Angels, VCs, Families and Crowds: The Truth Behind Startup Investment
Event description
When it comes to raising investment, it can be tough to separate fact from fiction. For the first time, this is an opportunity to hear what it’s like from both sides of the boardroom table.
Luna and Startup Victoria welcome you to join us for a panel featuring both investors and founders sharing their experience with four different types of investment vehicles:
- Angel investment
- Venture capital
- Family offices
- Equity crowdfunding
Our panel will explore what it's like to raise at each of these stages, what investors are looking for, and how founders and investors come together.
Representing Angel Investment:
Matt Allen (Investor)
Matt is a Venture Capital Business Development Manager on the Startup Team at AWS. He’s a partner at Startmate, Australia’s best accelerator. He has a portfolio of 14 angel investments with his wife, Aprill, and was the CTO for 3 startups that had varying degrees of success. He really enjoys working with early stage founders who may or may not go down the VC route. Ask him about bootstrapping a company to profitability, or electric cars.
Alison Hardacre (Founder)
Alison Hardacre is a global health technology entrepreneur. She co-founded HealthKit, a global health platform for practitioners, patients and people everywhere used in over 50 countries around the world, that makes healthcare efficient, effective and accessible; HealthKit has recently launched its European office in Cork, Ireland. In 2016, Alison was named one of the Top 50 Australian and New Zealand Women in Tech, and in 2015 received the Victorian Pearcey Entrepreneur Award. Before HealthKit, Alison was an accomplished general manager in health and banking, and a director of numerous health organisations. She speaks five Asian languages, and holds an MBA from Melbourne Business School, and Law and Arts degrees from Monash University.
Representing Venture Capital:
Paul Naphtali (Investor)
Paul is a partner of Rampersand, an early stage Australian/NZ tech venture capital fund. Since launching in 2013 Rampersand has backed more than 20 high growth tech startups (and is looking for more). Before Rampersand Paul lived in Silicon Valley, where he was a senior marketing exec with a number of successful venture back startups.
Heidi Holmes (Founder)
Heidi Holmes is the cofounder of Mentorloop, a software platform used by leading companies to run effective mentoring programs and build a people-first culture leading to better engagement, retention and productivity. She is an accountant and marketer by trade and spent the first years of her career in tax accounting and marketing for the financial services giant, KPMG. A founder at heart, Heidi's first startup was a mature age job board, Adage, which was successfully acquired in 2014. Two years later, Heidi joined forces with her cofounder Lucy Lloyd to launch Mentorloop, with a mission to make mentoring mainstream.
Representing Family Offices:
Sheree Rubinstein (Founder)
Sheree Rubinstein is on a mission to put Australia on the map as the number one destination in the world to be a female entrepreneur. Former corporate lawyer, Sheree is the Founder and CEO of One Roof, Australia's leading co-working space dedicated to women-led businesses. Sheree is considered an expert in curating environments, events and programs for women to thrive. Sheree is a 2018 AFR 100 Women of Influence, a 2017 Telstra Business Women's Awards Finalist in the Entrepreneur Category and was awarded the 2016 Victorian Young Achiever's Leadership Award. Sheree is on the board of the Victorian Women's Trust and is a volunteer facilitator for YHER an accelerator program for female impact entrepreneurs.
Campbell Andrews (Investor)
Campbell Andrews is an investment manager at private family office, Baron Corporation. He is responsible for evaluating new investments and assisting with management of the portfolio. His asset class responsibilities include private and public equities, alternative assets and selected debt securities. He also undertakes fund manager selection and due diligence.
Representing Equity Crowdfunding:
Alan Crabbe (Investing Platform)
Originally from N Ireland, Alan is the co-founder and CEO of Pozible & Birchal. In 2010, Alan launched Pozible and introduced Crowdfunding to Australia and Asia pacific. The platform was developed to help creatives build audiences, raise capital and get ideas off the ground.
The site has hosted fifteen thousands of projects in Australia and distributed over $70 million since its launch.
In late 2017, Alan launched a sister platform called Birchal - one of the first licensed equity crowdfunding platforms for local brands to connect with investors.
@birchalco @pozible birchal.com pozible.com
Jonathan Byrt (Founder)
Jonathan is the co-founder and co-CEO of memobottle. In 2014, Jonathan launched memobottle on crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter with close friend and co-founder Jesse Leeworthy. The flat water bottle concept was designed to overcome two major frustrations; single-use water bottles, and the inability to fit round bottles in bags.
Memobottle has sold 350,000 bottles globally, ships to over 80 countries and in stocked in 1,200 retail stores. memobottle products are endorsed globally by influencers and celebrities such as Ann Hathaway.
Jonathan is a chartered account and prior to memobottle, spent 5 years in Big 4 Accounting across Australia and the US. Last year he was named the Monash University 2018 Most Outstanding Alumni.
@memobottle www.memobottle.com @jonathanbyrt jonathan@memobottle.com
*further panellists representing Angel Investing, Venture Capital and Family Offices to be announced*
Venue Partner:
About One Roof:
One Roof is a co working and events space in South Melbourne that exists to close the persisting gender gap in entrepreneurship.
In just two years One Roof has become well recognised as Australia’s leading B corp certified co working and event space dedicated to women-led businesses. One Roof is also leading the way as one of the top 10 female co working spaces globally (according to the 207 Female Quotient: Modern Gide to Equality Report). Based in Southbank, One Roof is home to 85 women-led businesses (150 people) as well as the go-to venue for events focused on women and girls in business, leadership and entrepreneurship.
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All attendees to Startup Victoria's event must comply to our Startup Victoria Events Code of Conduct.