The Founder Institute's four-month curriculum covers everything you would expect from an early-stage startup program, including topics like "Startup Legal and IP” towards the beginning, to “Fundraising” near the end. What makes the curriculum special is the Mentors that teach it, whose passion, feedback and support helps our companies avoid rookie mistakes and set the foundation for a meaningful and enduring company.
The Founder Institute carefully recruits approximately 25 Mentors per Semester, who are normally the CEO or founder of a successful startup. Rather than specialists or consultants, we prefer Founders and CEOs to give our companies "the entrepreneur's perspective." The mentors share their experiences, best practices, and mistakes, while also providing specific guidance and feedback on the Founder companies.
In addition, the Founder Institute's unique Graduate Liquidity Pool allows our mentors to share in the equity of companies formed in each program - and, their share is based solely on the anonymous ratings they receive from the Founders both during, and after the program. In this way, the Founder Institute incentivizes mentors to take a special interest in our startups, and provide as much assistance as possible after the program.
We have a great lineup of Mentors confirmed for the Spring 2013 Sydney Founder Institute, including many from out of town. See the full list below.
Adam Benson
Director, Recognition PR
Adam is a Director of the PR firms Recognition PR and Write Away Communication and Events. Adam has more than 17 years experience creating and executing public relations and content driven lead generation programs. Adam is a Fellow of the Public Relations Institute of Australia and a former Chair of the Registered Consultancies Group which represents PR agency owners and directors in the PRIA. He holds a Masters of Business in Marketing and a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies.
Adam Long
Strategist, Step Change Marketing
Adam Long. Marketing Strategist, Step Change Marketing. An industrial designer and marketing strategist, Adam has deployed his skills across the not-for-profit sector, the government, big business and even by starting, and commercialising, his own business. One of Australia’s top 30under30 entrepreneurs, he sits on the Board of Engineers Without Borders and is a Director of Beehive, the sustainable design lab he founded in 2010. He takes a triple-bottom-line view of success, and his thinking has been sought out and implemented by the likes of AusIndustry, Red Cross, Sony Music and 3M.
Adeo Ressi
CEO, TheFunded.com
Adeo Ressi is Founding Member of TheFunded.com, an online community of 17,000 CEOs to research, rate, and review funding sources worldwide. Adeo also runs the Founder Institute, a mentoring program that helps entrepreneurs launch hundreds of world-class companies each year. The Institute is the eighth start-up that Adeo has founded or built, four of which were acquired and three of which are still operating.
Alec Lynch
Managing Director, DesignCrowd
Alec is the Founder and CEO of DesignCrowd.com, a leading design crowdsourcing website. Prior to DesignCrowd, Alec was a Senior Consultant at Booz & Company, where he worked across a variety of industries including Internet, Telco, Government and Oil and Gas. Alec has written articles for TechCrunch, Smart Company, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Next Web. He has a Bachelor's of Information Technology from Sydney University of Technology.
Andrew Rogers
Managing Director, Anchor
Andrew is the co-founder of Anchor, an Australian-based web hosting and management company. Anchor uses a deep technical expertise to deliver a hosting service that goes all the way through the application stack to the code, going beyond the role of a traditional hosting provider and becoming part of your team. This unique approach has seen Anchor attract attention from tech startups in Australia and the US, working with iconic sites such as Github, TestflightApp, Groupme and Kazaa.
Andrew Campbell
Co-founder, goCatch
With 14 years of sales, business development and management experience, Andrew is a self-starter with huge enthusiasm and energy. Andrew is a co-founder of goCatch, a multi-award winning, taxi booking and payment platform. goCatch is creating a vastly improved taxi experience for passengers and drivers by using smartphones to connect this market more efficiently than ever before. Passengers can watch as their taxi approaches on the map and pay with PayPal or credit card. Drivers get more jobs and increase their profitability.
Ari Klinger
Partner, Right Click Capital
Ari Klinger is a Partner at Right Click Capital, based in Sydney, Australia. Ari has extensive experience in starting, building and selling Internet-related businesses. He was the co-founder and CEO of iMega, an online media network with over 30 million visitors a month which he sold to a publicly listed marketing services group in 2006. In 2008 he co-founded and served as CEO of Online Marketing Group (OMG), which quickly grew to become Australia’s largest network of websites and owner of premium domain names.
Ashton Bishop
Head of Strategy, Step Change Marketing
Ashton Bishop is the Head of Strategy at Step Change Marketing. Ashton has 14 years experience in Marketing and Advertising working across Australia and UK in the world's biggest agencies, on the world’s most successful brands. He's now the Robin Hood of Marketing and brings 'what works' to the start-up world. A start-up owner himself with Eric The Circle, the world's draw-it-yourself cartoon and founder of an agency he's taken from the garage to a multi-million dollar business in under 3 years he knows the ups and down of the entrepreneur’s road. He's experience comes from a law/commerce degree to street performing and most things in between.
Bart Jellema
Founder, ZeroMail
Bart was only 6 years old when he started coding. At the age of 14 he developed a complete CRM system for a large company. He's been developing new software applications ever since. In 2007 Bart co-founded the online discount coupon service Tjoos which was acquired by US based Internet Brands in March 2010. Bart is also the founder of Startup Australia and was honoured as The Next Web Australia’s Startup Person of the Year in 2010. He is now running ZeroMail, the future of email.
Benjamin Chong
Partner, Right Click Capital
Benjamin has a track record of investing in and building successful Internet-related businesses over the last fifteen years. These include Online Agility, an incubator and developer of online concepts, and Jetabroad, one of Australia's leading online travel companies.
Bjorn Behrendt
Managing Director and Co-Founder, StyleTread
Years of experience in web development, complex software projects, online marketing, systems integration, mobile, web 2.0 and project management. Currently running a start-up with www.hiogi.de and www.service-community.net.
Chaz Dheer
Lead Corporate Counsel, Marque
Chaz Dheer is a genuine product of the UK and former partner of a London firm with a complete set of skills in M&A, corporate and commercial law. He can float your IT start-up, knows what a leveraged MBO is (in fact, he speaks fluent private equity) and, with a deal sheet containing more zeroes than World War II, he is, basically, the complete corporate package.
Christian Magel
Founder & CMO, amaysim Australia
Christian Magel is Chief Marketing Officer and founder of amaysim, Australia’s first low cost mobile service provider dedicated to delivering simplicity, fairness and low prices to mobile consumers with its customer centric mobile services and low cost guarantee. An international marketing expert and entrepreneur, Christian is a Founding Partner of Shark Holding GmbH, an investment and management company that combines extensive knowledge in business strategy, marketing, sales, operations and finance, with investment intelligence in the online and telecommunications market sector.
Conrad Yiu
Principal, Arden Point
Co-founder of ArdenPoint - investing and building online retail companies in Australia, including Temple & Webster and ParcelPoint Ex- Corporate Development for Newscorp's Australian's digital media division - investor / Board Member for Getprice, Moshtix, Wego & SportingPulse 15+ years as advisor, entrepreneur and investor in Technology, Telecoms & Media sector across Sydney and London with MBA from Cambridge University
Daniel Ringrose
Intrapreneurial Change Consultant, Future Results
Daniel is involved through the Sydney startup community both as an entrepreneur and mentor. His latest venture, Future Results, is a consultancy to bring startup-style innovation into large enterprise companies. He recently worked as a lean business evangalist for Optus and has background of 15 years in technology management for major corporates in UK and Australia
David Jones
Founder, StreetHawk
David is a serial internet company founder who previously started SurfControl Email Filter (now WebSENSE), SpamMATTERS and ThreatMetrix - now a Gartner "Visionary" company for Web Fraud Protection. David's is now co-founder at StreetHawk - driving the product development of the StreetHawk's 'RRR Engine' and initial iPhone and Android StreetHawk apps. In his copious spare time (not) David can be found freezing in lap pool somewhere, mangling mandarin and aiding the Australian Startup scene via initiatives like StartMate.
Dean McEvoy
Investor / Startup Mentor
Dean has had a varied and interesting career starting in business consulting, marketing and advertising with big business. Translating business strategy into code with Australias best web development agency during the dot com boom of 1999 to 2001, learning about local business first hand when he owned, managed and successfully sold his own bar and restaurant. With his understanding of local business and technology background they launched Australia's first group buying site Spreets. This has seen tremendous success and is now the No. 1 in the market. Spreets was acquired by Yahoo!7 in 2011. His earnout period finished in June 2012 and since then he has been investing in a few startups and mentoring companies through the Startmate program.
Garry Visontay
General Partner, Sydney Seed Fund
Garry has successfully started-up five businesses across a variety of industries and is an active angel investor with significant board-level experience. He currently serves as Chairman of DesignCrowd; Chairman of Oneflare; as cofounder and Chairman of RecruitLoop and is a Director of The Fresh Venture Group, a multi award-winning corporate services company. He is also a General Partner in the Sydney Seed Fund, a newly established fund that invests in early stage technology start-ups. Garry holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (Honours) in Computing from University of Technology, Sydney.
Jeffrey Cooper
General Manager, Step Change Marketing
Jeff Cooper is the General Manager of Step Change Marketing (www.stepchangemarketing.com), one of Australia’s top marketers under 30 and adviser to World Education Australia and Good Return. He has a background in Brand Strategy and Communications Planning and now focuses on Medium Enterprises and Start-ups bringing all the big brand secrets from working on the country’s biggest brands.
Justus Hammer
Non-Executive Director, Tempurer
Justus is a non-executive director at Tempurer, a cloud based social business application for recruitment. In addition, he is also the CMO and Co-Founder of Spreets, and was a former marketing manager at GetPrice. Justus earned his MA in Information Technology at Macquarie University and holds a degree in Macro Economics from Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München.
Matt Allen
Director, DevLogic
I'm Matt Allen, Founder, Dev Logic & Co-Founder ProcessGo! . I've been building for the web since 1996, that's pretty much the beginning. Previous CTO of iseekgolf.com and founding member of the Sydney Rails Group. My co-founders and I won the first Sydney Founder Institute class in 2012 and also pitched, and won SydStart 2012
Nathan Mattock
Partner, Marque Lawyers
After a string of high profile cases involving telecommunications giants and umm, adult content, Nathan would be famous enough as a major case litigator even without the three High Court cases he's run and his appearance on TODAY where he delivered the immortal quote "It's game over, Sony." Nathan's experience encompasses intellectual property, franchising and a wide variety of contract claims. Clients love him because he's commercial, confident, fast and entirely entertaining.
Nic Lowe
Co-Founder, GoGet
Nic is the Co-founder of GoGet, a Sydney-based Carsharing company. Prior to GoGet, Nic was Vice President of Debt Market Trading at Deutsche Bank, Associate Director of Schroders Australia, and Funding Analyst at Goldman Sachs UK. He has a Masters in Economics and International Studies from the University of Sydney.
Phil Morle
Director, Pollenizer
Phil Morle is the Co-Founder of Pollenizer, a full service startup investment machine. With Pollenizer, he has created an ecosystem which allows for new tech companies to start including inception funding (up to $100K AUD), team (engineering, product, UI, back office, customer development), process (lean startup). Before Pollenizer, Phil held the position of CTO at Kazaa for 5 years and led the development of a technology strategy which saw 5 million users online at any one time, millions of downloads per day and a total global user base of over 100 million; all this powered by innovative technology, a globally distributed team and a sprinkling of imagination. Prior to his work in the tech industry Phil was a theatre director with companies in the UK and Australia.
Roby Sharon Zipser
CFO, hipages Group
Roby is a Chartered Accountant by training and an entrepreneur at heart. He started his career as a Senior Accountant, working with PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Allco Finance Group. The breadth of Accounting responsibilities he held gave him exposure to a broad range of industries with companies of differing sizes and complexities. It was here that he learned the nuts and bolts of setting up entities and managing organisations from a Financial perspective. He then went on to set up his own boutique Accounting firm, offering Audit, Accounts Payable and Recovery Services. His clients included large corporates such as JB Hi-Fi, Arnotts biscuits, Corporate Express, Tyco, Elgas and General Pants.
Sebastien Eckersley Maslin
Technical co-founder and investor, Geepers, MoneySoft, Digital Sorbet
Sebastien runs BlueChilli - a "Venture Technology" company that builds and invests in digital start-ups by providing technology rather than cash. Through BlueChilli, Eckersley-Maslin is currently launching a new online business every month and is opening incubators in Sydney and Melbourne.
Soren Harner
Vice President Engineering, BigCommerce
Soren Harner is the Vice President of Engineering at BigCommerce, the fastest growing SaaS ecommerce marketing platform in the world. BigCommerce helps small businesses power anything and everything related to an online storefront from search to inventory to online payments to marketing and SEO. Prior to starting Permaling, Soren held leadership positions in startups in Sydney and San Francisco. From 2007 through 2009 Soren was the Vice President of Engineering for Atlassian, an innovative and fast growing Australian software company, which makes tools for software developers. Soren grew the team from 25 to 100+ developers.
Tim Fung
CEO, AirTasker
Tim is responsible for the strategy and marketing of Airtasker. Prior to this role, Tim was a founding team member and investor in mobile startup amaysim. He is a founder of several web businesses (including online custom designer Joe Button, and motorsport events business Circuit Club). He has worked as a consulting talent agent at Chic Management and before this, spent five years as an investment banking executive at Macquarie Bank and Macquarie Capital Advisors.
Tom Frazier
CTO, HotHouse Interactive
Tom is an American expat serial entrepreneur. He has founded 3 different companies, is an advisor to several more and has a stake in more than a dozen companies. He is a regular speaker on technology and occasionally even teaches dance.
