed investment program, designed to help early stage companies prepare to scale and grow into significant, sustainable and global businesses.  

In addition to all this, James is also committed to Legal Innovation and his award-winning work in this area has received global recognition by Harvard University, the US Association of Corporate Counsel and the Financial Times.

While James recognises the importance of academic credentials, he reckons for those new to the startup technology scene, you can learn just as much from hit comedy TV show Silicon Valley.  

LINKS AND RESOURCES

Australian Investment Council (formally AVCAL) templates

The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

Silicon Valley

How Google Crushed My Company (Unlockd co-founder Matt Berriman)

Unlockd advertising start-up blames Google as it goes into voluntary administration

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Georgie Turner is excited about the potential of Aussie startups. Partly because she has been entrepreneurial since she was a child, and partly because Australians have plenty of first hand experience of the world’s most pressing problems, Georgie believes nothing motivates quite like a mission to save the world!

Described by her fellow investing partners at Tidal Ventures, as a go-to-market guru and a fundraising gun. Georgie has extensive experience in investment banking as well as enterprise sales, working closely alongside founders to develop successful go-to-market strategies. She brings wisdom and dedication to help founders optimise their business and prepare for the next round of fundraising. Formerly Bailador, Rackspace, Lazard.

Books:

Still Life by Sarah Winman 

Klara and the Sun: by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Lisa Fedorenko is passionate about helping create a fairer world through increased diversity and sustainability. After completing a triple major in Advanced mathematics, computer science and econometrics in her combined Commerce/Science degree, she began her career in equity research sales at Credit Suisse before moving into a range of finance roles spanning value investing (at Montgomery Investment Management), venture capital (at Reinventure), and venture debt (at Marshall Investment Management). Lisa is now the investment manager at Alberts, a unique family business with over 130 years of history and a commitment culturally rich, inclusive, healthy and sustainable world.

Lisa is fluent in English, Russian and French and as a raging extrovert never stops being inspired by the entrepreneurs she works with.

Companies mentioned

Uluu

Baymatob

Like Family

Books:

• Quiet by Susan Cain
• Principles by Ray Dalio – it’s particularly interesting for company culture
• Atomic Habits by James Clear – one of the best life-hack books
• 21 lessons for the 21st century by Yugal Noah Harari – very thought provoking

Anyone looking to get into VC should read:

• The Hard thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• What You Do is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz
• The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christenson

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Sam Sicilia is Chief Investment Officer at Hostplus, one of Australia’s largest and most successful superannuation funds.  With its roots serving the hospitality and related industries, Hostplus has a unique member profile with an average member age of just 37.

As the leader of the investment team, Sam is also quite unique. Described by some as a polymath, Sam loves numbers, finds human behaviour fascinating and has a special affection for the beauty and precision of well-crafted language.

While he certainly would not include this on his business card, Sam has a PhD in mathematical modelling and theoretical physics and really stumbled into finance by accident via academia in 1994. 12 years later found himself establishing what would become one of the most successful investment teams in the country, and key supporter of Australia’s then nascent venture capital ecosystem.

What I really liked when researching Sam’s background, is that he is much less interested in listing his qualifications and much more interested in talking about the skills that have helped him achieve success:

• Lateral Thinking.
• Intuitive Reasoning.
• Problem Resolution.
• and Decision-making under uncertainty.

All of which have been required in very good measure over the last decade and a half in financial markets.

Companies

Zoox -  acquired by Amazon for well more than $1 billion 

Vaxxas – Vaccine delivery patches

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Kristin Vaughn is managing partner of Virescent Ventures, where Cleantech Innovation Meets Commercial Ambition. An offshoot of Australia’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation, Virescent invests in founders, technologies, and businesses that help achieve zero emissions and beyond. Kristin beleives there's no need to choose between emissions impact and commercial outcomes. Along with her team at Vircent, Kristin invests from pre-seed all the way to late-stage growth companies across 4 main areas Clean Energy; Mobility And; Smart Cities; Food And; Agriculture; the Circular Economy.

Prior to joining the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, Kristin spent more than a decade at top tier Australian private equity firm CHAMP Ventures and prior to that was a consultant at leading management consulting firm AT Kearney. Kristin holds a first class honours degree in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney and the energy she has for her work is palpable.

Kristin Vaughn on LinkedIn

• Book: Into Thin Air, Touching the Void and The Adventurer's Son
• Podcast: The Interchange from Greentech Media
• How I Built This

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It is an extra special episode this week with 2 great investors sharing their passion for agtech and the specialist fund they co-founded Tenacious Ventures. 

The first half of today’s duo is Sarah Nolet, an internationally recognized food systems innovation expert who has been instrumental in building the early stage agtech ecosystem in Australia - from advising dozens of startups, designing accelerator programs and consulting to established agribusinesses, all the way to helping industry, universities and government develop and implement forward-looking initiatives in food system innovation. 

Sarah is also the host of the AgTech...So What? podcast, telling stories of innovators building the food systems of the future. Sarah holds a Masters in System Design and Management from MIT, and a Bachelor of Computer Science and Human Factors Engineering from Tufts University in the US. 

Matthew Pryor is the other half of the co-founder team at Tenacious Ventures and a Partner at AgThentic. He was previously co-founder of Observant, an Australian agtech pioneer acquired by Jain in 2017. He was the founding chair of Rocket Seeder, a food & agriculture innovation accelerator, and having achieved multiple significant exits himself, Matthew is dedicated to promoting Australian agri-food innovation globally. Both Sarah and Matthew are passionate about helping Australia take its rightful place as a leader in the technologies which will solve global food and environmental challenges. Its such an important mission. 

Companies 

Geora - https://www.geora.io/ Simple and secure technology for farmer networks to track and finance global agri-supply chains. Founder Bridie Ohlsson  

Rapid Aim - https://rapidaim.io/ A precision pest management tool for today’s farmer. Founder Nancy Schellhorn, PhD  

Goterra - https://goterra.com.au/ Modular, autonomous waste management units using insects to consume food waste, directly where waste is produced or at a central site. Founder Olympia Yarger 

Resources 

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss & Tahl Raz  

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Annie Duke

Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups-Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000 by Jason Calacanis  

Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be by Dr Marshall Goldsmith & Mark Reiter 

Other 

20 minute VC podcast 

Heavyweight podcast 

Karyn West is the founder and managing director of Apostle Funds Management.  I think of her as the fund whisperer, with a seemingly mystical ability to connect institutional investors, like the big Australian super funds, with the exact specialist investment management capability they maybe didn’t even realise they needed.

Karyn left the security of a great job at Rothschild, to single handedly launch an unknown American manager in Australia and then when on to established Apostle in 2008.

Now with over 30 years of experience in the finance sector, Karyn refutes that her success is anything magical, it is just the outworking of years of honing her skills, network and always being able to see things from her client’s perspective.

Links

United National Principals for Responsible Investment UNPRI 

Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson 

Fear and Greed podcast 

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